r2908 said..
http://www.wimp.com/withoutrope/
this kid takes the cake . ..
The article in Outside mag on Honold is great
www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/rock-climbing/No-Strings-Attached.html?page=1Honnold shrugged. "Hey, we've all gotta die sometime. You might as well go big."
The blas? attitude concerns his close friends. "I'm worried that he's going to kill himself," says Chris Weidner, 36, one of Honnold's longtime climbing partners. "I think free soloing is a numbers game. The more you solo, the greater the chance of making a mistake. Alex disagrees. He says, 'Even though I solo a hundred pitches in a month, on each one the chances of falling are almost zero.'"
Caldwell expresses his concern more succinctly. "I really like Alex," he says. "I don't want him to die."
LAST OCTOBER, I spent a week with Honnold at Smith Rock, a massif of volcanic stone rising out of central Oregon farmland. Honnold wanted to visit Smith, the site of the first 5.14 ever climbed in the United States, before leaving on a four-month tour of Chad, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, and Greece.
We met in Portland and drove southeast, me in a rental, Honnold in the Econoline, which is clean and well organized. When we stopped at a motel, I asked if I could pose a few questions. "Sure," he said. "Might as well get the media B.S. out of the way."
I did a double take. "Don't take it personally," he continued. "Going to Virginia next week for The North Face to do a dog-and-pony show. Banff"?the annual adventure-film festival where Honnold was scheduled to speak?"will be full-on B.S. It's fun sometimes, but it's annoying. It takes away from actual climbing."
Honnold seems to have no self-censoring mechanism. He often speaks in short, pat locutions, and some of his one-liners can be abrasive. "There's only a handful of chicks in the world who can climb big walls on my level," he told me. And: "I took a test once; they said I was a genius." He recently erased himself from Facebook. "It was too crazy," he says. "I was getting 20 friend requests a day. Some kid would ask, 'Hey, what kind of chalk bag should I buy?' You hate to blow him off, but, like, you don't give a ****."
Some friends think fame has taken a toll on Honnold. Weidner, his climbing partner, says, "When we started climbing together, Alex was very polite, very safety conscious. Now he's more likely to badmouth you. About a year ago, I was trying to lead this pitch, and I kept falling off. Alex said, 'Dude, what's your ****ing problem? It's only 5.13.' He may have been joshing, but it hurt my feelings. He's got a certain attitude now, like unless you're a world-class climber, you suck."
