Alex Honnold's epic escape: No food, nuclear winds | Trending Now

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0:47Graham Bensinger:Grab a cold, refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate now at Celsius.com. Hey, everybody. It's Graham and it's Friday, which means today we get to bring you another trending clip. What you're about to listen to is trending this week on our Facebook page. Hope you enjoy. This week, Alex Honnold.

1:14Graham Bensinger:You'll literally hike for 24 or climb for 24 hours straight? Yeah, I mean, I have, yeah. Without taking a, like, without sleeping?

1:23Alex Honnold:This last season in Patagonia, my partner and I did a 53-hour push. So it's like 53 hours of, like, continuous effort.

1:31Graham Bensinger:And how much do you sleep during this?

1:33Alex Honnold:No, like, that's, like, continuous 53 hours of, like, climbing, hiking, you know, fleeing for our lives. And how, like, how do you get to the point where you can do that? Oh, you just build up to it. I don't know. I mean, I remember the first time I climbed El Cap in a day, it took us 22 hours, and I was crushed. Like, so worked. You know, I was 21 or something, and, like, it was the biggest effort I'd ever done. and it was like I was useless as a climber for the next like five or six days. And now I'm like...

2:00Graham Bensinger:And El Capitan is like the Everest of rock climbing.

2:03Alex Honnold:Yeah, yeah, it's certainly like, that's a fair analogy, yeah. It's the most beautiful one in the world, I think. Oh, did you? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's good. I'm going to use that sometimes. But so 53 hours of climbing. So the thing with our 53-hour push is like we did a 24-hour push climbing and then we wound up, we were supposed to get to the summit of Ceretore, which is like a really big mountain, and then rappel back off the east side, which is where our camp was. But instead, this epic storm came. We sat for a few hours. We got worked. We wound up having to retreat down the west side, which is like the opposite side of the mountain range.

2:33Alex Honnold:So then when we got down, after like six hours of rappelling in a storm, we had to walk all the way around the mountain range to get back to town. And we were on like the southern ice cap, which is like one of the biggest glaciers in the world, basically. And so then we just, and we had no more food or like we had no supplies. We had no tent because we were just trying to do one continuous push climbing. So then we just had to walk back to town. It's like if you don't walk out, you'll just perish, you know? Right. Because, like, we didn't have food, so it's not as if you can just, like, sleep for a day and feel better.

3:03Alex Honnold:What do you mean you didn't have food? Well, we'd already eaten our food because we'd already done, like, 24 hours of climbing. Okay.

3:08Graham Bensinger:And you thought you would be done? Yeah.

3:11Alex Honnold:So had we finished the way we were supposed to and had we not gotten stuck in the storm, we would have been done in 24 hours. We would have been a little bit hungry, but we would have wound up right at our camp. We would have cooked dinner and we would have hiked out. It would have been great. Right. But instead, we sat for like four more hours, we repelled, like we got worked, and then we had to walk for 20 hours without food, which is pretty grim, like hiking on a glacier. And we were carrying backpacks full of climbing gear, like 20, 30 pounds worth, you know, crampons, boots, like ropes, all this stuff, and like nothing useful at all.

3:40Alex Honnold:You know, like no tent, no stove, no shelter, no food. You're just like, we're carrying all this stuff for 20 hours with like nothing. It was like very depressing. But my partner had this strategy where you just walk until you get warm, and then you just lay down on the trail and fall asleep until you get cold again, which is like 15 minutes, and then you wake up shaking. Because, I mean, we were just like laying down in the dirt in the rain, and you'd fall asleep for like 15 minutes, and then be like, oh my God, we're cold, and then start walking again until you got warm. It was really grim. Man.

4:07Alex Honnold:And what's the worst conditions you've ever been in when you've been high up? Soloing or with a rope? Either. Well, with a rope, like, I mean, horrible conditions. Like, I mean, this experience I'm just talking about in Patagonia, of like, you know, nuclear winds. And we were at the top of this like icy spire. So we were like connected to a sheet of ice, like literally hanging from ice screws, like sitting on ice waiting for like four hours, hoping that the sky would clear. Because the forecast that we'd seen a couple days before looked like it should get better. It turns out the forecast had changed and it never got better.

4:36Alex Honnold:But so, I mean, it's Patagonia. It's like nuclear winds, overcast. Well, and the thing about Patagonia,

4:41Graham Bensinger:and correct me if I'm wrong, there's no other landmass anywhere in the world in line with it. So there's nothing to block. So there's just constant winds.

4:50Alex Honnold:The wind is legendary and definitely lives up to it. You're like, whoa.

4:55Graham Bensinger:And that's this week's fan favorite. To see more popular videos, go to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Graham Bensinger.

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