Alex Honnold's Scariest Climbing - Onsight Free Soloing Icey Big Walls || Climbing Gold Podcast

so I was doing sort of like 510 face climbing and this is all like on-site solo except that there were like sheets of ice over big sections of the pitches it's funny hearing the the veneer of ice on the wall it's like there's that um Peter Croft quote that you really like about like you can climb in the rain just not as hard yeah I don't feel like that works for ice on the walls this is climbing gold what do you think the most frightening or full-on experience um climbing you've ever had is I mean like who freaking knows I'm like roll axing all the scary though most of them are climbing with a rope uh either doing first desense or thinking that I'm off Route or just generally having total Misadventures while roped up but but just getting into things that were a disaster now I mean like one that comes to mind is like leading the last pitch of this route in Antarctica um which I think I wind up calling 10 DX in uh you know TC Pros the size of my street shoes with like ski socks on and a ton of layers and freaking freezing cold temps with just no protection on terrible Rock You know it's always like scary climbing with something extra where it's like oh it's kind of scary and I think I'm off Route and I don't know if it'll go to the summit or not you know and things like that like one of my scariest climbing experiences for for much of my life was this uh route I climbed in the needles in California like Granite spires in in in the SI Nevada with uh with an ex-girlfriend way way long time ago I was like just starting how to Trad climb and I think the route was I don't know like 11 plus or 12 minus or something couple pitches but I did maybe it was like 12b and I did the krux pitch and then I was going to link it with the 511 pitch to The Summit but then the 511 pitch totally changed character and The Rock quality got way worse and uh you know the Topo just showed like a line with a couple bolts but it turns out the bolts were these like ancient quarter inch like rusted rusted old bolts that had been placed to avoid this giant death Block in the corner the kind of thing where like oh you're supposed to clip those to keep your rope from touching this thing that will probably fall off and like cut your rope and kill everybody and so basically because I was extending the because I was linking the pitches I was already basically out of gear I had terrible rope drag and then I got into the stuff and The Rock quality went way down and the protection got way worse and long story short I basically clawed over the top of the mountain with nothing on my harness except for my blade of ice like I placed every single thing that I had and I had you know half a meter of rope left and the whole time I was up there like gripped out of my mind trying to figure out how to get to the top my my like then girlfriend was down at the anchor being like I'm cold can we go down you know I was like I'm cold too and basically at any point I would have bailed if I thought I could but I couldn't get any gear to lower off of and I was already like too far out to lower lower back to the anchor and it was kind of early on and I was kind of inexperienced anyway and it was all just like I would have given up if I could but I didn't know how so I was just like keep going up and I think I think that's a Common Thread through all what route what route was that I think it might be called Nautilus uh I think in in the needles I remember where it is it's on the backside one of the spires it's just like I think maybe the first pitch is like a popular 512 maybe and then it's like quite hard 5'11 supposedly to the top I thought it was crazy though it'd be interesting to go back now as more of an adult though and see if it's like if it's maybe not as crazy as I remember but I I I think I think a Common Thread through all of my scariest TR climbing experiences has been continuing to move forward assuming that things will get better and things just don't get better you know where you're like oh the rock is bad but I'm sure it'll get better if I punch it a little further and then you punch it further and now you're in even more serious situation and the rock is even worse and you're like oh no you know it's like that I think that's basically the main thing in all my scariest climbing experiences I would take a similar approach I think sometimes when I find myself in that like run out bad rock or whatever is like the worst thing you could kind of do is to stop because like that doesn't make yourself your situation any better like you're not you know maybe I mean if you're getting you're trying to get gear in that's great but like just sitting there and being like wow this is a terrible predicament doesn't it actually produ like improve anything you're dealing with yeah though though generally you should either turn around immediately and be like oh it turns out this isn't the situation I want or just commit to the full adventure and just punch it and I mean I I think I generally have punched it and you do wind up with your most exciting experiences that way not to say that that's that you always should maybe but but it does it does always make for a memorable experience I mean I'm thinking of like on-site soling new roots in various places and and like on-site down soing new rotes in places like Expedition to Chad down climbing these towers I was like tagging Towers cuz no one had ever been there so anything you did was a first Ascent which is pretty cool and so then you feel an obligation to just like tag as many towers as you can because when else do you get opportunities like that in life but uh but the rock quality was horrendous and so sometimes you would sort of eek by on the way up like you'd sort of make it happen but then you'd be like oh I don't want to repeat that on the way down so you're like I'll try a different way down but then sometimes you get into something even worse on the way back down and you're like oh jeez mountain climbing it's was an adventure or like man okay speaking of mountain cling I had this totally insane uh uh have you heard of the rude uh the thaw is not holding right in uh in Patagonia it's on the south face of uh of uh uh DEA de s it's like the smallest little Mountain at the beginning of the range but the south side of it actually quite big it's like a couple thousand foot rock face it seems like um it's kind of clever it was put up by Kevin thaw Leo holding and and Cedar right so like the thaw is not holding right I know I thought I I think it's really clever I appreciate clever names but uh on a bad on a relatively bad weather day I was in Patagonia climbing with Colin Haley but basically conditions weren't good and so we weren't going to go climb anything real but I was like oh it's the closest thing to town I was like I can just run in try to solid this route on the south face and then and then kind of run back to town and kind of squeak in this 12-h hour weather window and uh and basically I got there got up onto the route and it's like really big and the upper head wall had like ice flows all over it and so I was doing sort of like 510 face climbing and this is all like onsite solo except that there were like sheets of ice over big sections of the pitches and so I was making like big detours trying to you know I was like oh God like I don't you know I can't really face climb on Ice you know it's like weird like like a veneer over sections of it and so so then I started looking at making big detours like oh maybe I can like get to this other system system and then down climb this corner for several hundred feet to get over to this other huge Corner way over there and then follow that but that's all getting into like onsite soling first descent sort of terrain you know whereas like nobody's climbed any of these features so it'd be like just a total Adventure anyway long story short I basically persevered on on mostly the original line but with big face climbing things around eyes and uh and it was all very very exciting and then by the time I got to the top you know then I down climb the other side of the mountain and that was all snowy and also sort of adventurous and you have to cross the glacier to get back to town and by the time I finally got back to town I was like that was a lot more of an outing than I thought it would be cuz conditions were just like a lot more full on than I expected yeah it's like it's funny hearing the the veneer of ice on the wall it's like there's that um Peter Croft quote that you really like about like you can climb in the rain just not as hard yeah I don't feel like that works for ice on the walls though actually I remember on some of the stuff I was actually holding ice you know if it's like a flat two- pad Edge or something that's covering ice I mean you can like use it for balance very very carefully you're sort of like oh jeez it was all very it's all very scary would you repeat it well if it was if it was like sunny out yeah it'd be beautiful it was great rude it was like beautiful Rock um no I mean I think if I were if I were to go in solar route like that again I would I would have more of a plan I would uh uh in in retrospect I probably should have the thing that that kind of suckered me into it and and this is the the through line for so many of these experiences is that you've you've gone too far to turn back it feels like like when you've gone like in this case on that particular route it was like several thousand feet of sort of Alpine Ridge scrambling to get up onto this big upper face and so by then you've already done literally thousands of feet of elevation gain and a bunch of climbing before you actually get to the hard part and so by then you're kind of like well I'd rather just push through a few more sections of ice than to down climb thousands of feet of Al on Ridge you know you're just like oh I'm sure I can find a way past this one icy crimp rather than reverse this entire mountain and so I feel like that's when you really sucker yourself into big experiences when you're like oh I can just you know like it's the classic thing when you get lost and you don't ask for directions and you're like I'll just keep going and I'm sure I'll figure out the way yeah yeah like except most of us are like having to go to the gas station and you're just like alone on some face out there they're like what that's crazy I think that's called was that the sunk cost you're like oh yeah yeah the the sunken cost fallacy like with gambling when you keep throwing good money after bad you're like I've already lost 10 grand but I'll just throw in another five and see if I can win it back yeah thinking about that route I'm like I don't even know if that route is on my list of roots that I'm proud of like soling wise I should look at my soloing list because I'm like that is a freaking crazy crazy solo actually I'm G to look at my list right now I I haven't looked at this in a long time like I haven't even thought about that in a long time will you show us like what you're looking at right now Journal uh no I'm I'm just on my phone looking at a list of uh let's see somewhere in here I have a list of proud solos but it's like a ways down because I haven't used it in forever let's see proud solos list haven't looked at it in two years oh no I do have yeah thaw's not holding right onite that's on here as it should be because it was pretty exciting proud yeah yeah totally hey actually that's the uh that's funny on this list it's the next thing after Freer riter I guess maybe I went that winter so I mean yeah I guess that was the year after I Sol it all cap yeah it just goes to show that if you can free Sol all cap you can also free solo icy 510 in the mountains

Channel: Climbing Gold with Alex Honnold

Views: 3,872

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Id: B4ohmsT8pQc

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 05 2024