Alex Honnold’s ‘How to’ Climb Three El Cap Routes in 1 Day
By Rocky Thompson on July 28th, 2010
Alex Honnold filed a blog post for Black Diamond on how one goes about climbing the Nose, the Salathe Wall and Lurking Fear in one day. The post is worth reading, even if you have no intentions of ever dragging yourself up a big wall. He describes it like a 24-hour marathon, complete with mind-bending exhaustion, and it’s easy to forget that one missed step in this race would mean his and climbing partner Sean Leary’s deaths.
Here are a few choice excerpts:
“I stopped to re-rack at Camp 6, I think, but we moved pretty quickly. We accidentally woke some folks up on Camp 6. I’d thought that we had the route to ourselves so we were yelling back and forth. But when I popped over the ledge there were two poor dudes trying to sleep. They didn’t seem too bothered though.”
“Taking off my climbing shoes was an orgasmic pleasure, though my feet were so rocked that my comfy approach shoes hurt a lot, too.
The hike down was, again, surreal. It felt like we’d climbed the Nose the week before. We kept almost saying things like “the other day when we were on the Salathe,” only to realize that we’d topped out the Salathe 12 hours before.”
