Alex Honnold

That's the thing is that because when you're free soloing, you generally keep it within a healthy margin or you practice ahead of time, you know, basically because you're going to die, you make sure that you can do it.

But when you have a rope on, you're way more willing to push into the unknown because you're kind of like, surely I'll get some protection eventually.

I'll just keep looking.

I'll keep looking.

And so like I've had – I was on an expedition to Antarctica actually in 2017 and did a bunch of climbing that was very extreme but like with a rope.

But, you know, it's Antarctica.

It's really freaking cold.

Conditions are challenging.

The rock is crumbling.

Everything is scary.

And you just keep hoping that it's going to get better, and it just keeps getting worse instead.

And eventually you're sort of like – because the thing is having a rope on doesn't mean anything unless you get good protection, which means you have to be able to put gear into the rock.

And if you can't find places to put gear into the rock, then you can go – you know, the rope is 200 feet long.

If you go 200 feet without getting good gear, then you're looking at taking a 400-foot fall before the rope catches you.

Uh, which is almost certainly fatal.

You know, I mean, if you fall that far, even though the rope will catch your corpse, you know, but you're still just going to hit the wall after 400 feet, like you're screwed.

So anyway, my scariest experiences have all been situations like that for the most part.

This is why I'm saying climbing, you get scared a lot.

I was like that expedition we were climbing basically day on day off each day we would go climb one of these crazy spires and we'd have these experiences where I'd be like so scared and then the next day we would just sit in the tent because it's Antarctica it's like really cold you're in the cook tent and I would basically just spoon Nutella all day totally shell shocked like totally like just completely traumatized and then you'd be like rested enough and you'd go out the next day and do it again and we just did like day on day off of like full trauma fear for the whole trip and then we climbed everything in the range it was amazing it was an incredible trip

Yeah, I was so scared the whole time.