Alex Honnold on Free Climbing in Guyana and Studying Frogs

The Jurogan Experience

How often are you uh doing these free solo climbs?

Uh, you know, I'm working on things. Yeah, like fairly frequently. I don't know, I was just on this expedition in the jungle in Guyana. It was like a National Geographic TV show thing, and I free soloed the wall we put up just because the type of rock we're on, no one's ever soloed a wall like that before. So I felt like since we were there, it felt almost an obligation to do it just for like this climbing history. You know, you're like, oh, if you're there and you have the opportunity, you kind of have to.

Now, when you see something like that, do you make a route first with ropes?

Always, yeah. Yeah, so our, I mean, because we were there, I mean, it's a whole complicated National Geographic TV thing. So we were there with— we're like studying these endemic species of the Tepuis. There's like this whole interesting natural history component to it or sort of biology component. But we were just trying to climb this mountain that had never been climbed before. So the priority is obviously just to get up it to like find these species of frogs, to like do all the things that are important for the TV show. But then, but then because I was there, I was like, oh, you know, on the side I can at least do something that I'm proud of, and climbing that's also pretty cool.

Oh, wow! That's pretty cool.

Yeah, so it's like this like, pretty— and it wound up being totally insane climbing, like really cool, like this overhanging wall of 6,700 feet high. You know, like dangling. It's, it was kind of the best style of climbing to solo because it felt secure. Like, it's the type of climbing where you feel safe. Like, it's very, very good rock. So anything you hold on to, you know, is solid and it's not going to break. And it also lends itself to these sort of striations in the rock where you can like wedge your hand in and like feel really secure. But also, it's incredible exposure because it's really steep. Like, because you're in the jungle, you can only climb stuff that's overhanging because anything that's like less— anything else accumulates like water and dirt and winds with plants all over it. So like the only stuff that's really climbable is the stuff that is sheltered from the rain so it doesn't have plants on it. So it's difficult just by nature.

Yeah, so it's difficult because you're hanging, and so you're like in these crazy positions where you're dangling from your arms. But you feel safe doing it because the rock's so good and the holes are so good and you're just like, what a crazy place! It's really cool. But then when you get to the very edge, you have to somehow make it away, and that's a bummer.

Yeah, that seems like the most gnarly part of it is actually probably, in terms of risk, it probably was the final 20 or 30 feet of like getting onto the top. It's all like rotten soil and those rocks and like, you know, yeah, it wasn't ideal.

But how do you decide which way to go when you get to something like that?

Just what's the most likely path to success?

Yeah, well, so in that particular case, we had already established the route. You know, like because it was this TV thing, we'd already climbed it, we'd put ropes up, but we'd like worked on the camera guys had gone up and down. We'd like camped up on this ledge to look for these frogs. We'd like done this whole experience. So for the free solo, I already had a pretty good sense of like how I should tackle that part because, you know, we'd already been sort of living up there a bit.

But wow! Yeah, but I'm like, what'd you do in February? You know, like that was my February. So these frogs— like the idea is to, is it really an excuse to climb or is it like do you really, are you really there for the frogs to check out these weird species?

It's a little bit of both.

Yeah, well, I'm like, I know this is a long-form show. Do you want to like go deep into it because it's actually really interesting? So, um, all right, long form.

So, okay, the trip was, the trip is crazy. I mean, we just talked about the whole time. I’ve read freaking eight books while we were there because it's the jungle and, you know, it's the tropics, so it's dark from six to six every day. It's like 12 hours of dark, and we're in our own little hammocks. So I was just in my cocoon like reading books every day.

And so, like a headlamp?

Yeah, yeah, but headlamp. Because you have nothing else to do, it's like raining and you're just in your own little like personal cocoon just like reading.

But um, so I read like Natural History of Guyana, Natural History, like, you know, sort of the geology.

So, um, like have you seen the movie Up? Like the Pixar Disney movie, the cute thing with the flying house and the balloons?

Yeah, yeah.

So you know that's all modeled on like where they fly to the big rock things with the waterfalls. Those are Tepuis, which are like real things in South America. That's in Venezuela, Guyana, in the northern part of Brazil. Or if you've seen the new Point Break, they film down there on the same rock features.

I didn't see that.

But so you're not missing anything?

No, it's really bad.

But a lot of my friends worked on it, so it's like it's cool and it is like an incredible climbing place.

I had a responsibility for Patrick Swayze.

I just said—

Yeah, exactly! You didn't miss anything. I actually fell asleep watching it on a plane. When you fall asleep during an action movie, you're kind of like, come on, you know?

But um, but the climbing edge is cool and anyway, so it's on these things called the Tepuis, which are like these big quartzitic sandstone walls that stick out of the jungle. And so if you imagine a huge raised area of land that, because it's in the jungle, has been massively eroded by the constant rain over the last 40 million years. So now you wind up with all these like slender sort of towers and mesas, you know, so like do you know Angel Falls?

Like, no, it's one of the biggest waterfalls in the world.

Here, like pull up a picture of Angel Falls.

It's like—

Oh! Yeah!

Yeah, there we go! That's a—that's a rhyme!

That's, you know what we're doing?

Yeah, that's so beautiful!

So, if it looks fake—

Yeah, it does look fake. Isn't that crazy? I'm pretty sure that one is a rhyme. And if you look to the left of the one you were just on that we climbed, this little wall to the left of it— can you go back to that one, Jamie? Because, like, if I was a dumb—

Yeah, so that would think someone built that totally!

So, if you could pan that photo to the left, though, obviously you can't because not in the frame, we climb this little mountain to the left. And so this is a really famous peak because the summit of it marks the boundary between Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana. It's used as like the marker to separate those three countries. And so we were climbing this sort of little bastard stepbrother next to it. But with, you know, that peak, though, had never been climbed and was like new to science for the different species of frogs and all that kind of stuff.

If you're an explorer and you've stumbled upon that, you would think that that was like a structure.

Yeah! Like it's so square and flawed, and some of them did! Like European explorers that first came into the region had all kinds of names like the White Cathedral and things like that, like that tower.

Um, they're just a bunch of—

Wow! Look at that one! Click on the one your cursor is on, Jamie! That's so—

Oh, actually, so again, so actually you see on the left side of that, there's like the hint of a little thing in the distance that I'm pretty sure that's the thing we were climbing. The thing to the left that's like just starting to appear out of the clouds?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the peak that we found.

God, it's so beautiful!

Yeah! Yeah, it's crazy! Except, to be fair, the sun only comes out— like so we were there in the dry season and it rained like eight hours a day and we were in the clouds non-stop. It was totally grim!

And that's the dry season?

Yeah, and so you see these pictures where you're like, it's so beautiful, and you're like, yeah, for 30 minutes a day, you know? And the rest of the time, you're just in the water.

Yeah, getting worse.

That's so wild, man! Like really, if I stumbled upon that, I would think someone built that!

Yeah, no, it's totally incredible!

What is the ge— so I didn’t—I didn’t even get to the cool part of this!

Oh, it was so—

Yeah, asking about the geology.

Yeah, like how does something like that form? It's so strange!

Yeah, so, that's the stuff I was reading while we were there. So it's like this huge bed of sandstone, which then gets metamorphosed— like compressed into quartzite. So like really, really hard sandstone. And then, you know, the Andes! So you have Gondwana, like one of the mega continents that predates Pangaea, I think like—

Yeah!

So like, you know, if you imagine all the continents on Earth were once sort of combined. So South America and Africa, you know, fit together at the horn. And so this rock is most similar to rock in parts of Africa actually. And so part of what makes the biology that are so interesting is that the creatures on the summit of some of the Tepuis are more closely related to creatures in Africa than they are to the ones in the jungle below them.

Because the summits have been separated for so long, you see what I'm saying? Like, because the top of those islands basically— they've been separated from the jungle below for so long that they more closely resemble where they came from in Africa than the creatures that live in the rainforest below. It's like this totally incredible, you know, I mean, it's just—it's just an interesting part of Earth.

Are you aware of the Olmecs? Do you know what the Olmec civilization was?

No, the Olmecs? It's really—it's quite a mystery. They don't exactly know what they did or, you know, what their culture was all about. But they had these heads that they left behind, these sculpted gigantic stone heads that resemble African people.

That's not the Easter Island stuff?

No, no! That's different! It's different! This is the Olmecs!

Oh wow! Where— and where were the Olmecs?

In South America!

Oh yeah, it says Olmec!

Yes, South America, Mexico, Central America. And there's a lot of them, and these images are very, um, African-looking faces and they don't really know what the history of them were. And they know—they think some of them existed in the neighborhood of 6,000 years ago. But, you know, when you're looking at stone, it's hard because they carbon date the stuff that's around the stone as they unearth it. But that doesn't really necessarily give them an accurate sense of when it was constructed. It just gives an accurate sense of how the sediment, yeah, of where it's around.

So the stuff in Guyana though is on a totally different scale. Like the stuff that I'm talking about— I think the Tepuis have been eroded away, like isolated for 40 million years or something, which, you know, far predates humans. And then I think the rock itself is like 1.5 billion years old! It's like ancient, ancient! It's incredible rock! It's really cool!

It's just so wild the way it formed, the look.

Yeah, it's funny because, I mean, you saw the posters. It looks like islands and, you know, early explorers thought that they must be islands or something. But it's actually just the eroded remnants of what was once like a giant, you know, elevated plateau.

Oh yeah, totally!

So this is what the summits look like. I have a bunch of photos like that on my phone. It's just like scrappy little iPhone pics of like here we are on this crazy, you know, because you're like in the clouds, you're in the mist! It's like kind of grim and it's raining, but then the summit is like this totally wild! So like all those plants are incredibly well adapted to this harsh environment and they're really high rates of carnivory—like plants that eat things because they're basically no soil. One of the books I read said that described it as a rain desert.

Like, you think of a desert normally as having lots of soil but no water. And there you have infinite water but no soil because it's a stone surface that's getting rained on so much that it washes all the soil away.

Oh wow!

So for any of the vegetation that lives there, they basically all have different strategies where they're rooted straight to the stone, and then they eat, you know, they eat bugs and things that, you know, they eat insects or they eat other plants or they, you know, they—lots of plants that grow on plants. And it's just like a whole crazy web of life that's like really different than what you expect.

It's weird because it's so abundant!

Yeah! It's got—it's an unusual form of life, but it's everywhere!

Yeah, like that’s so rich and green!

Like you'd have—

Yeah, though actually, I bet if in that photo, if you'd pan the photo a bit to the side there'd be like big expanses of bare rock because the summit's like—

Yeah! They're little pastures and things. It's almost like alpine meadows! If you go into the mountains and in the northern hemisphere, there'll be like high tundras and things where it's like, yeah, it feels really lush but then there's also a lot of exposed rock because when the sun comes out, you know, you're at seven to nine thousand feet in the tropics. So it's really intense UV exposure and it dries things out instantly. So it's a really hard climatic condition for life.

Wow, that's wild!

Yeah, and so these organisms, these creatures that live up there, they're closely resembling creatures that live in Africa. And so that was part of what you're studying?

Yeah, so we were with this biologist who was trying to do an elevational transect of the river basin that we were in. So basically starting from the rainforest where the frogs are pretty well known and then going up through the cloud forest, which is kind of as you gain elevation to the actual wall and then the species all change as you gain elevation, which is kind of normal.

And then the things on the summit of the Tepuis, on the summit of the stone island, are completely different again. And so he was basically doing research on how the different species, you know, basically what the deal is.

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