The free solo climber Alex Honnold shifted his focus from rock faces to glass skyscrapers this weekend, completing what was the highest urban climb in history.
The 40-year-old made it to the top of the Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan unaided — without ropes or safety equipment, wearing just a T-shirt, tracksuit trousers and climbing shoes. His stunt was streamed live on Netflix.
Honnold left the ground at 9am local time and took one hour and 35 minutes to climb the 1,677-ft, 101-storey tower, which was the tallest building in the world until the 2010 construction of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
“As long as I can remember I always wanted to climb things,” Honnold told Netflix before the climb. “I’ve always wanted to climb the coolest thing that I could find.”
Sanni McCandless, his wife who was watching the climb in Taiwan, said she was “excited to see him fulfil a lifelong dream”. She continued: “Like all relationships it just comes down to trust. I trust him and I trust his decision-making process.”
The tower was previously scaled by the urban climber Alain Robert, known as the “French Spiderman”, in 2004. It took him nearly four hours, with the use of safety ropes.
The first part of the climb consisted of sloped steel and glass, followed by what looked like eight glass boxes stacked on top of each other, with an enormous metal “dragon” jutting out of each corner. The remaining section of the tower was made up of overhangs, rings and, at its tip, the spire — which was the most dangerous section of the climb.
Honnold took a selfie when he finally got to the top.
The camera crew hung in harnesses on wires around him, filming the climb, and a crowd of thousands gathered below. People inside the building took photos and waved at him as he climbed past.
“It’s a big building,” he said on his mic, partway up the building. “What a beautiful day in Taipei.”
The climb was originally scheduled to take place on Friday, but it was postponed due to wet weather conditions. “Sadly [I] can’t climb a skyscraper while it’s raining,” he said in a video on social media.
Honnold on the side of 101 Skyscraper
ANN WANG/REUTERS
In an interview with the New York Times last week, Honnold said he hoped people would see the “joy” in it. “Like when you’re a kid and look around and think, It’d be amazing to climb up there,” he said. “As an adult, that gets hammered out of you. ‘Why would you do that? That’s dangerous. Do you have insurance?’ You know, all that type of stuff. But there’s something to be said for maintaining that childlike joy of just looking at it, like, that is amazing. I want to do that.
“Just sitting by yourself on the very top of the spire is insane.”
Honnold became a household name after becoming the first person to scale El Capitan, a 3,000ft summit in Yosemite National Park, without a rope. The stunt was featured in the 2018 Bafta and Oscar-winning film Free Solo.
Before that, he climbed the Moonlight Buttress and the Half Dome.
“When I’m doing these hard free solos, I like to think that the risk, the chance of me falling off is quite low even though the consequence is extremely high,” he said in Free Solo. “And that’s one of the appeals of free soloing, to take something that seems difficult and dangerous and make it feel safe.”
There had been significant public debate about the live streaming of the event, in case of catastrophe.
“It’s obviously a conversation that everybody has,” Jeff Gaspin, Netflix’s vice-president of unscripted series, told Variety. “You can imagine what we’ll do. It’s nothing momentous. We’ll cut away. We have a ten-second delay. Nobody expects or wants to see anything like that to happen. But we will cut away, and it’s as simple as that.”
Crowds gather to watch Honnold
CHIANG YING-YING/AP
Honnold lives in Las Vegas with his wife, whom he met at a book signing event in 2015, with their two daughters, aged three and one.
His passion for climbing started as a child with trips to the climbing gym at age five. He eventually started to road trip and go to campgrounds more often. Honnold has said he started soloing because “he didn’t want to talk to strangers”.
“I think that when he’s free soloing, that’s when he feels the most alive, the most everything, feels the most,” Deidre Wolownick, Honnold’s mother who started climbing at age 60 and became the oldest woman to climb El Capitan aged 66, said in Free Solo. “And how can you ever think about taking that away from someone? I wouldn’t.”