I need to share a video [0] which helped contextualize Alex Honnold for me by contrasting him with another climber I've watched for years: Magnus Midtbo. In this video they're solo climbing a fairly simple and safe mountain, and Magnus is visibly stressed out while Alex calmly shouts encouragement all while recording.
When watching Alex Honnold in Free Solo, I understood there was a exceptional aspect to him, but it took me seeing him climb with other people to really grasp the magnitude.
Reminds me of that time I was taking climbing lessons in the Belgian Ardennes. Helmet on, in harness, hanging in the ropes, holding tight to not fall, we where climbing half way up the mountain, when a person out of nowhere ask if he can pass and just flew up the key section of the route. It was just a local, casual clothes, no harness, no helmet, no rope, maybe not even proper climbing shoes but I can't recall that. Just casually climbing the mountain like he was on a lunch stroll. Even now with years of experience I still don't have that confidence.
I suspect a lot of this is habituation due to repeated practise. As long as one climbs well within one's abilities, the actual level of danger is comparatively low. But the fear is still there and needs to be trained away.
They also did an MRI scan on Honnold and found that he doesn't have the usual fear response. It's not clear if this was trained away, or if it's something innate.
I recall reading about a certain species of birds where, to impress the females, the males dives to the ground. The closer to the ground before they pull out of the dive the more impressive.
The scientist found there was a gene encoding how daring a bird would be, mostly clustered in two groups IIRC. But there was a rare variant which made them much more fearless, causing them to go much lower than the others.
However they only found birds with one copy of that variation. Turned out if a bird inherited the variant from both parents, they never pulled out of the dive and smacked into the ground, killing the bird.
These crazy free solo climbs and similar reminds me of those birds.
This. Watching Honnold makes your palms go clamy and makes you uncomfortable because you imagine how terified you'd be in that position. But for an athlete like Honnold, the experience is more similar to just a "hard hike". Strenuous, but just work. It's just normalized because he does it so damn much. He really seriously is not gonna fall off that building, just like you're not gonna get seriously injured on a class 3 hike.
(Source: I'm also a climber. Not remotely close to Alex's level. But frequent exposure significantly changes how your brain processes these situations)
That’s not true, he has debunked that. It’s due to repeated practice and his confidence in his skill set that he doesn’t feel fear under those conditions
How do I square "he has debunked that" with the article about his brain fMRI and the results about his amygdala, linked above in this subthread? It's full of direct quotes from both Honnold and the doctors. Where did he debunk it... and how? He's got a more accurate analysis than the fMRI? Do you have a link?
When I go out running a might feel a twinge in Achilles. Or a pain in my knee. Maybe I'm just tired.
When that happens I have to do a mental inventory and ask myself, "Am I better off finishing the run or should I just bag it and take tomorrow off?" Two things; firstly every run hurts a little bit - especially the first mile. I usually get into a groove and sometimes, very rarely, I really have gotten to that place where I'm feeling no pain and a run seems like less effort then a walk - mostly though the nice part of a run has an undeniable unpleasantness bound up with it. I like being able to go out for a run though so I put up with the bad. Second thing. I'm an unreliable source. For all the reasons I just talked about I don't trust my ability to take stock of my physical state. I do occasionally take off or skip for days at a stretch but it's like candy - I don't trust it because I like it so.
Here's the thing. If I get that balance wrong I end up walking in the middle of my run.
I imagine Honnold has to do that same self assessment. If he gets it wrong he plunges to his death. Which - to my mind - is totally crazy. Takes all kinds though.
We had the privilege to watch at first from the SE corner of the building and later as he climbed by the the observation deck on the 89th floor. Hair raising stuff I'll never forget.
There are many answers depending on what you meant by this, but in terms of actual risk this is probably not much worse to him than e.g. riding a motorcycle, and certainly better than what it would have been to be crew on the space shuttle.
The second one is from the inside of the observatory (89th floor). Folks with media passes were allowed to get closer so that's the crowd you see pictured. He's climbing in the background.
In his El Capitan climb (Free Solo), Alex was worried about cameras or presence of friends watching interfering with the climb. As oppose to that, this climb must have felt very different!
>Climbing star, 23, dies after falling from Yosemite's El Capitan [this past Wednesday]
>Balin Miller, 23, was live-streamed on TikTok ascending and subsequently falling from the monolith on Wednesday.
>Details of what caused the incident are not clear, but Miller's brother Dylan told AFP he was lead rope soloing - a technique that enables climbing alone while still protected by a rope - on a 2,400ft (730m) route named Sea of Dreams.
>He had finished the climb and was hauling up equipment when he likely rappelled off the end of his rope, Dylan said.
>Tom Evans, a Yosemite-based photographer who witnessed Miller fall, told Climbing magazine he called 911 after Miller tried to free his bag, which was stuck on a rock.
Not sure what your point is here. He died rappelling when his bag got stuck. He didn't die free soloing. And it's unrelated to Yosemite. It was an avoidable accident and very sad. Climbers tend to die from Rappelling more than anything else. And, it's completely incomparable to Honnold's recent climb.
Yes, Freerider (the route he climbed on El Capitan) is much harder than the climbing on Taipei 101. The style of climbing is also very important, some of the moves on Freerider are very insecure and hard to climb in a reliable way, whereas on Taipei the difficulty largely comes from doing the same moves over and over again which means your body gets tired in a specific ways.
The climbing on Taipei was way more chill for him than the climbing on Freerider.
I'd assume - unlike El Capitan - the pitches here are all pretty much identical, so by the time he got to the third or fourth floor he had it figured out
If you watch the climb you'll see that the skyscraper definitely wasn't quite so straightforward - there were some interesting challenges along the way.
Of course, no question El Cap was technically far more challenging.
I wondered the same because there was a helicopter the entire time. Also the very tip top of Taipei 101 appeared to have many cameras mounted on it, at least through binoculars.
One of the most incredible feats of strength and daring I've ever witnessed. The only thing at all comparable was watching Baumgartner freefall back to earth from the edge of space. Unbelievable!
Yeah that was a great moment when that happened! I remember watching that, and then a couple weeks (?) later were the Snowden docs? That was quite a year, iirc.
This was far more thrilling and exciting to watch than I thought it would be. Which feels wrong when I say it, but I don't mean it was a good watch because of the consequences of failing. Rather because it was amazing watching a human perform at such a peak level.
I and some friends observed his climb from the base of Taipei 101. Thousands of people were present and it was very good fun how the crowd would react when he made it to another ledge, and when he made it to the top people were shouting and cheering. It was like a great big party.
I imagine Threads and Instagram just got hit with like ten thousand vertical video clips of the climb if you're interested in seeing for yourself.
For me it was almost scary how abruptly he started and made it up the first ledge. Dude just fuckin went for it. Made me realize, for the first time, how truly incredible the feat was to be.
The observation deck level is often so windy I worry about losing my phone if I take it out. I can't comprehend how he managed that wind while hanging on by his fingertips. Then he stood at the tippy top for quite some time, which must be unbelievably windy. At some point he was tethered in for the rapelle down though so maybe he clipped in right as he got to the top.
Probably nothing, at least for a moment, and that's the point. Then maybe: Another summit, another view, another inspiration. What's next? while feeling immense gratitude for his life and his family, and like this is where he's meant to be. And probably wanting to get someplace warm.
I think anyone who’s ever worked in construction would balk at the idea of hanging your life on pieces of building facade. Except for the the pieces stopping people falling through the outside windows and walls themselves, most of the outside decorative stuff is only designed to hold itself onto the building and not much more. He’s potentially hanging his 200lbs on something that’s intended to hold 0lbs.
No, you forgot that architects count the wind forces in, not just the weight of pieces hanging onto the facade. Give them dynamic spikes of factor 10, so it looks more like 1000lbs. Only once you can get your engineers to agree on only factor 2, you can build much much lighter structures.
No I didn’t, you’re talking about big sheets of stuff, which probably won’t have anything to hold onto on it. I’m talking about the fiddly little bits that he’s likely to be holding onto. A little bit of flashing around a window has a wind load approaching zero.
When I'm cleaning highrise windows I put a looot of force crimping window frames to move laterally. I haven't broken anything yet.
I've also done a facade inspection on a building where massive sheets of metal had been badly installed. The vast majority of them weren't connected to the structural steel beams, they were just held together by single screws (with no nuts!) that were falling off due to wind making the screws bore a bigger hole. A sheet had fallen off the 12th floor right onto the busy boulevard below.
you're not wrong, but i lived in Taiwan a while back for a number of years and things are built different there. it's not something you would necessarily notice unless you live there for a while, but once you start seeing it, it's hard to unsee.
the walls are thicker. everything is reinforced. external structures are bolted more securely. why is this a thing? taiphoons and earthquakes, is why.
if you like solid construction, there's plenty of it in taiwan. also, 101 is a flagship building. an item falling from the facade would kill someone or be a huge embarassment. this is not something they would let happen. just some local context fyi. that said, i wouldn't trust my life to those external structures either, but you do see alex testing as he goes.
I thought he had freakishly large hands before, but that picture of him on the top with his hands in the air makes him look like the lawyer uncle from Always Sunny. He's built for free solo.
You spend a ton of time belaying you partner (with whom you need to coordinate free time, which is a major hassle if you're trying to climb on a weekday as an unemployed dirtbag) or just clipping the rope into protection while roped climbing. Free soloing you get to do nothing but climb. There's ways to toprope solo so you can just flow up a route without having to fiddle with any of your equipment while you're climbing, but even that will require you to spend a solid 25% of your time rigging (and that's assuming you're efficient, a lot of climbers don't rig very efficiently). A rope team will climb about 3-4 pitches of moderate difficulty in an hour if they're efficient. A free soloist can easily get this done in a quarter or a third of the time. You climb a whole lot more and you get to only climb instead of working with ropes.
Your average roped climbers at a crag might get 3 pitches of climbing in an hour (sometimes even less when they're on hard stuff where they flail). You can get that done in 15 minutes free soloing. After climbing for a while there's a lot of terrain where you know the odds of falling are minuscule, and you know exactly when you feel insecure and have the option of backing off by down climbing. It's a very common practice among alpinists, where moving fast is an enormous advantage and the terrain usually isn't difficult compared to current sport climbing standards.
He's spoken about it extensively in interviews. Watch his El Capitan movie or recent interviews before this climb.
He just finds it very peaceful and thrilling. "Just him and the climb" kind of language.
Also I suppose clout has to be involved: only person to free solo El Capitan, as far as I know the only person to climb Taipei 101 let alone free solo (did the spiderman guy ever make it or was he arrested?)
I guess watching the film ('free solo' is the one you mention) is the lowest effort way of getting his perspective and I recommend the film.
For a deeper dive, the book "Alone on the wall" is a good read and I recommend it. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36531127-alone-on-the-wa..., although that said the book might be less appealing to someone who 'knows nothing about climbing' and is more of a time investment than the short documentary :)
...which is easily misconstrued as "feeling less fear" which I don't believe for a second. If that was the case he'd be dead by now.
But it's certainly time we admit everyone feels feelings diferently. Even something basal like pain experience is hugely individual with large variation.
I certainly believe he feels less fear. Doesn't mean he wants to die. I'm sure at an intellectual level he enjoys life and doesn't want it to end. I just doubt he gets the innate "nope nope nope" of fear that 99% of people would get when contemplating an activity like this.
Money! He has a family to provide for and his unique skillset is "climbing below his grade but with no support", so that's the service he offers the world.
(I get that there are more motivations underneath free soloing in general, but I doubt Taipei 101 with a million cameras is the climb he'd choose if it were not for the money.)
I'm going to be controversial and say that this is an interesting spectacle but it is not even remotely comparable to the difficulty of what was going on in Free Solo. This is a circus trick by comparison to that.
For example I think a lot of 'good' climbers with several multi pitch climbs behind them could do this building fairly comfortably with ropes and really the only thing interesting about this is he did it without safety equipment which is frankly just a bit daft.
(I have climbed pretty extensively in the UK and also in Yangshuo China). I was kind of 'intermediate/good' at one point.
It's not contraversial at all - buildings are extremely predictable (
to a point, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750654 and consider that the initial overhang pass failed due to not finding an open bottomed window cleaning track to slot into, they backed up, tried another spar, and success )
this was an exercise of focus, indifference to exposure, and fitness to complete the 1,660 odd feet of ascent.
> he did it without safety equipment which is frankly just a bit daft.
People vary a lot, I had spent a few years climbing before someone pointed out that you could use ropes and protection .. indoor climbing gyms were fun for a while but never really became a thing of great interest for myself.
We watched the livestream together, such a stressful watch, glad he made it up there. As my partner and both do bouldering, it definitely gives another level of appreciation of just how insane this is. (I still get stressed at times when I'm just 2-3m up in the air lol).
In other tower climbing events, some things cannot be free climbed (too smooth, fingers aren't made for window cleaning tracks, etc).
The 1988 ascent of the Sydney Centrepoint was a technical climb with custom jumars for both the cables and the window tracks and a fun challenge for all, both the scouting, the climb, and the filming.
Originally titled The Only Building I Ever Wanted To Climb, later released as A Spire, there's a documentary film that follows a climb at night of "only" 1,000 feet.
Netflix has a stream with close-up cameras, as they were the ones who arranged the whole thing. Unfortunately the commentary and color grading are both terrible: https://www.netflix.com/watch/81987107
About to watch the film now. I know there are controversial aspects to this, but in my opinion this is something I myself need to allow happen. Alex know it himself, that there is a risk of ending it, but most people will not understand the feelings he get before, during and after a climb. So who am I to judge from my couch in my livingroom whether he should be allowed to pursue his lifestyle or not. He is not actively hurting anyone.
He mentioned he considers partying more dangerous than climbing. I can't tell how dangerous his stunts are, but he's still alive, so perhaps he knows what he's doing?
After watching the documentary about him I don't really like the person, but here's my take: will he be doing the same if there was no TV, nor social media?
He’s said in multiple interviews (like on his own climbing podcast, Climbing Gold) that he’d do it for free with no publicity. He’s been trying for a very long time to get permission to do something like this, just because it’d be really cool.
The fact that Netflix was behind it might’ve made it possible to get permission to climb this specific tower though.
Alex Honnold: No free soloist ever died doing anything cutting edge. Nobody died doing something really hard. A handful people died doing things that are easy. Most soloist died in different types of accidents...base jumping, rogue wave.
Factually inaccurate, the Wikipedia page for free solo climbing has an entire section on prominent free solo climber deaths.
In my view this guy is pretty irresponsible especially for promoting a “sport” that is unnecessarily dangerous in the most preventable way imaginable.
A bunch of kids and stupid adults watched that live stream and a non-zero amount of them now think they can try the same thing without anywhere near as much training and skill.
Not gonna lie, this kind of extreme sport doesn't attract the brightest people.
I have a fascination with this kind of stuff. Taking risks is sometimes necessary and worthwhile in life, but seriously, risking your life just so you can say you realized a specific feat is really dumb.
Especially when we have the technology to do the thing just fine with no problem whatsoever.
I think those people live too comfortable lives and try to feel something. They could apply those skills to some meaningful work, but of course it doesn't get the same recognition.
I'm not saying money wasn't a factor in his decision to do this for a livestream, but it clearly wouldn't be the only factor and I doubt that would make him stop. (He free solo'd before, without cameras, although not this building).
For people like Alex, it's much more about the thrill, the experience, and 'proving' themselves than it is about money.
Very impressive feat, no doubt about it. But the commentary on the Netflix broadcast ruined the spectator experience completely. It was utterly unbearable.
With the Netflix infrastructure, I'm surprised they broadcast it so conventionally. Different channels running at the same time (with the crowd at the bottom, with the crowds as he passed each floor, with his wife watching, with pro climbers talking technical climbing stuff with simultaneous 8K online illustrating graphics, etc.), different audio tracks (with commentators, with crowd at bottom only, etc.*). Alex Honnold was paid only $500K for the event, so maybe there simply wasn't a lot of money allocated to the project to get fancy with the live broadcast.
Stuff like this seems a bit... selfish? to me. Why risk falling, and people having to see that/having to clean that up? For a bit of adrenaline and publicity? Meh.
The Taipei tourism bureau disagrees. Many here as well. The more eyes on Taiwan, the better. I'm grateful Alex was willing to risk his life for this spectacle, now potentially millions will have at least some concept of Taipei and Taiwan in their minds.
He did it because he thought it would be cool to free solo a building. He grew up idolizing Alain Robert, a french soloist who made his bread and butter out of soloing buildings. The guy was free soloing for free on his own without telling anyone about it for years, living out of his mom's minivan and eating cheap food, the media attention just allows him to be more comfortable as he keeps climbing obsessively. Also running his foundation probably gives a lot of meaning to what he's doing, he'd just be your average dirtbag loser otherwise.
I'm going to add that his coolest achievements were done with ropes. The friendly race to climbing a route graded 5.15 with Sonnie Trotter and Tommy Caldwell is a lot more interesting to me.
> Statistically more danger than a free solo climber.
While I don't have statistics on free solo death rate per climb compared to death per car trip, this is most likely very, very wrong. You should really stop throwing such strange wild claims..
This is in contradiction to the experience of driving, where any number of people on the road with you are untrained, undertrained, drunk, or suffering diseases that affect their ability to drive. Or just doing crimes like speeding or dangerous driving. So when climbing, your fate is entirely in your hands and that of nature's. When driving, it's in the hands of many strangers.
You did not adress the point though. This isn't about the tens of thousands of people climbing, it's about the ones climbing free-solo, which is a much, much smaller number.
>>> You put your life in danger every time you get behind the wheel of a car. Statistically more danger than a free solo climber.
>> While I don't have statistics on free solo death rate per climb compared to death per car trip, this is most likely very, very wrong. You should really stop throwing such strange wild claims..
> Of all the thousands of times tens of thousands people climb, only 30 die per year. Of that 30, 30% are free solo deaths.
So? I would think few people die from free soloing at height not because it’s relatively safe, but because very few people do it.
False equivalence. It's by no means required to free climb a skyscraper. While you might say it's also not required to get behind the wheel of a car, the difficulty in getting places (like a job, for example) without doing so in many locations makes it more or less required.
Well then rather than criticize a guy for doing an extreme sport, perhaps we can direct our energy inwards towards why we allowed ourselves to design such a fatal society.
That a government would be willing to risk this for publicity isn't really changing my mind.
"Come to Taiwan; you may or may not watch someone plummet to their death while here" doesn't appeal to me, personally anyway. Anyway that guy that did it with safety equipment a few years back made the rounds in the news too, so not sure this was necessary in that regard.
C'mon, didn't some guy do a skydive from nearly outer space? Do you criticize the country he landed in? Or red bull for sponsoring it or the many other extreme sports?
Injury and death happens in rock climbing even when tethered. Not often but it does happen, that's the nature of the sport and it's the same as BMX, skateboarding, motocross, any kind of racing.
It's also the same as just living - go look up Taiwan traffic deaths. There's so much more dangerous things happening here and wherever you live, it just seems silly to criticize someone for doing an extreme sport publicly.
If Baumgartner - or any athlete/governing body for a sport - forewent safety measures to make it a better spectacle, then yes, I would be criticizing them!
They all forgo the safety measures of "don't smash into each other's heads" despite repeated studies showing NFL players frequently have long term brain damage from the sport.
It's an extreme sport and a thrilling thing to watch. The danger is exciting and makes his accomplishment all the more stunning. I think it's really cool that there are humans willing to push the limits of the human experience like this.
People often confuse severe consequences (a fall = death) with high probability. Alex, like most climbers, reduce that probability to near zero through obsessive prep.
The travel to/from Taiwan was statistically riskier than the climb.
It's not 25% per climb, but it's not near zero either, especially in aggregate. It only takes one mistake. A fairly high percentage of famous free soloists (I'd say over 25%) have died prematurely, either while free soloing, or during other extreme sports.
>A fairly high percentage of famous free soloists (I'd say over 25%) have died prematurely
Yes but I'd also say Alex is a bit of a different beast. He's clearly not a thrill seeker who attempts climbs he isn't sure about. And as he has once said, there's a very real risk of dying when you get in your car, play football, are a boxer, and so on.
People have a stark reaction to the visual of a guy being 200 meters above the ground but the reality is if you're a circus acrobat and you're 10 meters up the air you're also likely dead or maimed if something goes wrong. It doesn't get more dead than dead and in many ways he's probably more calculated and less reckless than people in other sports or performances.
> People have a stark reaction to the visual of a guy being 200 meters above the ground but the reality is if you're a circus acrobat and you're 10 meters up the air you're also likely dead or maimed if something goes wrong.
No, it's the large number of free soloists that have died. And the small number of circus performers who have died. People's intuitions about the relative risks are actually very accurate here.
I need to share a video [0] which helped contextualize Alex Honnold for me by contrasting him with another climber I've watched for years: Magnus Midtbo. In this video they're solo climbing a fairly simple and safe mountain, and Magnus is visibly stressed out while Alex calmly shouts encouragement all while recording.
When watching Alex Honnold in Free Solo, I understood there was a exceptional aspect to him, but it took me seeing him climb with other people to really grasp the magnitude.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyya23MPoAI
Reminds me of that time I was taking climbing lessons in the Belgian Ardennes. Helmet on, in harness, hanging in the ropes, holding tight to not fall, we where climbing half way up the mountain, when a person out of nowhere ask if he can pass and just flew up the key section of the route. It was just a local, casual clothes, no harness, no helmet, no rope, maybe not even proper climbing shoes but I can't recall that. Just casually climbing the mountain like he was on a lunch stroll. Even now with years of experience I still don't have that confidence.
I suspect a lot of this is habituation due to repeated practise. As long as one climbs well within one's abilities, the actual level of danger is comparatively low. But the fear is still there and needs to be trained away.
They also did an MRI scan on Honnold and found that he doesn't have the usual fear response. It's not clear if this was trained away, or if it's something innate.
https://nautil.us/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-s...
I recall reading about a certain species of birds where, to impress the females, the males dives to the ground. The closer to the ground before they pull out of the dive the more impressive.
The scientist found there was a gene encoding how daring a bird would be, mostly clustered in two groups IIRC. But there was a rare variant which made them much more fearless, causing them to go much lower than the others.
However they only found birds with one copy of that variation. Turned out if a bird inherited the variant from both parents, they never pulled out of the dive and smacked into the ground, killing the bird.
These crazy free solo climbs and similar reminds me of those birds.
This. Watching Honnold makes your palms go clamy and makes you uncomfortable because you imagine how terified you'd be in that position. But for an athlete like Honnold, the experience is more similar to just a "hard hike". Strenuous, but just work. It's just normalized because he does it so damn much. He really seriously is not gonna fall off that building, just like you're not gonna get seriously injured on a class 3 hike.
(Source: I'm also a climber. Not remotely close to Alex's level. But frequent exposure significantly changes how your brain processes these situations)
I don't think it required much training for Alex, I think he just has an under active amygdala or something
It’s literally the case. They gave him an fMRI:
https://nautil.us/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-s...
That’s the impression I got: he doesn’t feel fear like the rest of us.
That’s not true, he has debunked that. It’s due to repeated practice and his confidence in his skill set that he doesn’t feel fear under those conditions
How do I square "he has debunked that" with the article about his brain fMRI and the results about his amygdala, linked above in this subthread? It's full of direct quotes from both Honnold and the doctors. Where did he debunk it... and how? He's got a more accurate analysis than the fMRI? Do you have a link?
When I go out running a might feel a twinge in Achilles. Or a pain in my knee. Maybe I'm just tired.
When that happens I have to do a mental inventory and ask myself, "Am I better off finishing the run or should I just bag it and take tomorrow off?" Two things; firstly every run hurts a little bit - especially the first mile. I usually get into a groove and sometimes, very rarely, I really have gotten to that place where I'm feeling no pain and a run seems like less effort then a walk - mostly though the nice part of a run has an undeniable unpleasantness bound up with it. I like being able to go out for a run though so I put up with the bad. Second thing. I'm an unreliable source. For all the reasons I just talked about I don't trust my ability to take stock of my physical state. I do occasionally take off or skip for days at a stretch but it's like candy - I don't trust it because I like it so.
Here's the thing. If I get that balance wrong I end up walking in the middle of my run.
I imagine Honnold has to do that same self assessment. If he gets it wrong he plunges to his death. Which - to my mind - is totally crazy. Takes all kinds though.
is it possible to suppress amygdala? asking for a friend
Would that be safe? asking for an enemy.
We had the privilege to watch at first from the SE corner of the building and later as he climbed by the the observation deck on the 89th floor. Hair raising stuff I'll never forget.
I, on the other hand, had the privilege not to watch this. I don't know how one can without feeling sick to the stomach.
There are many answers depending on what you meant by this, but in terms of actual risk this is probably not much worse to him than e.g. riding a motorcycle, and certainly better than what it would have been to be crew on the space shuttle.
[flagged]
Wow that's awesome! You saw him climb past your windows! Must be a Googler
Nope! Startup founder who happened to be visiting Taiwan at the right time.
The Googlers had way better views XD
Do you know if there was any guidelines to not "disturb" during his climb? Was shocked by how many people tried to distract him during that climb
They kept most folks pretty far away, you needed a pass or to work in one of the offices to get really close.
I was also terrified when ppl would engage with him directly lol
He needs the ultimate focus, there can be no mistakes. That's amazing you got to see the actual climb!
Do you have any photos on social media?
Two good ones my gf took here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gb-cc_my-desperate-attempt-to...
The second one is from the inside of the observatory (89th floor). Folks with media passes were allowed to get closer so that's the crowd you see pictured. He's climbing in the background.
In his El Capitan climb (Free Solo), Alex was worried about cameras or presence of friends watching interfering with the climb. As oppose to that, this climb must have felt very different!
I'm wondering if this is because El Capitan is a much more technically difficult climb and thus posing much more risk than Taipei 101.
>Climbing star, 23, dies after falling from Yosemite's El Capitan [this past Wednesday]
>Balin Miller, 23, was live-streamed on TikTok ascending and subsequently falling from the monolith on Wednesday.
>Details of what caused the incident are not clear, but Miller's brother Dylan told AFP he was lead rope soloing - a technique that enables climbing alone while still protected by a rope - on a 2,400ft (730m) route named Sea of Dreams.
>He had finished the climb and was hauling up equipment when he likely rappelled off the end of his rope, Dylan said.
>Tom Evans, a Yosemite-based photographer who witnessed Miller fall, told Climbing magazine he called 911 after Miller tried to free his bag, which was stuck on a rock.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz08jp4xv2jo
https://archive.ph/vjETS
Not sure what your point is here. He died rappelling when his bag got stuck. He didn't die free soloing. And it's unrelated to Yosemite. It was an avoidable accident and very sad. Climbers tend to die from Rappelling more than anything else. And, it's completely incomparable to Honnold's recent climb.
It was a response to this comment:
>I'm wondering if this is because El Capitan is a much more technically difficult climb and thus posing much more risk than Taipei 101.
Yes, Freerider (the route he climbed on El Capitan) is much harder than the climbing on Taipei 101. The style of climbing is also very important, some of the moves on Freerider are very insecure and hard to climb in a reliable way, whereas on Taipei the difficulty largely comes from doing the same moves over and over again which means your body gets tired in a specific ways.
The climbing on Taipei was way more chill for him than the climbing on Freerider.
I was surprised to see him take breaks and wave at the crowd. Very different vibe.
He was able to practice El Capitan over and over, though. Was he able to in Tapei?
Yes, this past week he was doing a lot of practice with a rope. This building isn't new to him. He's also climbed it in previous years I believe.
I'd assume - unlike El Capitan - the pitches here are all pretty much identical, so by the time he got to the third or fourth floor he had it figured out
If you watch the climb you'll see that the skyscraper definitely wasn't quite so straightforward - there were some interesting challenges along the way.
Of course, no question El Cap was technically far more challenging.
He must have. My impression from the documentary is that he practice the climb route many times with safety gear first.
Yes. You can see him here climb with ropes: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/24/world/video/alex-honnold-...
It would be insanely reckless to free solo without practicing first.
In the rain! Here's another video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljtXTBenYlc
I wondered the same because there was a helicopter the entire time. Also the very tip top of Taipei 101 appeared to have many cameras mounted on it, at least through binoculars.
This is much easier climbing and you can rest on balconies every few floors. It has nothing to do with slippery granite slab or v7 boulder problems.
One of the most incredible feats of strength and daring I've ever witnessed. The only thing at all comparable was watching Baumgartner freefall back to earth from the edge of space. Unbelievable!
Yeah that was a great moment when that happened! I remember watching that, and then a couple weeks (?) later were the Snowden docs? That was quite a year, iirc.
Also for daring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Petit
This was far more thrilling and exciting to watch than I thought it would be. Which feels wrong when I say it, but I don't mean it was a good watch because of the consequences of failing. Rather because it was amazing watching a human perform at such a peak level.
I and some friends observed his climb from the base of Taipei 101. Thousands of people were present and it was very good fun how the crowd would react when he made it to another ledge, and when he made it to the top people were shouting and cheering. It was like a great big party.
I imagine Threads and Instagram just got hit with like ten thousand vertical video clips of the climb if you're interested in seeing for yourself.
For me it was almost scary how abruptly he started and made it up the first ledge. Dude just fuckin went for it. Made me realize, for the first time, how truly incredible the feat was to be.
The observation deck level is often so windy I worry about losing my phone if I take it out. I can't comprehend how he managed that wind while hanging on by his fingertips. Then he stood at the tippy top for quite some time, which must be unbelievably windy. At some point he was tethered in for the rapelle down though so maybe he clipped in right as he got to the top.
He was not clipped in while standing at the top. That part actually made me the most nervous because you could see the wind blowing him around
Ah I haven't watched the videos yet, just what I could see through binoculars. When did he clip in to rapelle down? Immediately before doing so?
I wonder what he was thinking about up there.
Probably nothing, at least for a moment, and that's the point. Then maybe: Another summit, another view, another inspiration. What's next? while feeling immense gratitude for his life and his family, and like this is where he's meant to be. And probably wanting to get someplace warm.
I think anyone who’s ever worked in construction would balk at the idea of hanging your life on pieces of building facade. Except for the the pieces stopping people falling through the outside windows and walls themselves, most of the outside decorative stuff is only designed to hold itself onto the building and not much more. He’s potentially hanging his 200lbs on something that’s intended to hold 0lbs.
No, you forgot that architects count the wind forces in, not just the weight of pieces hanging onto the facade. Give them dynamic spikes of factor 10, so it looks more like 1000lbs. Only once you can get your engineers to agree on only factor 2, you can build much much lighter structures.
No I didn’t, you’re talking about big sheets of stuff, which probably won’t have anything to hold onto on it. I’m talking about the fiddly little bits that he’s likely to be holding onto. A little bit of flashing around a window has a wind load approaching zero.
When I'm cleaning highrise windows I put a looot of force crimping window frames to move laterally. I haven't broken anything yet.
I've also done a facade inspection on a building where massive sheets of metal had been badly installed. The vast majority of them weren't connected to the structural steel beams, they were just held together by single screws (with no nuts!) that were falling off due to wind making the screws bore a bigger hole. A sheet had fallen off the 12th floor right onto the busy boulevard below.
you're not wrong, but i lived in Taiwan a while back for a number of years and things are built different there. it's not something you would necessarily notice unless you live there for a while, but once you start seeing it, it's hard to unsee.
the walls are thicker. everything is reinforced. external structures are bolted more securely. why is this a thing? taiphoons and earthquakes, is why.
if you like solid construction, there's plenty of it in taiwan. also, 101 is a flagship building. an item falling from the facade would kill someone or be a huge embarassment. this is not something they would let happen. just some local context fyi. that said, i wouldn't trust my life to those external structures either, but you do see alex testing as he goes.
You can see him testing pieces as he goes - tapping with his fist.
I thought he had freakishly large hands before, but that picture of him on the top with his hands in the air makes him look like the lawyer uncle from Always Sunny. He's built for free solo.
You need to be specific! There are 2 lawyers with completely opposite hand sizes.
The one educated in bird law.
touche.
I assumed they were talking about the uncle’s fake hands: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UWVVLKZ56zM&pp=0gcJCTMBo7VqN5t...
I know nothing about climbing. beyond the straight flex of "I could die if I make a mistake", is there a point to doing this without safety equipment?
You spend a ton of time belaying you partner (with whom you need to coordinate free time, which is a major hassle if you're trying to climb on a weekday as an unemployed dirtbag) or just clipping the rope into protection while roped climbing. Free soloing you get to do nothing but climb. There's ways to toprope solo so you can just flow up a route without having to fiddle with any of your equipment while you're climbing, but even that will require you to spend a solid 25% of your time rigging (and that's assuming you're efficient, a lot of climbers don't rig very efficiently). A rope team will climb about 3-4 pitches of moderate difficulty in an hour if they're efficient. A free soloist can easily get this done in a quarter or a third of the time. You climb a whole lot more and you get to only climb instead of working with ropes.
Your average roped climbers at a crag might get 3 pitches of climbing in an hour (sometimes even less when they're on hard stuff where they flail). You can get that done in 15 minutes free soloing. After climbing for a while there's a lot of terrain where you know the odds of falling are minuscule, and you know exactly when you feel insecure and have the option of backing off by down climbing. It's a very common practice among alpinists, where moving fast is an enormous advantage and the terrain usually isn't difficult compared to current sport climbing standards.
He's spoken about it extensively in interviews. Watch his El Capitan movie or recent interviews before this climb.
He just finds it very peaceful and thrilling. "Just him and the climb" kind of language.
Also I suppose clout has to be involved: only person to free solo El Capitan, as far as I know the only person to climb Taipei 101 let alone free solo (did the spiderman guy ever make it or was he arrested?)
I guess watching the film ('free solo' is the one you mention) is the lowest effort way of getting his perspective and I recommend the film.
For a deeper dive, the book "Alone on the wall" is a good read and I recommend it. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36531127-alone-on-the-wa..., although that said the book might be less appealing to someone who 'knows nothing about climbing' and is more of a time investment than the short documentary :)
I believe it's also documented that he has an underdeveloped amygdala, so he literally doesn't experience fear in the same way most people do.
...which is easily misconstrued as "feeling less fear" which I don't believe for a second. If that was the case he'd be dead by now.
But it's certainly time we admit everyone feels feelings diferently. Even something basal like pain experience is hugely individual with large variation.
I certainly believe he feels less fear. Doesn't mean he wants to die. I'm sure at an intellectual level he enjoys life and doesn't want it to end. I just doubt he gets the innate "nope nope nope" of fear that 99% of people would get when contemplating an activity like this.
Second person to climb it (Spidey got there first), but only one to free solo it.
Money! He has a family to provide for and his unique skillset is "climbing below his grade but with no support", so that's the service he offers the world.
(I get that there are more motivations underneath free soloing in general, but I doubt Taipei 101 with a million cameras is the climb he'd choose if it were not for the money.)
Is it known how much he made?
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/nation-world/how-much-alex-...
I am not sold that this way of raising money qualifies as putting family first.
I'm going to be controversial and say that this is an interesting spectacle but it is not even remotely comparable to the difficulty of what was going on in Free Solo. This is a circus trick by comparison to that.
For example I think a lot of 'good' climbers with several multi pitch climbs behind them could do this building fairly comfortably with ropes and really the only thing interesting about this is he did it without safety equipment which is frankly just a bit daft.
(I have climbed pretty extensively in the UK and also in Yangshuo China). I was kind of 'intermediate/good' at one point.
It's not contraversial at all - buildings are extremely predictable (
to a point, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750654 and consider that the initial overhang pass failed due to not finding an open bottomed window cleaning track to slot into, they backed up, tried another spar, and success )
this was an exercise of focus, indifference to exposure, and fitness to complete the 1,660 odd feet of ascent.
> he did it without safety equipment which is frankly just a bit daft.
People vary a lot, I had spent a few years climbing before someone pointed out that you could use ropes and protection .. indoor climbing gyms were fun for a while but never really became a thing of great interest for myself.
We watched the livestream together, such a stressful watch, glad he made it up there. As my partner and both do bouldering, it definitely gives another level of appreciation of just how insane this is. (I still get stressed at times when I'm just 2-3m up in the air lol).
In other tower climbing events, some things cannot be free climbed (too smooth, fingers aren't made for window cleaning tracks, etc).
The 1988 ascent of the Sydney Centrepoint was a technical climb with custom jumars for both the cables and the window tracks and a fun challenge for all, both the scouting, the climb, and the filming.
Originally titled The Only Building I Ever Wanted To Climb, later released as A Spire, there's a documentary film that follows a climb at night of "only" 1,000 feet.
... with a massive overhang.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Tower
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qch1Gd8VLK0
I've watched a lot "Shiey tower climbs" in the last decade to overcome my sudden fear of heights, it didn't help. https://www.google.com/search&q=Shiey+tower+climb
Alex is just a bit too crazy to follow him. I don't like suicidal tendencies
shameless plug for folks in taiwan: we do regular meetup in Taiwan - join us! https://taipeidev.com
Does anyone have a link to good video footage of the climb?
Netflix has a stream with close-up cameras, as they were the ones who arranged the whole thing. Unfortunately the commentary and color grading are both terrible: https://www.netflix.com/watch/81987107
A YouTube search pulls up a stream filmed from the ground (a nearby building?) using a zoom lens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzthkg2ti2Q
My heart beats fast just watching him. I wonder if the path has been clean/power washed before the climb.
Netflix have absoluely no taste. Everything they make has unbearbly bland cinematography.
this was a live stream... the camera work was incredible, did you see it?
About to watch the film now. I know there are controversial aspects to this, but in my opinion this is something I myself need to allow happen. Alex know it himself, that there is a risk of ending it, but most people will not understand the feelings he get before, during and after a climb. So who am I to judge from my couch in my livingroom whether he should be allowed to pursue his lifestyle or not. He is not actively hurting anyone.
The issue with moralistic people is that they feel they have a duty to preach their opinions unto everybody else.
One should be free to do whatever they want with their own life, provided they don’t hurt anyone else.
He has a young child.
Many people do.
He mentioned he considers partying more dangerous than climbing. I can't tell how dangerous his stunts are, but he's still alive, so perhaps he knows what he's doing?
Great feat of strength, determination and athleticism! I also hope Netflix stays as far away from this as possible.
watching in Live on Netflix was riveting
After watching the documentary about him I don't really like the person, but here's my take: will he be doing the same if there was no TV, nor social media?
He's been doing this since he was a child, much of it without TV and social media. But this specific tower? Doubt it.
He’s said in multiple interviews (like on his own climbing podcast, Climbing Gold) that he’d do it for free with no publicity. He’s been trying for a very long time to get permission to do something like this, just because it’d be really cool.
The fact that Netflix was behind it might’ve made it possible to get permission to climb this specific tower though.
This is a very irresponsible thing to do when you have children.
Alex Honnold: No free soloist ever died doing anything cutting edge. Nobody died doing something really hard. A handful people died doing things that are easy. Most soloist died in different types of accidents...base jumping, rogue wave.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9WWUNDb_S0o
Factually inaccurate, the Wikipedia page for free solo climbing has an entire section on prominent free solo climber deaths.
In my view this guy is pretty irresponsible especially for promoting a “sport” that is unnecessarily dangerous in the most preventable way imaginable.
A bunch of kids and stupid adults watched that live stream and a non-zero amount of them now think they can try the same thing without anywhere near as much training and skill.
Not gonna lie, this kind of extreme sport doesn't attract the brightest people.
I have a fascination with this kind of stuff. Taking risks is sometimes necessary and worthwhile in life, but seriously, risking your life just so you can say you realized a specific feat is really dumb. Especially when we have the technology to do the thing just fine with no problem whatsoever. I think those people live too comfortable lives and try to feel something. They could apply those skills to some meaningful work, but of course it doesn't get the same recognition.
Yeah I hope he made enough money to stop.
I'm not saying money wasn't a factor in his decision to do this for a livestream, but it clearly wouldn't be the only factor and I doubt that would make him stop. (He free solo'd before, without cameras, although not this building).
For people like Alex, it's much more about the thrill, the experience, and 'proving' themselves than it is about money.
He didn't have kids when he free soloed the mountain.
Sure but that is not related to the argument I'm making (or the post I commented on)
I think NYT said their sources claim he was paid mid 6-figures? Which is really shitty of Netflix. If I were him I would've asked for at least $5M.
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Very impressive feat, no doubt about it. But the commentary on the Netflix broadcast ruined the spectator experience completely. It was utterly unbearable.
The Taiwanese live feed news channels on YouTube were great. Little to no commentary and you could hear the crowd engagement.
I thought the same thing. Half the time I wished they would just keep quiet.
Then again, there's always Mute. Turn up your favorite music/sound or just silence. Could be good
Honestly surprised that there was no audio option to disable the commentators.
With the Netflix infrastructure, I'm surprised they broadcast it so conventionally. Different channels running at the same time (with the crowd at the bottom, with the crowds as he passed each floor, with his wife watching, with pro climbers talking technical climbing stuff with simultaneous 8K online illustrating graphics, etc.), different audio tracks (with commentators, with crowd at bottom only, etc.*). Alex Honnold was paid only $500K for the event, so maybe there simply wasn't a lot of money allocated to the project to get fancy with the live broadcast.
Stuff like this seems a bit... selfish? to me. Why risk falling, and people having to see that/having to clean that up? For a bit of adrenaline and publicity? Meh.
The Taipei tourism bureau disagrees. Many here as well. The more eyes on Taiwan, the better. I'm grateful Alex was willing to risk his life for this spectacle, now potentially millions will have at least some concept of Taipei and Taiwan in their minds.
Did he do this climb with no safety equipment for Taiwan or for Alex?
I'm with the OP - watching people so willfully put their lives in danger isn't my cup of tea. I'm just glad he didn't die.
He did it because he thought it would be cool to free solo a building. He grew up idolizing Alain Robert, a french soloist who made his bread and butter out of soloing buildings. The guy was free soloing for free on his own without telling anyone about it for years, living out of his mom's minivan and eating cheap food, the media attention just allows him to be more comfortable as he keeps climbing obsessively. Also running his foundation probably gives a lot of meaning to what he's doing, he'd just be your average dirtbag loser otherwise.
I'm going to add that his coolest achievements were done with ropes. The friendly race to climbing a route graded 5.15 with Sonnie Trotter and Tommy Caldwell is a lot more interesting to me.
You put your life in danger every time you get behind the wheel of a car. Statistically more danger than a free solo climber.
> Statistically more danger than a free solo climber.
While I don't have statistics on free solo death rate per climb compared to death per car trip, this is most likely very, very wrong. You should really stop throwing such strange wild claims..
Of all the thousands of times tens of thousands people climb, only 30 die per year. Of that 30, 30% are free solo deaths.
Free solo climbing is incredibly dangerous, but the people who do it (usually) prepare extensively and train their whole lives.
https://gitnux.org/rock-climbing-death-statistics/
This is in contradiction to the experience of driving, where any number of people on the road with you are untrained, undertrained, drunk, or suffering diseases that affect their ability to drive. Or just doing crimes like speeding or dangerous driving. So when climbing, your fate is entirely in your hands and that of nature's. When driving, it's in the hands of many strangers.
You did not adress the point though. This isn't about the tens of thousands of people climbing, it's about the ones climbing free-solo, which is a much, much smaller number.
>>> You put your life in danger every time you get behind the wheel of a car. Statistically more danger than a free solo climber.
>> While I don't have statistics on free solo death rate per climb compared to death per car trip, this is most likely very, very wrong. You should really stop throwing such strange wild claims..
> Of all the thousands of times tens of thousands people climb, only 30 die per year. Of that 30, 30% are free solo deaths.
So? I would think few people die from free soloing at height not because it’s relatively safe, but because very few people do it.
Driving is more dangerous than a lot of things, but free solo definitely isn't one of them.
False equivalence. It's by no means required to free climb a skyscraper. While you might say it's also not required to get behind the wheel of a car, the difficulty in getting places (like a job, for example) without doing so in many locations makes it more or less required.
Well then rather than criticize a guy for doing an extreme sport, perhaps we can direct our energy inwards towards why we allowed ourselves to design such a fatal society.
Except, using your malleable logic the response is easy, this is Honnold's job.
Some people drive to their jobs, some people climb shit as their jobs... where's the problem?
Per trip!?
Even the best drivers wear seatbelts.
That a government would be willing to risk this for publicity isn't really changing my mind.
"Come to Taiwan; you may or may not watch someone plummet to their death while here" doesn't appeal to me, personally anyway. Anyway that guy that did it with safety equipment a few years back made the rounds in the news too, so not sure this was necessary in that regard.
C'mon, didn't some guy do a skydive from nearly outer space? Do you criticize the country he landed in? Or red bull for sponsoring it or the many other extreme sports?
Injury and death happens in rock climbing even when tethered. Not often but it does happen, that's the nature of the sport and it's the same as BMX, skateboarding, motocross, any kind of racing.
It's also the same as just living - go look up Taiwan traffic deaths. There's so much more dangerous things happening here and wherever you live, it just seems silly to criticize someone for doing an extreme sport publicly.
There's like one injury per NFL game ffs...
If Baumgartner - or any athlete/governing body for a sport - forewent safety measures to make it a better spectacle, then yes, I would be criticizing them!
They all forgo the safety measures of "don't smash into each other's heads" despite repeated studies showing NFL players frequently have long term brain damage from the sport.
It's an extreme sport and a thrilling thing to watch. The danger is exciting and makes his accomplishment all the more stunning. I think it's really cool that there are humans willing to push the limits of the human experience like this.
Don't watch then. Clearly enough people around the world found some kind of value in it. If you didn't, just jog on.
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People often confuse severe consequences (a fall = death) with high probability. Alex, like most climbers, reduce that probability to near zero through obsessive prep.
The travel to/from Taiwan was statistically riskier than the climb.
Selfish? Not even close.
It's not 25% per climb, but it's not near zero either, especially in aggregate. It only takes one mistake. A fairly high percentage of famous free soloists (I'd say over 25%) have died prematurely, either while free soloing, or during other extreme sports.
>A fairly high percentage of famous free soloists (I'd say over 25%) have died prematurely
Yes but I'd also say Alex is a bit of a different beast. He's clearly not a thrill seeker who attempts climbs he isn't sure about. And as he has once said, there's a very real risk of dying when you get in your car, play football, are a boxer, and so on.
People have a stark reaction to the visual of a guy being 200 meters above the ground but the reality is if you're a circus acrobat and you're 10 meters up the air you're also likely dead or maimed if something goes wrong. It doesn't get more dead than dead and in many ways he's probably more calculated and less reckless than people in other sports or performances.
He is a thrill seeker. He does it for the thrill which he feels but in a muted way compared to us.
> People have a stark reaction to the visual of a guy being 200 meters above the ground but the reality is if you're a circus acrobat and you're 10 meters up the air you're also likely dead or maimed if something goes wrong.
No, it's the large number of free soloists that have died. And the small number of circus performers who have died. People's intuitions about the relative risks are actually very accurate here.
> The travel to/from Taiwan was statistically riskier than the climb.
That doesn't seem plausible. What's the number of free soloists who have died in climbing accidents vs in commercial aviation accidents?
> The travel to/from Taiwan was statistically riskier than the climb
That is not even close to being true, haha. Probably not as risky as it looks but come on.
Near zero is a bs number you pulled out of thin air.
Selfish is too harsh, but don’t go making up stats for this.
> The travel to/from Taiwan was statistically riskier than the climb.
You just made this up.