Source: Wikipedia

The quest for the greatest athletic feat of 2017 — and possibly the last decade — is already over.

Climber Alex Honnold scaled the 3,000-foot granite rock formation El Capitan in Yosemite National Park solo and without ropes, becoming the first person to ever accomplish such a feat.

Climbing El Capitan without ropes shouldn’t be possible for a human. It’s a vertical wall, with only a few crevasses that allow climbers to grab on. This photo from National Geographic, which documented the climb, shows what Honnold was up against.

The climb took Honnold just under four hours, in which he climbed up a rock taller than the world’s tallest building. That’s like climbing straight up two of Chicago’s Willis Towers stacked on top of each other. It’s almost impossible to comprehend. Climbing El Capitan usually takes four to five days. Honnold did it in half a work day (he also holds the speed climbing record on the mountain, completing the feat in 2:23:46).

National Geographic followed Honnold’s year-long training for the climb, and the climb itself, and the pictures and graphics in it are must-sees.

But what’s even more telling is the quotes and anecdotes from fellow climbers on Honnold’s ascent. These are people who can climb things almost nobody else in the world can, and they’re even shocked by what Honnold did.

Among them:

“What Alex did on Moonlight Buttress defied everything that we are trained, and brought up and genetically engineered to think,” said Peter Mortimer, a climber who has made numerous films with Honnold. “It’s the most unnatural place for a human to be.”

“This is the ‘moon landing’ of free soloing,” said Tommy Caldwell, who made his own history in 2015 with his ascent of the Dawn Wall, El Capitan’s most difficult climb, on which he and his partner Kevin Jorgeson used ropes and other equipment only for safety, not to aid their progress.

Climbers have been speculating for years about a possible free solo of El Capitan, but there have only been two other people who have publicly said they seriously considered it. One was Michael Reardon, a free soloist who drowned in 2007 after being swept from a ledge below a sea cliff in Ireland. The other was Dean Potter, who died in a base jumping accident in Yosemite in 2015.

John Bachar, the greatest free soloist of the 1970s, who died while climbing un-roped in 2009 at age 52, never considered it. When Bachar was in his prime, El Capitan had still never been free climbed. Peter Croft, 58, who completed the landmark free solo of the 1980s—Yosemite’s 1,000-foot Astroman—never seriously contemplated El Capitan, but he knew somebody would eventually do it.

“It was always the obvious next step,” says Croft. “But after this, I really don’t see what’s next. This is the big classic jump.”

In America, we’re obsessed with team sports and individual feats within those sports, but the most astonishing athletic feats are those that fight against nature and go where human beings are absolutely not supposed to be. Honnold has now pushed biological boundaries further than anyone else in the world, and it might be quite some time until someone is able to push the boundary even further.

[National Geographic]

About Kevin Trahan

Kevin mostly covers college football and college basketball, with an emphasis on NCAA issues and other legal issues in sports. He is also an incoming law student. He's written for SB Nation, USA Today, VICE Sports, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal, among others. He is a graduate of Northwestern University.