Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure

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Our editorial team curates these reading lists by consolidating all verified mentions and recommendations from Alex Honnold. The question most readers will want to walk away from the book with—especially those who are not climbers and encountered Honnold firstly via a 60 Minutes feature on him or some magazine article—is simply enough, why does he do this? That said, many of these free solo climbs were reenactments, performed for the camera after he’d successfully done the route without a rope. Dierdre Wolownick, Alex Honnold's mother, started climbing at age 60 and is the oldest woman to climb El Capitan (first at the age of 66 and then breaking her record, again at age 70). A central event of the book is Alex Honnold’s free solo of El Capitan, but Synnott includes many of climbing’s most central personalities and their respective adventures.

Alex says: “This is an epic story about a Polish POW escaping a Russian labor camp during World War II. Honnold] is the foremost practitioner of the dark art of free solo rock climbing - ascending extremely difficult cliffs hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feet tall without ropes or protection hardware of any kind. As the years and centuries go by, the mountains we climb get bigger, more serious, and more difficult.Those who do not climb probably conjure in their minds a climber with loops of rope in hand, secured to his harness, carefully placing strange equipment here and there to offer safety and protection while scaling great heights. The majority of books I review are poetry, often in translation, because I came to literary criticism via my career in translation. What we want is 'Free Solo', 2018, the Oscar winning documentary by directors and cameras Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. Don't put it down too often otherwise you might not pick it up again, but overall I'm glad I read it.

I have extremely limited climbing experience, so some of the technical terms were sometimes lost on me, but Mark Synnott's ability to describe the physical and mental experience that goes into these extreme endeavors put me on the mountains beside him. I love these climbing stories and this one really gets into the history of climbing in Yosemite and the reasons people love it. It’s not part of the process, according to Honnold, to say it is would be akin to saying you attend a rock concert foremost for the lyrics, or watch a James Bond movie to understand British spycraft.

I thought this was amazing as I read it until I mentioned it to Jimmy Chin, who told me that it was all fake. Honnold via the sketches of his climbs and his wholehearted efforts to answer the question he has admitted he’s quite tired of being ask— do you fear falling and dying while free soloing? My biggest take away is probably to think about the world in terms of 4 levels of development, instead of trying to break it down into west/global south or developed/developing or whatever else.