Can you imagine being thousands of feet above ground, hanging by your fingertips, with nothing more than the grips of your shoes preventing you from falling from your death?
To me, this is the making of my absolute worst nightmare, but there are some adventurers that live for this kind of rush…and 29-year-old professional rock climber Alex Honnold is king of the solo climb.
While you won't find me dangling my life on the side of a mountain like Honnold does for a living, or like this insane daredevil recently did on a mountain bike, I'd like to think I lie somewhere in the middle of the adrenaline-junkie spectrum.
I figure, if people like this 100-year-old great-grandmother can survive skydiving, I should probably try it at some point in my life. However, what Honnold does in the following video is just completely and utterly insane to me.
Here's why: Solo climbing means you scale the side of a mountain without being attached to any ropes — it's literally just you and the mountain. If your fingers or feet slip, a bird spooks you, or you get lightheaded and fall, you're dead… There's really no way around it.
This absolutely terrifying threat didn't stop Honnold from trying to be the first person to ever solo climb El Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path), a 2,500 foot tall flat surface of the El Potrero Chico rock climb in Nuevo León, Mexico. What Honnold accomplishes in the following video shouldn't be possible, and yet this rock master did it in under three hours. No helmet required.
Even if this makes you squeamish, I guarantee it'll make you want to tackle something scary in your own life.
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