- This is by far the weirdest
thing I've been asked to do.
Hello, I'm Alex Honnold,
I'm a rock climber,
and I will be painting
a Yosemite Valley scene,
while I answer questions,
or perhaps just a big smiley face.
(upbeat music)
I mean, typically I tell any beginner
just to go to the gym, have
a good time, and try it,
just enjoy climbing and do the thing,
work on the footwork, practice technique.
Yeah, the thing about going climbing
is that there's no
particular way to do it.
You just go and try it
out, have a good time.
On my successful free solo of El Cap,
I felt good and confident and
comfortable the whole way.
Though, I mean, I'd had
a previous failed attempt
where I obviously felt uncomfortable.
But by the time I actually
did it, it felt great.
In that particular situation,
I actually climbed another 500 feet up
to a big ledge system,
and then there's a thousand feet of rope
from the ground up to those ledges.
Climbers always use it
as a way to commute up
and down the wall.
In that particular case,
I kinda cheated my way up
a couple hundred more feet,
and then climbed a bit more,
and then got to the ropes,
and then rappeled down.
But depending on where
you are on the wall,
there's always kind of
a different strategy
in how you would potentially descend.
I need a tree trunk, this
is gonna be exciting.
Climbing is very serious and nobody jokes.
You know, climbing is life and death,
like nobody's having a
good time when they climb.
It's all much too serious.
I need some green.
Hopefully people find it motivating
in whatever way is good for them.
I mean with audiences
everybody sort of chooses
their own little thing from it.
I mean, that woman who just signed up
for a marathon after watching it.
I was like, "That's pretty cool."
You know, I don't think I want people
to take anything from the movie,
I just hope that they
get something from it.
I need more forest.
In normal life,
I typically wake up in the
van in some climbing area,
eat some breakfast, go
out and climb for the day,
and then come back, eat some dinner,
and go to bed, and then repeat.
It's all pretty, it's a
pretty lovely lifestyle.
I'm making a rather impressionistic
version of the valley.
Certainly on easy free soloing,
I'm thinking about all kinds of things.
You know, I can think about the weather,
appreciate the position, enjoy
the actual moves themselves.
I think about partners
I've been up there with.
But then for harder climbing
I have to fully focus on
what I'm actually doing.
It's sort of like painting,
for cruxy painting you have
to really pay attention.
This is the Sentinel.
Actually, I climbed that for
60 minutes once upon a time.
It's one of my favorite
features in Yosemite.
I don't really think, no.
I mean, honestly, I don't
really have any hidden talents,
I don't think.
I've put a lot of energy
into rock climbing
and not that much energy into really
any other particular skills.
Well, I mean painting is gonna
become my new hobby, I think.
I was gonna turn this all sort of blue.
It's gonna be nice.
If I wasn't a professional climber,
I'd probably maybe be an
engineer of some kind, maybe.
I was studying that in
school for a little bit.
I have never seriously injured
a finger rock climbing.
I've only pulled tendons,
which is the most common
kind of climbing injury.
So in the film, I break my back.
I think in retrospect, I
didn't actually break my back.
I think I actually just
sprained a ligament in my hip.
At the time there was an X-ray.
Like I have some compression
fractures in my back,
but I think it might be from an injury
when I was much younger, actually.
I got really, really poor
medical care after that accident.
It was this really pretty
scrappy 24-hour emergency thing.
And the doctor never
even looked at my body.
They just rolled me in, took
an X-ray, rolled me out.
They never even physically
looked at the injury or anything.
It was kind of a weird experience.
And then the ankle injury basically
has just healed over time
the way you would expect.
I've been vegetarian for
maybe five or six years
because of the environmental impact,
because I felt like it
was one of the few things
that I could do personally
to reduce my impact
on the world.
And then once I went vegetarian,
I started caring slightly more
about the ethics of it too.
So once I stopped eating meat,
it's a lot easier to care about
not killing other creatures.
I mean, in general trying to do no harm
seems like a sound principle.
I think that diet is
probably that easiest thing
that most individuals can do
to lower their impact on the world.
Just because it really can have
almost no impact on your life.
You lead the exact same lifestyle,
you still take the same
pleasure out of life.
It's like basically
everything remains the same,
but you just have a tiny
fraction of the impact
on the Earth around you.
Actually the biggest thing
that most people can do,
well, the obvious one is vote
for people that actually
care about the environment.
But even more so actually
is changing your bank.
Pretty much every big bank
though is pumping tons of money
into politics on both sides of the aisle,
supporting all kinds of things
that you personally would never support
no matter where you stand politically.
Putting your money somewhere
local and not-for-profit
is maybe the biggest impact you can have.
I know people don't think about it,
but it's like all your
money is living somewhere
and somebody's using it.
I started the Honnold Foundation
maybe five, six years ago
in an effort to do something
positive in the world.
I basically felt like I
had more than I needed.
I was living out of my van,
I had very little overhead
and I was suddenly making
more than I needed,
and I felt like I should
do something useful.
So that meant donating money
to environmental non-profits.
And then we sort of gravitated
toward solar projects
just because I personally was interested
in environmental projects
that also improved
standard of living.
Like things that help the environment,
but also help people in need,
both domestically and abroad.
And honestly that's been
one of the highlights
of the film tour for me,
that the foundation has sort
of tripled in size and scope,
I think, just in the last six months.
I've certainly run into tons of creatures
that were a surprise.
I've pulled holds off the wall
and found scorpions underneath,
I remember really distinctly
because I was horrified
both times like, "Ahh!"
You know, 'cause you're hanging on
and there's suddenly a
scorpion right in front of you
and you're slightly concerned.
I don't really call myself a minimalist,
I think that I just use what I need.
And I don't need that
much because the things
that I enjoy doing don't
require that much. I don't know.
I think I just think about
whether or not I need something
before I acquire it.
I don't know if that
makes me a minimalist,
but I think that just makes me thoughtful.
Yeah, I can definitely tell you
that I will not be competing
in the 2020 Olympics.
And I've spent the last 10
years of my life focusing
on climbing 3,000-foot walls
in wild places like Yosemite
and people that are gonna win the Olympics
have been training inside
a gym their entire lives.
It's like different sports, basically.
I kinda want, like,
some kinda nice ground.
Maybe I'll try gray again.
Uh, yeah. I learned how to skydive,
thinking that I was gonna
get into base jumping
because all of my friends
had started base jumping
in Yosemite and it seemed
like such an efficient way
to fly down off the tops of walls.
And then basically when
I learned how to skydive,
I realized how dangerous base jumping was,
and then decided it wasn't for me.
There's a big heart-shaped depression
in the left side of El
Cap, so I added the heart.
If somebody tells me that
free soloing is crazy,
I don't really say, I mean, I don't care.
People can think whatever they want.
But I respectfully disagree.
And the thing about free soloing is that
it's fundamentally a fairly
slow and peaceful activity.
It doesn't have to be extreme,
it doesn't have to be crazy.
You know, if you're free
soloing at a low level,
it's more analogous to hiking
or scrambling in the mountains
and everybody likes to go
for a walk in the woods.
Difficult free soloing is
obviously not quite the same
as going for a hike in the woods.
It can still be done well and done safely.
I made a little forest, I
made a couple of little walls.
Oh, I could have added the
river through the middle
but I skipped that.
I'll go back to normal climbing.
I'll hopefully be in Yosemite in May,
climb some walls again.
And then we'll just see, we'll just see.
No big climbing plans yet.
I guess I'd bring a lighter of some kind,
or matches or flint or something, a knife,
I dunno, a tarp?
Otherwise I'd bring my book
and I'd bring my headphones
and I'd bring an MP3 player of some kind.
But I don't think that would
keep me alive very long.
What do we think, does this
look like Yosemite to you?
Yeah, it's really good.
Honestly, my coolest nature experience,
it's a bit of a random story,
but I onsite soloed this mountain in Zion,
this thousand-foot climb.
Basically I did it by myself,
first try without a rope.
So I'd never been up there,
never really know what's going on.
Made it to the top of the wall
and it had snowed a lot in Zion,
so there was snow everywhere.
Normally you would rappel back
down 1,000 feet at the rope.
I didn't have a rope, obviously,
'cause I was free soloing.
So instead I decided to
scramble another 2,000 feet
up to the rim of the actual canyon,
where I'd pick up a trail
and then hike down a normal tourist trail.
And it all was starting
to feel pretty extreme
'cause, you know, I've never been there,
didn't know what I was doing,
and I couldn't really
tell where I was going
because it was snowy.
And then I found some bighorn tracks,
basically followed these bighorn tracks
all the way up to the rim.
I was sort of like, "Oh, if
a frigging goat managed to,
"or a sheep, I guess, managed
to meander a way up to the rim
"surely whatever the goat
went up, I can go up."
Followed it for like 2,000
feet, made it to the rim.
It all worked out nicely.
Never actually saw the animal,
but I did follow the
tracks for a very long way.
You know, I felt pretty raw to begin with.
Only one more step for me to feel like
I had some spiritual connection
with the actual sheep.
That it had saved me or that
my ancestor had come back
in the form of a goat to guide
me to safety or whatever.
You know, it's hard to
know, but I was like,
"Oh, it's pretty cool."
Yeah, I filled it, I think.
I think it's done-sky.
This is by far the weirdest
thing I've been asked to do.
This is my art.
Sha-bam!
This is the first time I've
created art since I was a child.
Is that pretty good?
This was my attempt at
painting Yosemite Valley,
and if you want to see a better
version of Yosemite Valley,
see it in free solo.
It's ten thousand times
better than this painting.
Maybe, actually probably more than that.
Maybe ten million times
better than this painting.
- I could tell what it was.
- I should hope so.
The three most iconic
monoliths in Yosemite.
- And it looks just like them.
- Mm-hmm. Big and square, and gray.
(upbeat electric guitar music)
