Alex Honnold on Free Climbing in Guyana and Studying Frogs

the jurogan experience how often are you uh doing these free solo climbs uh you know i'm i'm working on things yeah like fairly frequently i don't know i was just on this expedition uh in the jungle in guyana it was like a national geographic tv show thing and i free sold the wall we put up just just because the type of rock we're on no one's ever soloed a wall like that before so i felt like since we were there's felt almost an obligation to do it just for like this climbing history you know you're like oh if you're there and you have the opportunity you kind of have to now when you see something like that do you make a route first with ropes always yeah yeah so our i mean because we were there i mean it's a whole like complicated natural graphic tv thing so we were there with we're like studying these endemic species of the tapui's there's like this whole interesting natural history component to it or sort of biology component but um but we were just trying to climb this mountain that had never been climbed before so the priority is obviously just to get up it to like find these species of frogs to like do all the things that are important for the tv show but then but then because i was there i was like oh you know on the side i can at least do something that i'm proud of and climbing that's also pretty cool oh wow that's pretty cool yeah so it's like this like pretty and it wound up being totally insane climbing like really cool like this overhanging wall of 6 700 feet high you know like dangling it's it was kind of the best style of of climbing to solo because it felt secure like it's the type of climbing where you feel safe like it's very very good rock so anything you hold on to you know is solid and it's not going to break and it also lends itself to these sort of striations in the rock where you can like wedge your hand in and like feel really secure but also it's incredible exposure because it's really steep like because you're in the jungle you can only climb stuff that's overhanging because anything that's like less anything else accumulates like water and dirt and winds with plants all over it so like the only stuff that's really climbable is the stuff that is sheltered from the rain so it doesn't have plants on it so so it's difficult just by nature yeah so it's difficult because you're hanging and so you're like in these crazy positions where you're dangling from your arms but you feel safe doing it because the rocks so good and the holes are so good and you're just like what a crazy place it's really cool but then when you get to the the very edge you have to somehow make it away and that's a bummer yeah that seems like the most gnarly part of it is actually probably in terms of risk it probably was the final 20 or 30 feet of like getting onto the top it's all like rotten soil and those rocks and like you know yeah it wasn't ideal but how do you decide which way to go when you get to something like that just what's the most likely path to success yeah well so in that particular case um we had already established the route you know like because it was this tv thing we'd already climbed it we'd put ropes up but we'd like worked on the camera guys had gone up and down we'd like camped up on this ledge to look for these frogs uh we'd like done this whole experience so for the free solo i already had a pretty good sense of like how i should tackle that part because you know we'd already been sort of living up there a bit but wow yeah but i'm like what'd you do in february you know like that that was my february so these frogs like the the idea is to is it really an excuse to climb or is it like do you really are you really there for the frogs to check out these weird species it's a little bit of both yeah well i'm like i know this is a long-form show do you want to like go deep into it because it's actually really interesting so um all right long form so so okay the trip was the trip is crazy i mean we just talked about the whole time uh i've read freaking eight books while we were there because it's the jungle and you know it's the tropics so it's dark from six to six every day it's like 12 hours of dark and uh we're in our own little hammock so i was just in my cocoon like reading books every day and so like a headlamp yeah yeah but headlamp um because you have nothing else to do it's like raining and you're just in your own little like personal cocoon just like reading but um so i read like natural history of guyana natural history like you know sort of the the the geology so um like have you seen the the movie up like the pixar disney movie the cute thing with the flying house and the balloons yeah yeah so you know that's all modeled on like where they fly to the big rock things with the waterfalls those are tapui's which are like real things in south america that's in venezuela guyana in the northern part of brazil or if you've seen the new point break they film down there on the same rock features i didn't see that but so you're not missing anything no it's really bad but uh but a lot of my friends worked on it so it's like it's cool and it is like an incredible climbing place i had a responsibility for patrick swayze i just said yeah exactly yeah you didn't miss anything i actually fell asleep watching it on a plane when you fall asleep during an action movie you're kind of like come on yeah you know but um but the climbing edge is cool and and anyway so it's on these things called the pooys which are like these big quartzitic sandstone walls that stick out of the jungle and so if you imagine a huge raised area of land that because it's in the jungle has been massively eroded by the constant rain over the last 40 million years so now you wind up with all these like slender sort of towers and mesas you know so like do you know angel falls like no it's one of the biggest waterfalls in the world here like pull up a picture angel falls is a it's like oh yeah yeah there we go that's a that's a rhyme that's you know what we're doing yeah that's so beautiful so if if it looks fake yeah it does look fake isn't that crazy i'm pretty sure that one is a rhyme and if you look to the left of the one you were just on that we climbed this little wall to the left of it can you go back to that one jamie because like if i was a dumb yeah so so that would think someone built that totally so if you could pan that photo to the left though obviously you can't because not in the frame we climb this little mountain to the left and so this is a really famous peak because the summit of it marks the boundary between brazil venezuela and guyana it's used as like the marker to separate those three countries and so we were climbing this sort of little bastard step brother next to it but with you know that peak though had never been climbed and was like new to science for the different species of frogs and all that kind of stuff if you're an explorer and you've stumbled upon that you would think that that was like a structure yeah like it's so square and flawed and some of them did like european explorers that first came into the region had all kinds of names like the white cathedral and things like that like that tower um they're just a bunch of wow look at that one click on the one your cursor is on jamie that's so oh actually so again so actually you see on the left side of that there's like the hint of a little thing in the distance that i'm pretty sure that's the thing we were climbing the thing to the left that's like just starting to appear out of the clouds yeah i'm pretty sure that's the peak that we found god it's so beautiful yeah yeah it's crazy except to be fair the sun only comes out like so we were there in the dry season and it rained like eight hours a day and we were in the clouds non-stop it was totally grim and that's the dry season yeah and so you see these pictures where you're like it's so beautiful and you're like yeah for 30 minutes a day you know and the rest of the time you're just in the in the water yeah getting worse that's so wild man like really if i stumbled upon that i would think someone built that yeah no it's it's totally incredible what is the g so i didn't i didn't even get to the cool part of this oh it was so yeah asking about the geology yeah like how does something like that form it's so strange yeah so uh that's the stuff i was reading while we there so it's like this huge bed of sandstone which then gets metamorphosed like compressed into quartzite so like really really hard sandstone and then you know the andes so you have gondwana like one of the mega continents that predates pangaea i think like yeah so like you know if you imagine all the continents on earth were once sort of combined so south america and africa you know fit together at the the horn um and so this rock is most similar to rock and parts of africa actually and so and part of what makes the the biology that are so interesting is that the creatures on the summit of some of the tapuis are more closely related to creatures in africa than they are to the ones in the jungle below them because because the summits have been separated for so long you see what i'm saying like because the top of that those islands basically they've been separated from the jungle below for so long that they more closely resemble where they came from in africa than than the creatures that live in the rain forest below it's like this totally incredible you know i mean it's just it's just an interesting part of earth are you aware of the olmecs do you know what the olmec civilization was no the ole mix of it's really it's a quite a mystery they don't exactly know what they did or you know what what their culture was all about but they had these heads that they left behind these sculpted gigantic stone heads that resemble resemble african people that's not the easter island stuff no no that's different it's different this is the olmecs oh wow where and where were the olympics in south america oh yeah it says olmec yes south america mexico central america and there's a lot of them and these images are very um african-looking faces and they don't really know what the history of them wore and they know they they think some of them existed in the neighborhood of 6 000 years ago but you know when when you're when you're looking at stone it's hard because they they just they carbon date the stuff that's around the stone as they unearth it but that doesn't really necessarily give them an accurate sense of when it was constructed it just gives an accurate sense of how the sediment yeah of where it's around so the stuff in guyana though is um on totally different scale like the the stuff that i'm talking about the i think the depuys have been uh eroded away like isolated for 40 million years or something which you know far predates humans and then i think the rock itself is like 1.5 billion years old it's like ancient ancient it's incredible rock it's really cool it's just so wild the way it formed the the look yeah it's funny because i mean you saw the posters it looks like islands and you know early explorers thought that they must be islands or something but it's actually uh just the eroded remnants of what was once like a giant you know elevated plateau oh yeah totally so this is what the summits look like i have a bunch of photos like that on my phone it's just like scrappy little iphone pics of uh like here we are on this crazy you know because you're like in the clouds you're in the mist it's like kind of grim and it's raining but then the summit is like this totally wild so like all those plants are incredibly well adapted to this harsh environment and they're really high rates of carnivory like plants that eat things because they're basically no soil one of the books i read said that described it as a rain desert like you think of a desert normally as having lots of soil but no water and there you have infinite water but no soil because it's a stone surface that's getting rained on so much that it washes all the soil away oh wow so for any of the vegetation that live there they basically all have different strategies where they're rooted straight to the stone and then they they eat you know they eat uh bugs and things that you know they eat insects or they eat other plants or they you know they lots of plants that grow on plants and it's just like a whole crazy web of life that's like really different than what you expect it's weird because it's so abundant yeah it's got it's an unusual form of life but it's everywhere yeah like that's so rich and green like you'd have yeah though actually i bet if in that photo if you'd pan the photo a bit to the side there'd be like big expanses of bear rock because the summit's like yeah they're little pastures and things it's almost like alpine meadows if you go into the mountains and in the northern hemisphere um there'll be like high tundras and things where it's like yeah it feels really lush but then there's also a lot of exposed rock because when the sun comes out you know you're at seven to nine thousand feet in the tropics so it's really intense uv exposure and it dries things out instantly so it's a really hard hard climatic conditions for life wow that's wild yeah and so these uh organisms these creatures that live up there they're closely resembling creatures that live in africa and so that was part of what you're studying yeah so we were with this biologist who was trying to do an elevational transect of of the river basin that we were in so basically starting from the rainforest where the frogs are pretty well known and then going up through the cloud forest which is kind of as you gain elevation to the actual wall and then the species all change as you gain elevation which is kind of normal and then the things on the summit of the tapuis on the summit of the the stone island are completely different again and so he was basically doing research on how how the different species you know basically what the deal is catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on spotify you can listen to the jre in the background by using other apps and can download episodes to save on data cost all for free spotify is absolutely free you don't have to have a premium account to watch new jre episodes you just need to search for the jre on your spotify app go to spotify now to get this full episode of the joe rogan experience

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 1,254,933

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party

Id: f3TuYwl7AZE

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021