“Rock” Star Alex Honnold, Prepping For National Geographic Show, Wonders If He Can Hack 2,000-Mile Bike Ride – Sheffield DocFest
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World-class climber and Free Solo star Alex Honnold is mapping out his summer plans, and naturally they call for adventure.
The man who famously ascended Yosemite’s El Capitan rock face without ropes will be doing some mountaineering in Alaska with his fellow climber and friend Tommy Caldwell. And they’re taking the long way to get there.
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“The two of us are biking from his house in Colorado to Alaska… [undertaking] a few very large, difficult climb objectives along the way. So, it’s basically a 2,000-mile bike ride with quite a bit of hard climbing, culminating in a difficult climb in Alaska,” Honnold told an audience Thursday at Sheffield DocFest in the U.K. He was Zoomed in by remote for a panel discussion with National Geographic executives who outlined their upcoming documentary projects, including several that feature Honnold. The Alaska trip will be filmed for a series tentatively titled The Last Frontier with Alex Honnold.
“It should just be quite the adventure,” Honnold said of the summer excursion. “It was Tommy’s idea and he’s been dreaming it up for a while and I was like, oh wow, two-thousand-mile bike ride. I’m very excited about the climbing. I’m more concerned about the human-powered aspect.”
“In a nutshell,” added Bengt Anderson, National Geographic’s SVP, Production, Unscripted, “we’re following two really close friends on a big buddy expedition this summer, giant expedition up into Alaska, the Tongass National Forest… Alex and Tommy, it’s gonna be something pretty special.”
Also something pretty special is the soon-to-be-released Disney+ series On the Edge with Alex Honnold, which will, among other things, find the climber attempting to scale Greenland’s formidable Ingmikortilaq, which National Geographic describes as a “towering buttress of granite-gneiss [that] rises directly out of the ice-choked waters of Nordvestfjord in the island’s Scoresby Sound region.”
All in a day’s work for Honnold.
“The main [rock] wall was 4,000 feet coming straight out of the fjord. We got out of the boat and climbed 4,000 feet straight up, basically,” he said. “But then we climbed a smaller peak on the way there to sort of warm up as we approached. That one was maybe 1,500 feet… It was quite an adventure to get to the wall. It’s a very remote part of Eastern Greenland.”
He and British climber Hazel Findlay became the first people known to have reached the summit of Ingmikortilaq (which apparently means “the separate one” in Greenlandic). Anderson said there was more to the journey than the pursuit of an adrenaline rush. “We started to call [it] ‘an expedition with a purpose,’” he said.
Honnold expanded on that theme, noting, “It’s been said that Greenland is home to some of the biggest walls in the world and it seemed like a natural destination for climbing, but it’s also probably the most important place in the world right now for climate change and the impacts of climate change… If you’re going to go there on a sort of adventure-based expedition, you may as well bring — in this case, we brought a glaciologist, a client scientist named Heïdi Sevestre, a French woman, who was incredible on the trip and she did quite a bit of basic science as we were there. Just because it’s such an inaccessible place to get to, if you’re going to go for an adventure, you may as well do something useful while you’re there.”
The success of Free Solo made Honnold known beyond just the world of elite climbers, catapulting him into the pop culture firmament. The documentary directed by E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin won the 2019 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, as well as half a dozen Emmys and a BAFTA Film Award.
“After Free Solo, it’s hard to know of any project that would match that in terms of scope… Nothing I do will ever win an Academy Award again, I’m sure,” he told the Sheffield audience. “But in terms of climbing projects, since then I’ve still just been looking for the biggest, most inspiring walls, the things that excite me, the places that I haven’t been before, the places that I can learn the most.”
He added, “That was one of the real pleasures of this trip to Greenland was that I personally learned so much from Heidi and from the other members of the team about the environment through which we were traveling.”
Honnold is dad to a one-year-old child with wife Sanni McCandless. He was asked if having a tot to look after was putting a crimp in his crampons or affecting how he views the future of a planet in the throes of climate change.
“I’ve always cared about the environment because as a climber you’re just outdoors nonstop,” he said. “But you’re right that having a small child makes you look forward a little further. I will say, it also makes me a lot more tired.”
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