The triple is perhaps Yosemite’s most spectacular enchainment, or “link-up” in climber lingo, and only a handful of people in the world — if that many — are capable of doing it in a day. Depending on the routes taken, a climber faces at least 70 pitches (rope-lengths) with some holds so small that human fingers are physically incapable of grasping them. In those cases a climber must place gear onto the rock and then pull on that gear to aid in upward movement — a technique known as aid climbing. Using only your hands and feet to go up (with a rope to guard against a fatal fall) is called free climbing. When the triple was first completed in 2001 by Timmy O’Neill and Dean Potter, the two used a mix of aid- and free-climbing techniques to link the three faces in 23 hours 45 minutes, O’Neill said.

Honnold wanted to improve upon that style by going alone and using no gear or rope for most of it, a dangerous technique known as free-soloing.

To prepare himself, Honnold arrived in Yosemite in May and embarked on a climbing frenzy. He became the first to free solo the west face of El Capitan and the first, along with fellow professional climber Tommy Caldwell, to free climb the triple. They did it in about 21 hours.

“That alone is a huge step up because they are not pulling on any gear at all,” said Peter Croft, who with John Bachar in 1986 was the first to link two Yosemite big walls — Half Dome and El Capitan — in a day.

Honnold kept the blogosphere humming with more accomplishments. On June 1, he climbed the iconic 2,000-foot-high northwest face of Half Dome, alone, with a mix of aid- and free-soloing techniques in a staggering 1:21 — 48 minutes faster than his previous record. On Sunday, Honnold and Hans Florine, a Yosemite speed climber, hope to break another speed record climbing The Nose route up El Capitan. Potter and Sean Leary currently hold that record at 2:35:45.

But the solo triple, if successful, was most likely to go down as one of Honnold’s greatest achievements. After he summited Mount Watkins and the silverfish were gone, he hiked through the highlands to the white Ford van he calls home for much of the year. He whipped it around the curves driving back down into the valley while his girlfriend, Stacey Pearson, a 26-year-old nurse, cooked him dinner on a camping stove in the back. By 9:30 p.m., Pearson, Peter Mortimer of Sender Films, and I stood at the base of El Capitan while Honnold prepared to climb the 2,900-foot-high Nose route through the night. There were dozens of people already on the wall preparing for bed in hanging platforms they had hauled up.