Alex Honnold completed the first free solo ascent of Taipei 101 on January 25, 2026. He reached the summit of the 508-metre skyscraper in a live broadcast that held viewers around the world.
A rainy false start, then a window of calm
The climb began a day late. Honnold postponed his Saturday attempt when rain slicked the tower's glass-and-aluminium face. By 9:17 am on Sunday, with the rain chance down to roughly 20 per cent, he stepped onto the southeast corner in a red shirt and yellow shoes.
Eight bamboo boxes and a dragon's spine
The tower's middle is eight identical segments called bamboo boxes. Their slight 10-to-15-degree overhang demanded heavy upper-body work. Honnold used the balconies between them as natural rests.
He also negotiated ten steel dragon corner features that jut far over the edge. A smooth, irregular cloud-shaped piece then broke his rhythm. The rehearsed moves carried him upward as the morning air began to warm.
A tired voice on the spire
With just over 80 minutes gone, Honnold started the final section. Winds hit the spire and the surface grew harder to grip. On his live microphone he admitted, "I was tired."
He campused the ledges after the 101st floor, climbing without his feet. He topped out in 1 hour and 31 minutes, roughly twice as fast as Alain Robert's roped ascent of the same tower in 2004. At the summit he took a selfie and said simply, "Sick."
"It was very windy," he told reporters afterwards. "I was like, don't fall off the spire. But it was an incredible position."
The achievement extends a line of firsts that runs from the Fitz Traverse to his ropeless 2017 ascent of El Capitan's Freerider. On a glass tower in downtown Taipei, the bar sits once again somewhere no one else has stood.
