‘Free Solo’s’ Alex Honnold says fatherhood won’t stop him from death-tempting climbs
Alex Honnold is scaling Mt. Fatherhood!
The rock-climbing superstar — who specializes in “free soloing,” perhaps one of the most dangerous athletic pursuits on earth — has two tiny kids.
But he tells Page Six that the responsibility of parenthood won’t stop him from pursuing his death-tempting career.
Honnold shot to fame in 2018 after the release of Oscar-winning doc “Free Solo,” which followed his attempt to climb Yosemite’s 3000ft El Capitan without a rope (as known as “free solo”). Since the movie came out, he and wife Sanni McCandless have had two kids, now two-and-a-half and six months old.
When we asked Honnold at Sports Beach at the Cannes Lions festival if fatherhood has changed his perspective on his dangerous job, he told us: “Less than you might suspect.”
“One of my friends, Tommy Caldwell, who is also a professional climber, often quips — it’s not quite a joke; he’s being serious — he didn’t want to die before he had kids, and now he does have kids, he still doesn’t want to die,” he said. “As a climber, I’ve always had a close relationship with risk; risk management. You’re always thinking these things through quite a lot, and having kids, it not like it suddenly changed my calculus around it. I still don’t want to die doing this activity.”
He added that, for the most part, free solo climbing isn’t “rolling the dice.”
“I don’t know if rock climbing is totally analogous to riding a motorcycle, let’s say, because I think that a lot of motorcycle riding is random risk,” he said, “Like you’re worried about getting hit by other people. And it’s true that there is some of that in climbing, but for the types of climbing I’m doing, free soloing, for the most part its not random so much as if you fail, it’s often because you fail. It’s more on you. The variables are slightly more under your control. It feels less like rolling the dice, even though to the average person, from an external perspective, it all looks the same.”
Meanwhile, he says that while he will encourage his kids to climb, he won’t specifically encourage them to free solo.
“I wouldn’t discourage them, either,” he added, “If it winds up being their passion, and if they climb long enough and well enough, and they learn how to manage that, that would be fine.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, his two-year-old has already begun shimmying up rocks.
Honnold’s next National Geographic film, “Devil’s Thumb,” comes out in the fall.
