Honnold: Ice climbing is too unpleasant and dangerous
Alex Honnold · The Risk, Fear, and Preparation Behind Free Solo · Feb 3, 2020 · at 1:32
Professional rock climber Alex Honnold explains to Andreessen Horowitz partner Peter Levine why he avoids ice climbing despite his high tolerance for free soloing risk.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Well, I mean, no, I genuinely don't like ice climbing. It's cold. It's unpleasant. It's really painful. It's you know. Yeah, and it's dangerous. I mean, it is legitimately dangerous. It's that you have all these pointy tools, and you hit yourself with the pointy tools.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alex Honnold
Honnold views feeling dread as a clear indicator of inadequate preparation
“For many, many years on my to-do list was, you know, solo El Cap, like amongst many other things I wanted to climb, but then I would drive into Yosemite, I'd look up at El Cap and be like, there is no way I'm soloing El Cap, like it looks completely insane, it…”
Honnold climbed previously unclimbed variations during his El Capitan free solo
“A few of the parts that I climbed had never been climbed by anybody before, because they just, ah, are off the normal climbing, like, they're not where you would normally go with a rope”
Honnold: Falling 100 feet in open air is safer than 12 feet
“Because, yeah, if you fall 12 feet and land on a ledge, you'll break both your ankles. But if you fall a hundred feet and touch nothing, it's totally fine. The rope absorbs the force, and you're just like, oh, wow, that was crazy, and then you keep climbing ag…”
Honnold predicts Free Solo will not trigger a wave of reckless climbers
“No, no, I really don't actually. And that's a common question. I mean, obviously, you know, there's the possibility for that to happen. In general, though, I think that rock climbing is actually getting more risk averse than it used to be.”
Honnold: Environmental care depends on meeting basic human needs first
“People don't care about the environment unless, unless they can meet their basic needs.”
Honnold completed six groundbreaking free solos omitted from the documentary
“Over the course of the two years that we were filming, I did maybe six or seven free solos that had never been done before, that were sort of cutting edge, that were, you know, like, groundbreaking within the climbing community, but, you know, when they edited…”