Alex Honnald, 37, is a master of cool, calm, and collected.
Despite having many brag-worthy outings under his belt, he speaks about his rock climbing accomplishments without the slightest whiff of braggadocio.
“It’s basically a traverse of the entire mountain range in Red Rock,” says Honnald about one of his latest adventures, dubbed The HURT, from his home in Las Vegas. Next week, he’s headed to South America to go mountain climbing for a month in higher altitudes.
The HURT is an endurance slog up 23 mountain summits in 32 hours, across 35 miles. During the climbing marathon, Honnald managed to climb 14 classic rock routes, accumulating 24,000 total feet of vertical gain.
All in his own backyard.
Completely by himself – which tracks for the subject of Free Solo, the dizzying National Geographic documentary about Honnald’s 2017 solo ascent up Yosmite’s 3000-ft El Capitan rock face.
Alex Honnald explains THE HURT
“It makes more sense if you’re already a climber,” Honnald tells me. “Red Rock is a world famous climbing area. It’s renowned and popular. There are classic routes in all these different canyons. There are eight or 10 different canyons between all these different mountains. And each mountain has routes all over it, with walls all over it. There’s climbing everywhere.”
“It’s this international destination,” he continues. “People climb the routes all the time. I live right near here. This is kind of my home. I look at Red Rock all the time and I think about it all the time. So it made sense to try to traverse the whole range.”
“It’s just fun to learn your own backyard that well.”
I ask Honnald if it feels like a new way of challenging himself. He’s quick to downplay it.
“I’ve actually done a lot of mountain traverses over the years,” he explains. “Part of the reason I wanted to do the HURT was because maybe two years ago, three years ago, my friend Tommy Caldwell and I did a similar traverse along the Continental Divide in Rocky Mountain National Park, which is sort of Tommy’s backyard. He grew up in Estes Park. So we did this sort of 35 mile traverse where we did all these classic routes. It was like a huge adventure. So I wanted to apply that same idea to the mountain range near my home.”
“Though in this case, it made more sense to do the traverse by myself,” Honnald continues. “Because of the style of climbing and the speed in which you can move through the mountains.”
“On the other hand, I’d never done anything quite this long or this big. And it was fun for me because I had to learn a lot about the mountain range to do it. So I spent a lot of days practicing different segments and finding routes, finding paths between the different climbing routes and finding ways up and over the peaks. There was a lot of exploration involved, which is always fun.”
“You get to explore somewhere, but it seems close to home. You feel like you should know it well, but then as it turns out, it’s actually hard to know that well,” says Honnald.
“Because the traverse took me 32 hours, I had to go through the night. So then learning it well enough that you can navigate the mountains in the dark is pretty complicated. It’s just fun. I timed it with the full moon. So I was looking at the lunar cycle, trying to plan my fitness with the moon… It’s so cool.”
“Normally you do a climb and then you’ve done that climb. This is like 32 hours of experiencing an entire mountain range,” he emphasizes.
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An adventure life with creature comforts upgrades
The conversation steers towards the thing that brings us together.
“My van now has a shower, actually,” says Honnold.
“That’s how I should explain the Dr. Squash sponsorship,” the legendary rock climber continues. “Now that my van has a shower, I obviously needed something to bathe with.”
Harnold recently announced a partnership with Dr. Squatch, purveyors of organic and natural handmade soap in scents like men, including Pine Tar, Bay Rum, Grapefruit IPA, and Alpine Sage. In a video announcing the partnership, he says “I’ve used soap, but I’ve never really cared what I’m using. I’ve always used whatever’s the cheapest or stolen hotel soap. I honestly haven’t showered that much in the past. But now that I have a home and a wife, I care a little bit more about hygiene.”
Back to our conversation.
“I have bathed my whole life, though sometimes infrequently,” he tells me. “If it’s something that you use all the time, you may as well use the thing that you care most about,” he tells me. “Or at least the thing that reflects your values better. I think Dr. Squatch is just that. It’s nice in the right way. Classy, but not too classy. It’s not like weird, douchey, luxury stuff. But it’s nice.”
I asked him what soaps he liked the most.
“Right now we have Summer Citrus in the shower. I mean, honestly, I don’t care about the scent nearly as much as my wife. And so whatever she’s into, I’m into. Honestly, they all smell really good,” says Harnold.
“They all smell way better than me sweaty,” he adds. “So no matter what, that’s a big step up.”
Then he launches into a story:
“This summer I was on an expedition in Greenland for six weeks that was being filmed. It’s a whole big adventure that will be a National Geographic TV show next year,” he adds. “So for that trip, I just took one bar of soap – I forgot which flavor, but it smelled nice. It was just one big robust bar.”
“I used it every few days – realistically, maybe once a week,” he continues. “It was so cold and I wasn’t really getting that dirty per se, but basically every once in a while, I’d just warm up a little dish of water and wash my face, I’d shave, I’d basically try to do a little bit of grooming, then just call it good. I mean, some other people on the expedition were just jumping into the ocean in the morning, but it was so cold. I was like, ‘Ehhh… Just not into it.” So I would just do the little pot of warm water, rinse and call it good.
“No polar bear plunge for you,” I add as we begin to wrap up.
“I mean, you’re sleeping by yourself in a tent. It doesn’t matter if you’re a little dirty.”
