CLINGING to the sheer cliff face with freezing fingers, Alex Honnold winces as stones cascade past his head and he pauses to see if bigger, more dangerous rocks will follow.
The free climber is almost 4,000ft above sea level, in the icy terrain of Greenland, and is about to make history by scaling the previously unconquered Ingmikortilaq cliff face, alongside Brit Hazel Findlay.
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It’s all in a day’s work for 38-year-old Alex, whose Oscar-winning 2018 documentary Free Solo captured his record-breaking bid to become the first person to climb the 3,000ft El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park, without ropes.
The superhuman feat, and the hit movie, changed his life forever, making him an overnight star and shining a spotlight on his romance with now wife Sanni.
But, ahead of his epic new National Geographic series, Arctic Ascent with Alex Honnold, he tells The Sun the “crazy” experience put a strain on the couple’s relationship.
“Free Solo made me a lot more high profile and opened up all kinds of work and TV opportunities, like the chance to do the Greenland expedition for this series,” he says.
“But in some ways it makes being a good climber harder because you have more demands on your time.
“The film was shot during the first two years of our relationship. It started when we were first dating and there was a year of post-production and then the film release, which was totally insane.
“I was doing six months of events and that was a strain on the relationship because it was non-stop travel, public exposure, going to the Oscars and the BAFTAs, meeting Prince William and Kate, which was incredible because they were so regal and charismatic.
“We had all these crazy experiences and then we settled into normal life, so it put stress on the us, but we’re now eight years in and it’s a great relationship.”
No longer solo
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The couple tied the knot in 2020 and baby daughter June, born in February 2022, was just six months old when Alex left for his arctic adventure.
But the expedition was also a fact finding mission to help climate change experts understand the ice fields of Greenland – where 300 billion tons of ice melted in 2020.
Alex reveals that his children’s future spurs him on.
“This is my first expedition as a father and I do miss my daughter,” he says in the series. “It’s a pretty long trip to be away from family and it’s certainly going to be hard on my wife to have to be a single parent for six weeks.
“But I really hope that June will grow up on a healthy planet. We’re in the midst of a crisis and we need to actually help change the world as quickly as possible.”
Despite his death-defying feats, Sanni – now expecting their second child, due next month – takes his perilous life in her stride.
This is my first expedition as a father and I do miss my daughter… it’s certainly going to be hard on my wife to have to be a single parent for six weeks
Alex Honnald
“The danger side of it is not that big an issue,” he says. “I think my wife probably worries more about what I do by myself than with the TV crew, because if you’re shooting for television, it means that somebody has signed off on insurance and there are a bunch of real adults supervising the trip.
“If I gave my wife a half-cocked, ‘I’m going to go do something in the mountains’, she would worry more about that.”
Even so, as June turns two next month, Alex admits being a dad does give him pause for thought when it comes to tackling dangerous climbs.
“I have much more of a relationship with my daughter now than I did when she was six months old because now we’re buddies, we play together, we do stuff together so I’d feel worse about taking risks now,” he says.
“But whether you have kids or not, you’re always trying to mitigate risk as much as possible.
“Whether I have a family or not, I don’t want to suffer grievous injury or get killed, so the decision making is pretty similar either way.”
‘Childlike’ passion
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Climbing from the age of five in his native Sacramento, Alex dropped out of college and lived out of his mum’s van while travelling around to attempt epic climbs.
His first major achievement was the 2007 free solo climb of Yosemite’s Astroman and the Rostrum in a day, matching Peter Croft’s 1987 feat, and he says he is still driven by the childlike urge to “clamber” on things.
“I just love climbing and it’s interesting now, raising a daughter, because you realise that some of that is innate, hardwired human behaviour. It’s just fun to climb things,” he explains.
“For most kids, that gets ground out of them by adults telling them it’s dangerous or because they hurt themselves and then get afraid. For whatever reason, I’ve held on to that childlike love of climbing my entire life.”
He agrees that parents today are often too risk averse.
“We love our daughter, obviously, and I don’t want her to get hurt, but there’s a big difference between getting an ‘ouchie’ – falling over and hurting yourself a bit – versus mortal peril,” he says.
“I don’t want to see my daughter suffer permanent injury or die, but if she tips things onto herself or hurts herself and cries a bit, that’s fine.
I don’t want to see my daughter suffer permanent injury or die, but if she tips things onto herself or hurts herself and cries a bit, that’s fine – she’s not going to remember
Alex Honnold
“She’s not going to remember, I’m not going to remember, so nobody cares.
“We play on the rocks all the time, where there are scrambling opportunities and she loves clambering on things.
“My duty as a parent is to constantly evaluate risk for her, because she can’t yet do that herself, and make sure she’s taking the appropriate levels of risk, so she can’t seriously hurt herself or fall off a cliff.”
After living in a van for a decade, Alex finally bought a house in Las Vegas in 2017 and he and Sanni are now raising their family in the city, which is surrounded by mountains and “the best four season climbing in the country”.
“There are times when I miss van life. It’s so simple, so wonderful, but family life is also wonderful in its own ways,” he says.
“Living in a van is the best possible way to climb full time but I now live in a place where I’m still climbing as much as I want to, but it allows me to have a family as well, and to have a good community.
“We live near other family members and we see friends a lot so it’s a great way for my daughter to grow up.”
Climbing runs through the family generations – his mum Dierdre Wolownick started climbing at age 60 and is the oldest woman to climb El Capitan, first at the age of 66 and then breaking her own record at age 70.
Alex’s top 5 previous climbs
Astroman and Rostrum, Yosemite
In 2007, Alex free soloed Yosemite’s Astroman and the Rostrum in a day, matching Peter Croft’s legendary 1987 feat, which propelled him to fame in climbing circles.
Half Dome – Yosemite, California
Five months after the Yosemite double, Alex scored anothe first by of free soloing the 2,000-foot glacially bulldozed Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome. Peter Croft called this climb the most impressive ropeless ascent ever done.
The Moonlight Buttress – Zion National Park, Utah
In another first free solo, in 2008, Alex completed the legendary climb in the heart of Zion National Park’s red rocks, known for its 1,200 foot sheer sandstone face and namesake rock formation. The ascent was reported on April 1 and many thought the news was a joke.
El Sendero Luminoso – México
In 2014, he scaled the legendary cliffs of El Potrero Chico in Mexico, climbing 1,750 ft in three hours.
El Capitan – Yosemite, CA
In June, 2017, Alex made history with the first free solo climb of El Capitan, completing the 2,900-foot route Freerider in 3 hours and 56 minutes. The climb was described as “one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever,” and was documented by climber and photographer Jimmy Chin and documentary filmmaker E. Chai Vasarhelyi, in Free Solo
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Ice quest
As a passionate campaigner on climate change, Alex has always put his money where his mouth is – donating a third of his income to innovative solar projects around the world.
In the Arctic expedition, Alex, Hazel and the team were accompanied by glaciologistic Dr Heïdi Sevestre, Greenlandic guide Adam Kjeldsen and adventurer Aldo Kane for part of the journey, which also involved trekking 42 miles across the uncharted Renland Ice Cap in whiteout blizzard conditions.
There the team used radar to measure the thickness and age of the ice reservoir before also dropping a NASA probe into the sea to monitor icebergs in the region.
The incredible footage also shows the whole team climbing the 1,500ft ‘Pool Wall’ in order to get to the ice field, and the final cliff face, as well as pitching tents halfway up on a narrow and perilous-looking ledge.
But only Alex and Hazel took on the challenge of the head wall of Ingmikortilaq, the final 1,000 ft climb to the summit of the 4,000 cliff face.
Alex described the dangerous rock formation as being like “Jenga blocks”.
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“This is the hardest part of the climb, the head wall,” he tells the documentary.
“If you touch it with rope, if you touch it with your foot, it showers these rocks down. The whole mountain is like a stack of cards.
“It’s just stacked blocks teetering on top of each other and feels like any one of them goes they’re all going to crumble. There are hardly any points where you feel safe.”
Looking back on the last part of their adventure, he says: “There wasn’t one hairy moment, but the entire last day that Hazel and I were climbing to the summit there was so much uncertainty around the direction that we were taking.
The whole mountain is like a stack of cards. It’s just stacked blocks teetering on top of each other and feels like any one of them goes they’re all going to crumble. There are hardly any points where you feel safe
Alex Honnold
“You’re looking up at the wall and you’re trying to guess what the easiest path will be and wondering whether to go left or right.
“You’re constantly thinking, ‘Did I make the wrong choice an hour ago and now I’m on the wrong path?’ You really don’t know, so there’s a sense of foreboding.”
While Free Solo made his name, the climber says he was pleased to have British champ Hazel by his side for the final push.
The Welsh climber, who has climbed with Alex on numerous expeditions, has broken numerous records and has free climbed El Capitan four times, using four different routes.
“We have probably lived together in remote parts of the world for at least six months, between various trips, and she’s an incredibly skilled, talented climber,” says Alex.
“She was a totally equal partner on this climb, which is great because when you have that uncertainty hanging over you, each time you pass the lead off to your partner, you get to relax for a bit and let them make the decisions.
“When I have a partner that I trust completely, I can turn my brain off and not worry for a while – I guess that’s the point of a partnership.”
Arctic Ascent with Alex Honnold is available on National Geographic on Feb 4 and Disney+ from Feb 11.
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