On Saturday, 3 June 2017, Alex Honnold became the first person to free solo El Capitan, climbing the 884-metre Freerider route without ropes in 3 hours 56 minutes.
A thousand holds, one mistake allowed
He began at 5:32 a.m. after a quiet breakfast and hiked to the base in the cool dawn. The granite wall rose nearly a kilometre above Yosemite Valley. Early on, at roughly 180 metres, he crossed a glass-smooth slab with no real holds.
He pressed his rubber soles flat against the rock, a technique called smearing. "It's like walking up glass," he told the filmmakers documenting the ascent. Higher still came the Boulder Problem, the route's hardest sequence at grade 5.13a, demanding an improbable move off a razor-thin flake.
Three hours fifty-six minutes, a lifetime of preparation
At 9:28 a.m. he pulled over the summit lip and stood on a ledge the size of a child's bedroom. The sky above was clear blue. His ascent shattered every precedent — the Freerider is so difficult that even roped sends had made news.
Honnold had aborted an earlier attempt in November 2016 after less than an hour because conditions did not feel right. That discipline was the foundation: he trained across the United States, China, Europe, and Morocco, keeping the project known only to a tiny trusted circle. Days before the solo, a roped rehearsal with Tommy Caldwell set a new speed record of just over five and a half hours.
"With free-soloing, obviously I know that I'm in danger, but feeling fearful while I'm up there is not helping me in any way," Honnold explained. "It's only hindering my performance, so I just set it aside and leave it be." Caldwell later called the free solo "the 'moon landing' of free-soloing."
Already known for earlier rope-free ascents of Half Dome and Moonlight Buttress, Honnold had now completed the line long held as climbing's ultimate unprotected prize. In under four hours he redrew the boundary of what the sport believed was humanly possible.
