Climber, without rope, conquers Yosemite’s El Capitan

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It took roughly four hours Saturday for rock climber Alex Honnold to make an ascent so dangerous no one has ever tried it before: scaling Yosemite’s El Capitan with no rope.

Some called it a suicide mission. El Capitan is 3,000 feet of vertical granite, jutting straight to the sky. Many of its cracks are so small, they fit only one finger.

“I mean, there are BASE-jumping stunts that require you to be ‘on’ for 20 seconds,” said Chris McNamara, a Lake Tahoe climber who spent many years diving and parachuting off giant rocks. “And then there’s tightrope-walking between the (World) Trade Centers, which is like a five-minute thing. But this — this is something where Alex had to be ‘on’ for four hours.”

And if he lost concentration for a moment, he’d die.

Honnold, who grew up in Sacramento, began climbing at age 11. At 31, he’s risen to become one of the world’s most high-profile risk-takers. In 2008, he scrambled up the Moonlight Buttress in Utah’s Zion National Park and the northwest face of Yosemite’s Half Dome, completing both climbs without a rope. In 2015, he helped his friends Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson in their historic free climb of El Capitan’s southeast face, which at that time was considered the hardest climb in history.

But there was a difference: Caldwell and Jorgeson had ropes anchored in the rock to catch them if they made a wrong move.

Honnold, who now lives in Las Vegas, said he’s been dreaming about conquering El Capitan with no safety equipment for at least eight years.

“And then each year I’d come (to Yosemite) and look up at the wall,” he said in a telephone interview. “And I’d think, ‘Oh my God, how can I do it?’”

He began the quest in earnest about a year and a half ago, after two filmmakers approached him to be the subject of a documentary. Months later, directors Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin got National Geographic to produce the film, which will be coming to theaters next year.

“I’d wanted to do El Cap for years, and it seemed like an objective worthy of a film,” Honnold said. He started rehearsing the route, climbing it with partners and a rope, and occasionally hiking up to the summit to rappel himself down.

On Saturday, he and the film crew drove to the rock at about 5:30 a.m. Honnold had a few canisters of water and some energy bars stashed on various parts of the cliff. He would be taking a route called “Free Rider” — one of the most popular ascents, known for its giant crags and stretches of smooth rock. He wore grippy climbing shoes, put chalk on his hands, and then took a deep breath.

“The hardest part was 2,300 feet off the ground,” he said, back in his van a few hours later. “That’s where you hit a part with a ‘boulder problem.’ There’s short sections where you’re moving from one crack to another, using very small holds. You have to get your body in tenuous positions. And one of the holds is a little thumb press that requires you to do this crazy maneuver — you have to switch from one thumb to the other.”

The last 700 feet “felt like exit-climbing,” he said. “As I got higher, I felt progressively better.”

And then, at 9:28 a.m., he hoisted himself up the last bit of rock.

“Well, eventually someone was going to do this,” said 57-year old Ken Yager, a former Yosemite climbing guide who estimates he’s done 60 routes up El Capitan over the years.

“And it might as well have been Alex,” Yager said. “I wrote him a text and said, ‘I don’t know whether to congratulate you or call you a knucklehead.’”

Honnold recounted those four hours in an even tone as calls from news outlets flooded in Saturday afternoon.

“So much of this was about a mental hurdle,” he said. “It was about wrapping my mind around doing something big.”

In reality, he said, “I’m pretty un-extreme.”

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan