Even Alex Honnold, the fearless rock climber who famously scaled Yosemite’s El Capitan without ropes, knows better than to battle Mother Nature.
The California native, who now lives in Las Vegas, delayed his attempt to tackle a 1,667-foot skyscraper in a spectacle that was set to air live on Netflix on Friday due to rainy weather.
Honnold now plans to “free solo” Taipei 101, the tallest building in Taiwan and among the tallest in the world, on Saturday.
“Skyscraper Live was originally scheduled to air on January 23,” Netflix said in a statement. “Due to weather conditions, the live event is postponed, and will now stream on Saturday, January 24 at 8 PM ET / 5 PM PT.”
Honnold hopes to summit the steel and glass tower in a single go, with no long breaks, he said on his podcast “Climbing Gold.” To prepare, he has climbed the building two or three times with ropes, taking notes and studying photos and videos of different sequences, he told the New York Times.
The training process has been different from the lead-up to El Capitan, when he reportedly spent hours every other day hanging by his fingertips. “With a building, you just don’t need that really,” he said on his podcast. “You just need to be fit.”
A Netflix representative told the Hollywood Reporter that the decision to delay the climb is up to Honnold, who is putting his life on the line for the first-of-its-kind spectacle. The streaming giant will implement a 10-second delay to ensure viewers do not witness a tragedy in a worst-case scenario, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The venture has drawn some backlash, including a “Saturday Night Live” skit that spoofed Honnold’s nonchalant attitude, which has earned him the nickname “No Big Deal” and prompted scientists to study his brain. A Telegraph headline reads: “A man might die live on TV tonight. Will you be watching?”
But Honnold, who is married with two young daughters, said he thinks about managing risk all the time. He’s known for meticulously preparing for his climbs, which he says helps him maintain the fearlessness that’s made him famous.
The challenge, he said, is the overall physical exertion — he expects the feat will test his endurance more than his climbing skills.
Honnold’s mother, Dierdre Wolownick — an author and speaker who made headlines of her own when she scaled the face of El Capitan on her 70th birthday, becoming the oldest woman to achieve the feat — said that her son has been longing to climb the building for about 15 years and had previously made arrangements to do so, but canceled when his insurer dropped out.
She said she’s not nervous, exactly — she’s learned to trust her son’s judgment when it comes to knowing his limits and how to prepare, and she’s made her peace with the risks that come with his career.
“I had years and years to get accustomed to the fact that this is what he does,” she said. “And for many years, every time he left the house, I knew that I may never see him again.”
“You can‘t really tell your kids what to love or what to feel passionate about, and doing this kind of stuff is the only thing that he feels really passionate about,” she added. “So it doesn’t matter how I feel about it, he’s going to do it.”
Ultimately, Honnold said he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to accomplish something that would have had his childhood self “so psyched,” he said on his podcast.
“I’ve always loved climbing anything that I’m allowed to climb on,” he said. “And I generally try to say yes to any kind of interesting life experience.”
Honnold has been climbing buildings since he was 6, long before he started rock climbing, he said. He scaled his childhood home, an auditorium at a nearby school and, later, a high-rise dorm at the University of Colorado, Boulder, he said.
He grew up in Sacramento, where both his parents were professors at a local community college, and started working at a climbing gym at 14, he wrote in a 2018 column in Wealthsimple Magazine. He later enrolled in — then dropped out of — an engineering program at UC Berkeley and moved into his mom’s old minivan, which he’d take to go climbing in Joshua Tree, he wrote.
Honnold climbed Moonlight Buttress in Zion National Park and the regular northwest face of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, both without ropes, in 2008. Each was considered a career milestone. He soon gained professional sponsorships that included the clothing brands North Face and La Sportiva.
In 2010, National Geographic named the then-25-year-old one of its adventurers of the year after he and partner Sean Leary climbed three different routes up El Capitan in 24 hours, breaking the speed record for consecutive ascents. Leary later died during a BASE jump in Zion.
After climbing expeditions to Chad and Borneo, Honnold was inspired to research environmental activism and in 2012 founded the Honnold Foundation to support solar energy projects, according to the organization’s website. The nonprofit gave out about $3 million in grants last year, he told the Associated Press.
Honnold has also, at times, been a somewhat polarizing figure in the climbing world, with some criticizing his decision to forgo ropes and other protective equipment. He and four other athletes were dropped in 2014 by a sponsor, Clif Bar, which said it was no longer comfortable supporting BASE jumping, free soloing or slacklining due to the risk involved.
Honnold responded with a New York Times op-ed, writing that the decision wouldn’t change his approach to climbing, which already involved carefully weighing the risks and benefits of any serious ascent.
“There are certainly better technical climbers than me,” he wrote. “But if I have a particular gift, it’s a mental one — the ability to keep it together where others might freak out.”
Honnold’s mother said it’s not that her son doesn’t feel fear — he gets scared like everyone else. The difference is “he knows how to control it because he’s had so many opportunities to learn that.”
Still, that preternatural calm may have a biological basis, at least in part. Scientists studied Honnold’s brain in 2016 and found that his amygdala — a set of neurons sometimes referred to as the “fear detector” — simply didn’t respond to images that would typically disturb or excite others, according to the Medical University of South Carolina.
“With free-soloing, obviously I know that I’m in danger, but feeling fearful while I’m up there is not helping me in any way,” he told National Geographic the following year, when he became the first person to “free solo” Yosemite’s 3,000-foot tall El Capitan. “It’s only hindering my performance, so I just set it aside and leave it be.”
The peak of Yosemite’s granite wall is higher than the tallest building in the world and requires climbers to navigate a maze of fissures, crevices and cracks. The climb became the subject of an Academy Award-winning documentary, “Free Solo.”
The film also chronicled the strain the endeavor put on Honnold’s then-nascent relationship with Sanni McCandless, who has since become his wife. The couple are raising their children in Las Vegas, which is conveniently located near both world-class climbing routes and creature comforts.
But Honnold isn’t big on slot machines or table games, he told The Times in 2024. “I like to joke that I only gamble with my life.”
Times deputy editor Joseph Serna and staff reporters Jack Dolan and Clara Harter contributed to this report.