Extreme climber Alex Honnold says ‘backyard travel’ is for everyone

Alex Honnold is so well-known for his gravity-defying, anxiety-inducing stunt climbs—most recently, a free solo climb up a 101-story building in Taipei—that seeing him stand on solid ground almost looks wrong.

But in his new TV show, Get a Little Out There with Alex Honnold, he spends a surprising amount of time at ground level—not a chalk bag in sight—exploring Nevada’s UFO museums, digging for treasure at a turquoise mine and getting supernatural at a couple of ghost towns. Instead of heading off to a far-flung peak, Honnold shows us the beauty of adventuring in our own backyard. Well, his backyard at least.

If you’re unfamiliar with Honnold by name, you probably know him as the guy who climbed Yosemite’s Half Dome without ropes, a feat documented in the 2018 film Free Solo. Since then, he’s used his platform as a world-famous climber to draw attention to environmental issues and offer actionable sustainability tips. 

In 2012, he founded the Honnold Foundation to support solar projects worldwide. It’s grown substantially since then, supporting solar infrastructure in more than 150 communities with over USD$10 million in funding.  

We sat down with Honnold—who’s just as chill and easy to talk to as you’d expect a desert-dwelling climber to be—to chat about adventuring close to home and his unusual optimism for the future. 

You should just gorge yourself on the things that are good: Big hikes and things in nature; free experiences that are close to home.

- Alex Honnold

Nevada is your home state, but did anywhere really surprise you?

Honnold: Yeah, a bunch of the places. There’s quite a bit of hype around the Ruby Mountains and that they’re an unsung gem, and they totally live up to the hype. I was very impressed by them, but maybe not quite so surprised, because there’s this reputation that they’re supposed to be amazing, and I was like, “oh, they are, in fact, amazing.”

I think the most surprising thing was when we climbed Mount Jefferson, which is just like a whatever-peak in the middle of the state. At that time of the year, it was popping with aspens and the colors were insane. I thought it was funny that Colorado is known for its aspens, but it turns out if you go to the right elevation in Nevada, you can find them here, too.

Did this trip teach you anything about adventuring closer to the ground, and to home?

Honnold: You can always have an adventure in your own backyard. That’s why I live outside of Vegas, for the climbing access. It’s just limitless. If you’re willing to seek out that kind of adventure, it’s always there, particularly in a state like Nevada where it’s 80 percent public land. You really can go virtually anywhere and just have big adventures.

I think that’s true for most people. If you try, you can always find something to get into. This show reminded me that there’s so much more to the cultural element as well. We went to the UFO museum, the alien museum in Boulder City, things that I wouldn’t necessarily choose to go to on my own. But then, surprisingly, those are some of the experiences that I remember the most.

So much messaging about sustainable travel these days is about what not to do. What are things we can do? 

Honnold: You should just gorge yourself on the things that are good: Big hikes and things in nature; free experiences that are close to home. Basically, everything we’re doing in the show, where you just drive to a trailhead and then you gorge yourself.

You’ve previously written for Adventure.com that you feel optimistic about our collective future. How do you maintain that optimism?

Honnold: If you don’t look at day-to-day news, the overall arc of human progress is very optimistic. 

So, yes, the environment has suffered greatly as a result, and the climate is changing more rapidly than we’d like. But I’ve just maintained the sense that humans are capable of doing great things. We just haven’t really chosen yet to make environmental issues a global priority. But most of the solutions are there.I think that’s where my optimism is. I’m sort- of like, well, we can fix it. We just need to start trying.

How would you describe Nevada to someone who has never visited?

Honnold: Nevada is 80 percent public land, and you just feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere in nature the whole time. In some ways, you feel removed from the conversations around human impact.

That’s one of the things I love about Nevada, is that it just feels so vast and kind of infinite. In a way, that’s how humans felt in the world before it got so crowded and sort-of overdeveloped. This is what the whole West used to feel like. But then you go to a state like California now and it’s so crowded and there’s so much traffic, but you go to Nevada and it still feels like the American West that you read about growing up, where it’s vast and limitless.

Watch Get a Little Out There with Alex Honnold here.

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