Why a pair of adventurers decided to make their treacherous climb much, much harder
Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell are two of the world’s best climbers. Why did they add a 2,600-mile odyssey of biking, boating, rafting, and rowing just to reach one of America’s most formidable mountains?
Not that long ago, the world’s great rock climbers clawed their way up spectacular cliffs in relative obscurity. But two of the sport’s best have changed all that. Over the past decade, Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold have pulled off a string of pioneering feats, starred in highly successful documentaries, and pushed climbing into the mainstream, all of which has transformed both men into global celebrities. Caldwell’s breakout came in 2015, when he and a partner completed what was then considered the world’s most difficult climb, a 19-day ascent of Yosemite’s Dawn Wall. Two years later, Honnold put the term “free solo” into general usage when he summited the park’s iconic El Capitan monolith without a rope, which was captured in an Academy Award–winning film.
Though they remain passionately committed to climbing, each has become increasingly vocal about environmental issues. So last summer, they teamed up to try something new. Caldwell had become interested in “ecopointing,” a term popularized by some European climbers to describe a human-powered adventure that produces zero fossil fuel emissions. What, he wondered, would be the ultimate green expedition?
The pair targeted the Devils Thumb—an isolated 9,000-foot Alaska mountain that many consider to be unclimbable. To make things even more epic, the friends set off on bicycles from Caldwell’s Colorado home, plotting a 2,600-mile course through some of North America’s most scenic landscapes. The odyssey that followed involved a sailboat, sea kayaks, pack rafts, and a bushwhacking trek through virgin rainforest, not to mention world-class rock climbing.
The Devil’s Climb, a new National Geographic documentary streaming on Disney+, chronicles their journey. Writer Mark Synnott, a professional mountain guide, spoke with Caldwell, 46, and Honnold, 39, about what they encountered along their route; the hidden challenges of ecopointing; how they balance risk and responsibility as fathers of young children; and the perilous etiquette of picture taking when perched on a summit the size of a pizza box. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Mark Synnott: Where did the idea for this trip come from?
Tommy Caldwell: I’ve always wanted to do a long bike ride, and I was overdue for a huge adventure because I didn’t do any during COVID. But most importantly, I saw this as an opportunity to raise awareness about the Tongass National Forest. The Tongass, which covers almost the entire panhandle of Alaska, is the biggest temperate rainforest in the world, and I’d been trying to conceive of ways to make its protection a higher-profile issue. I knew about the Devils Thumb from reading [Jon] Krakauer’s account of trying to climb it, and I was also inspired by the road trip to Patagonia that Doug Tompkins and Yvon Chouinard did back in the day. Originally, I wanted to ride my bike to Alaska solo, but then I realized that it would be way more fun to do it with a friend, so I called Alex. At first, he said no.
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Alex Honnold: To be clear, I said no because Tommy’s original idea included sea kayaking the entire coast of Alaska. It was a two-and-a-half-month trip, which was too long to be away from my family. At first, I was considering joining for some of the rock climbing along the way, but it seemed silly to miss the main thrust of the expedition. I’ve done a couple of cool biking adventures, and I’ve always felt that it’s a great way to immerse yourself in the landscape. So I was kind of hopeful that this adventure would be sort of like a personal transformation or something.
Synnott: Did that pan out?
Honnold: Not really. It was an incredible adventure, and we did a lot of cool climbs. But honestly, the biking across the West felt like a grind, and what I saw kind of made me sad. We got to see the human impact on nature in a way that I just haven’t been exposed to before. We biked 2,400 miles, and basically the only places that felt untrammeled were the national parks. Everything else felt like it had been logged or mined or somehow extracted. And a lot of the communities we biked through just didn’t seem like they were thriving. The town gets big when they’re cutting down all the trees, and then the trees are all cut down, and the place collapses.
Caldwell: Witnessing all this human impact, which is kind of why we were doing the trip in the first place, only reinforced how much [of the world] we’ve already destroyed. And it really showed how important our national parks are because they were the only places that were super pristine.
Honnold: I went into the trip with no real knowledge of interior British Columbia, and I just kind of assumed that as we got farther north, there would be more and more wild and virgin forest. It turns out that it’s all been clear-cut over the last hundred years. Sure, there’s a little screen of trees along the road, and when you’re whizzing by at 75 miles an hour in a car, that’s all you see. But when you’re biking, you have time to see past the screen, and it’s like, “Oh, wow, there’s no trees out there.” As rock climbers, we spend so much time in wild nature, on mountaintops, and in the most remote, obscure places, so I think I had this false perception that there was still a lot of untouched nature out there. And so I guess the takeaway is that the only places on Earth that have not had massive human impact are the places that are just too difficult to get to or have nothing of economic value.
Caldwell: Totally. The extraction companies always justify it by saying that it’s going to bring economic prosperity, but it never lasts. And the communities suffer. In interior B.C. we witnessed people smoking crack, crazy domestic abuse, and an active shooter situation. We rode along a road they call the Highway of Tears, where a lot of Indigenous people have been abducted. I think it all comes down to the fact that we’ve raped the landscape, and the communities are just following suit. It was a good reminder that we have to figure out how to rein things in, because if we keep going the way we are, eventually even the most remote places are going to be extracted too.
Synnott: Please tell me you also had some positive experiences.
Honnold: Of course. One day I was biking along, and I looked up and saw an eagle flying over me carrying a prairie dog, and I was like, “Welcome to Wyoming.” There were so many sunrises and sunsets, and I remember biking over the Icefields Parkway in Alberta in a storm and having it hit me that we were truly living outdoors in nature. And isn’t that kind of the point of adventure?
Caldwell: In southern Wyoming the landscape just came to life for me. There were rainbows and rain squalls sweeping across the landscape and wild horses that would run up to meet us. When the road ran out, we sailed the final leg to the Devils Thumb up the Inside Passage. On stormy days, we’d park the boat in little coves and go sea kayaking. There’d be otters cracking shells open with little rocks. One day I paddled up on an island with like 50 seals on it that all slipped into the ocean when I approached. And we came across this phenomenon called bubble-net feeding, where humpback whales, hunting in a pack, swim around in a circle and put up a net of bubbles that corral the fish, and then the whales all breach at once and you see like 10 open mouths. On the hike into the mountain, there was a salmon run where it seemed like the river had more fish than water. There were thousands of carcasses all over the place, and the bears were going to town.
Synnott: You guys climbed the Devils Thumb, a notoriously hard-core mountain. Now that you’re both parents, does having children change your risk calculus at all?
Honnold: Ha! I know you would probably bet against me making it to 40, but as Tommy often says, I didn’t want to die before I had kids, and I still don’t want to die now that I do. The bigger change has been with the way I spend my time. My kids are getting to the age where they’re fun, and I want to hang out with my daughters and do cool things. And so I suspect that as I spend more time at home, I’ll probably take less risk. But I could also just as easily see it going the other way, where every once in a while I go extra hard because, man, I just love soloing walls. And, you know, road biking 2,400 miles on the side of a highway is probably more dangerous than a lot of the climbing I do.
Synnott: More dangerous than free soloing El Capitan?
Honnold: (chuckling) Well, maybe not that.
Caldwell: When I was a young climber, my dad always told me that I should stay away from ice climbing and free soloing … I don’t want to go die in the Himalayas. I’ve been around so many people that have gone to climb the biggest mountains in the world and gotten themselves divorced or killed. Still, I suppose I have a relatively high risk tolerance, but I don’t crave risk the way Alex does. I’m willing to put up with it at times, but I try to make sure that I stay below the line that is acceptable for me. If anything, though, I’ve probably loosened it slightly over the years as I’ve become more confident in my abilities.
Synnott: What is it about climbing that you find so compelling?
Caldwell: It’s the relationships you form, the community, the immersion in nature, the need for adventure. It’s so many things that it’s hard to pin it on just one.
Honnold: I just freaking love the movement of climbing and how it offers so many op-portunities to try to improve and to take on new challenges.
Synnott: What stands out about this particular climb?
Honnold: We did the Diablo Traverse, which is the five summits of the Devils Thumb massif. We did it free, in a day—by no means cutting-edge, but it was cool.
Caldwell: The Cats Ears Spire might have been the most insane summit I’ve ever been on. The landscape is so menacing. The mountains are really pointy. There are big icefalls and avalanches coming down the northwest face all the time, so you hear this rumbling.
Honnold: One summit was like the size of a pizza box—the kind of summit where it’s hard to take pictures of each other because you’re just like standing on this tiny thing, and you’re like, “Back up; I can’t get you in the frame,” and then you both fall to your death. (Laughs)
Synnott: Why did you want to try to make the trip using only human power?
Caldwell: European climbers are into this idea of ecopointing, which is basically getting to the crags without cars. Then this Belgian friend, Sébastien Berthe, wanted to repeat the Dawn Wall, but he doesn’t fly on airplanes. So he decided to sail across the Atlantic. What would’ve been a month-long trip became an epic six-month journey. I met him and his crew in Yosemite, and I could tell the experience really bonded them. When you put up these guardrails around your adventure for an environmental reason, it just makes the trip way bigger and cooler.
Synnott: Your production team’s trip wasn’t as green. How did you square that?
Caldwell: I thought about it a lot. It’s one of those things where you have to decide between doing something that’s totally green or you can tell a compelling story. I felt that spreading the word [about what’s happening in the Tongass National Forest] was worth compromising on the greenness of the trip.
Honnold: It’s tough to do a green expedition in a fossil fuel–soaked world. We tried to sail part of it, but the wind and the tides weren’t right, so we were just moving under diesel the whole time. If we’d flown in a small plane, it almost certainly would’ve used less fuel. A lot of the expedition felt that way, like, This is an amazing adventure, but is this really the way?
Caldwell: I see what Alex is saying. Ecopointing is not the environmental solution to the world, but thinking about environmental solutions turned this into an immersive two-month-long expedition that was honestly one of the best experiences of my life.
This story appears in the November 2024 issue of National Geographic magazine.
Before becoming an Explorer in 1999, Mark Synott spent years honing his climbing skills on Yosemite’s towering cliffs. Since then, he’s embarked on and written about expeditions such as scaling Mount Everest and sailing the Northwest Passage.
