One of the most important insights into Alex Honnold’s nearly-decade-long obsession with climbing Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope occurs deep in the film Free Solo. Before being able to appreciate the high-performance lessons of Free Solo, which won the Academy Award last weekend for best documentary and makes its TV debut on Sunday, we have to chalk up Honnold’s decision to climb untethered to a peculiar calculus about risk and reward. Honnold climbed El Capitan roughly 50 times in the decade before his free soloing of the rock formation on July 3, 2017. Honnold free soloed Yosemite’s Half Dome in September 2008 with nothing like the preparations he made for El Capitan. “I didn’t really know how to prepare for a potential free solo, so I decided to skip the preparations and just go up there and have an adventure.

Source: Forbes March 01, 2019 13:07 UTC