Alex Honnold Solos The Phoenix

Raw and close, and indispensable as a record of the era when Honnold was redefining what soloing meant. On June 11, 2011, at 25, Alex Honnold free soloed The Phoenix, a dead-vertical, relentlessly pumpy 5.13a finger crack above Cascade Falls in Yosemite that Ray Jardine first climbed in 1977 using the Friends he had just invented. It took about eight minutes and was, at the time, among the hardest free solos done in the Valley. Reel Rock's cameras were there, with Peter Mortimer filming.

This is for climbers who want to see a hard solo without the polished arc of the later Honnold films: chalk, jams, wet rock at the lip of a waterfall, and a crew trying to stay out of the way. Skip it if you want the story around it. Nine minutes is the ascent and the strange logistics of filming someone who cannot fall, and nothing more.

What works is the wetness. A finger crack above a waterfall, with spray on the rock, soloed at 5.13a, is a specific kind of horror and the film shows it plainly. The Jardine history, hangdogging and all, is not in the film, and it should be, because the route was controversial for a different reason thirty-four years earlier.

Alex Honnold Solos The Phoenix (5.13) - Behind The Scenes is Mortimer's 2022 commentary on the same day. It is a footnote. This is the document, and the one to watch first. El Sendero Luminoso is the bigger solo. This is the harder pitch.