Alex Honnold climbs up the vertiginous Devil’s Thumb (Image: National Geographic/Renan Ozturk)
The phrase “death-defying” is often overused. But sometimes it really does apply. Professional climbers and best friends Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell have spent their entire careers cheating the Grim Reaper. They’ve scaled some of the most intimidating peaks on the planet, performing mountaineering feats that often seem beyond the bounds of human possibility.
Alex’s most celebrated achievement came in June 2017 when he became the first person to climb to the top of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, California, without ropes. He free-climbed the formidable vertical granite monolith via the 2,900ft Freerider route, an accomplishment the New York Times called “one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever”. That astounding historic climb was captured for a 2018 documentary, Free Solo, which won both an Oscar and a BAFTA.
For his part, Tommy ascended to worldwide fame with the release of the 2017 documentary Dawn Wall. It recounted the astonishing story of Tommy and three fellow climbers, Beth Rodden, John Dickey and Jason “Singer” Smith, being taken hostage for six days by rebels in Kyrgyzstan during August 2000.
They managed to escape after Tommy shoved one of the kidnappers off a cliff. The hostage taker miraculously survived the fall.
The following year Tommy lost most of his left index finger in an accident with a table saw and doctors said he would never climb again. More recently, he suffered a serious Achilles tendon injury that put him out of action for two years.
His resilience and tenacity are off the charts. National Geographic has described him as “arguably the best all-around rock climber on the planet”.
Now, Alex, 39, and Tommy, 46, face their toughest challenge yet.
Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell celebrating reaching the top of the Devil’s Thumb (Image: National Geographic/Matt Pycroft)
They are aiming to become the first climbers in history to scale all five summits of the fearsome Devil’s Thumb massif in Alaska in under 12 hours.
A menacing crenelation of sheer, slippery peaks wreathed in clouds and cloaked in ice and snow, the Devil’s Thumb looks like something out of the Lord of the Rings.
Conquering this seriously forbidding mountain is a goal that has previously defeated all comers. An assessment of fatalities per summit attempt shows the Devil’s Thumb to be the deadliest mountain on the continent. Five times taller than the Empire State Building, the 9,000ft peak is viewed as “the Last Great Problem” of North American mountaineering.
In 1977, the writer Jon Krakauer, who himself was obliged to abandon an attempted ascent of the mountain, labelled the Devil’s Thumb “a singularly sinister tower of ice-plastered black rock. I can’t imagine anyone climbing it.”
But Alex and Tommy are setting out to prove him wrong. Their super-human efforts are chronicled in The Devil’s Climb, a gripping new documentary that goes out tonight on National Geographic at 8pm. Ahead of its broadcast, the pair are talking to the Express from the US. Alex, 39, is at home in Las Vegas preparing to go bouldering with his wife while Tommy, 46, is in his van in Yosemite taking a break from some recreational climbing.
The pair radiate quiet assurance without ever tipping over into arrogance. Displaying an enviable unflappability, they are the sort of dependable characters that, should the urge ever grab you, you would happily follow up the steepest mountain.
Alex Honnold at camp in Bugaboo Provincial Park (Image: National Geographic/Taylor Shaffer)
Alex begins by weighing up what his next climb might be. I suggest he might try to emulate various social media influencers by free-soloing up a landmark building or crane. He is enthusiastic about the idea.
“If I had permission, I definitely would do something like that because, actually, climbing buildings is super fun,” he says. “It can be inspiring in the same way that rock climbing outdoors is. I’ve had the opportunity to scout a few skyscrapers for potential TVprojects. I’m sure it’s an incredible thrill.
“I just don’t think that it’s worth doing when you know you’re going to get arrested and when you’re putting other people at risk. When there are so many free, natural, beautiful places to climb outdoors, whyget arrested for trespassing if you don’thave to?”
However, the ridiculously audacious mountaineer does not rule out the idea of attempting to scale the aforementioned Empire State Building if he had permission.
“If I thought it was possible and safe enough, I’d do it for sure,” he says. “It would be incredible.
“I’ve paid the money to take the elevator and be on the sky deck to see the view from the top of a lot of skyscrapers in the world. If you are given the opportunity to climb it on the outside, that’s even better!”
It sounds extremely scary but maybe not as scary as what Alex and Tommy tackled on the Devil’s Thumb. Their most white-knuckle moment came when they had to undertake a fiendishly difficult 600ft rappel – or abseil – down from the fourth peak, the evocatively named East Cat’s Ear.
As they rappelled downwards, they were only supported by one very small metal triangle wedged into a crevice in the rock face and attached to an extremely thin rope. One sharp edge on the mountainside could have cut the rope and sent the climbers plunging to their doom.
Watching the dizzying descent is enough to give anyone vertigo, so what it was like to actually do it?
Alex doesn’t hold back about how terrifying it was. “The scariest thing for me in alpinism is rappelling because one simple thing could kill you both,” he admits. “You’re completely trusting your life to your partner. It’s 600ft of free-hanging space and it’s really quite scary.”
He was reliant on “a very skinny rope, only slightly bigger than a shoelace really, and this very skinny piece of hardware that you left to rappel off. If a piece of gear blows, you die.”
The documentary shows Alex flying down the mountain, exclaiming: “Wow, this is freaking crazy!” It’s a sentiment shared by viewers. As they safely reach the bottom of the rappel and breathe a huge sigh of relief, Tommy asks Alex a perfectly reasonable question. “Do you ever think, ‘Why do I do this?’”
Alex tells him: “Those are the kind of risks I really don’t want to take. If the flake of rock ripped and the equipment came out, we’d both die, and you’d be like, ‘Well, that was freaking stupid!’”
Looking down on Alex Honnold as he climbs in the trees next to Lake Louise (Image: National Geographic/Taylor Shaffer)
Alex and Tommy’s extreme mountaineering may seem unutterably frightening but, in the moment, the pair have to banish fear and focus on the task in hand. Tommy reflects on the perils inherent in his job. “We talk about this all the time,” he says. “I never go into the experience thinking that I’m going to risk my life. But things do happen on the mountain and, retrospectively, I question it at times.”
It’s never his overriding thought though. “For the most part, when we’re climbing, it feels like we’ve got it in hand really, and so it doesn’t cross my mind in those moments,” he says.
Alex concurs. “Part of the reason why the partnership works so well is that we both have similar risk profiles. We’re both trying to make good decisions. We’re trying to be safe. Occasionally you make mistakes. But in general we’re trying to be smart up there. It’s about making good decisions.” As an example of taking the sensible option, the climbers decide not to attempt the notoriously dangerous northwest face of the Devil’s Thumb which is plagued by constant landslides and avalanches. Tommy calls it “the face of death”.
All the same, both mountaineers are married with small children, and the dangers of alpinism clearly have an impact on their families. In the film, Tommy’s wife Becca sums up her feelings before he embarks on the expedition, saying: “He’s most ‘Tommy’ when he gets to do this. But they are climbing a mountain that could potentially be a dangerous climb. I haven’t made it past that yet.” Tommy admits he contemplates the effect of his job on his family a great deal. “It’s very natural to question these things,” he says. “In base camp during bad weather days I think about my wife a lot, and it makes me consider the kinds of mountains that we’re climbing.
“But honestly, we pick objectives that we think are conservative. We could certainly go and climb giant Himalayan peaks and make it way more dangerous. But we’re picking objectives that we feel we’re uniquely suited to make safe, even if most of the rest of the world would see them as quite deadly.”
What makes the documentary so compelling is that it is as much about friendship as it is about mountaineering. “It’s not really a climbing film,” says Alex. “The trip has never been about climbing the Devil’s Thumb. It’s about spending two months with Tommy and helping him achieve his dream of making his big comeback. That’s thereason I’m here.”
Tommy agrees. “I love climbing but it’s just a venue to experience people and experience the world in the best way possible.”
He believes he and Alex truly bonded during the climb because “you know the only thing keeping you alive is your trust in your climbing partner and your best friend”.
They are both clearly deeply affected to have shared the experience of scaling the five peaks of the Devil’s Thumb in record-breaking time. “Partnership and brotherhood” is how Tommy views their journey.
“Climbing really brings you together with your friends, especially in this world where guys don’t have that a lot. We’re in this era where dudes need to be better friends with each other, and climbing is a great way to do that.”
The pair also hope their work is inspirational. Tommy says their achievements tap into “this idea of having a really big goal that drives your life. I think people are moved by that.”
Alex chips in, remembering the reaction to Free Solo. “The general sentiment with that film is that people are inspired by the effort and inspired by the gumption to take on a big challenge like that. I don’t think anybody who watches Free Solo wants to go free-soloing,” he says.
He felt that the audiences hemet in cinemas often felt inspired to take on their own challenges in response. “They’d say, ‘I’m going to sign up for that half-marathon I’ve been putting off,’ or whatever. The challenge doesn’t need to be death-defying rock climbing.It’s just a way to harness that motivation to do something.”
Before we part, we return to the subject we began with: Alex possibly free-climbing the Empire State Building. I joke that when he reaches the top, he will have to face the fearsome task of fighting King Kong.
“I’ll do my best,” Alex says with a winning smile.
And you get the feeling he would triumph in that ultimate fight. Nothing seems to be beyond these two superhumans.
The Devil’s Climb is on National Geographic at 8pm tonight