Alex Honnold

Like in the springtime, that whole...

West side of the wall stays in the shade until 11 or noon-ish in the morning.

So you go at four in the morning and then you have sort of eight hours of solid shade.

So normally the temperature and the conditions feel relatively stable and you spend the whole season working on it.

So you kind of know that tomorrow is going to feel the same as it did today, roughly, you know, and so it's all within a relatively narrow band, particularly in the spring, which is why I did it in the springtime.

In the fall and the autumn, it's a little bit different because the sun is lower in the sky.

So it gets sun much earlier and it actually is way hotter counterintuitively.

It's colder when it's in the shade, but then hotter when it's in the sun.

Anyway, that makes it harder for climbing, obviously.

But when I free soloed El Cap, I was spending three or four months a year in Yosemite every year, like a month or two every spring and every autumn.

And so you're spending four months a year in a place, you just know how it feels.

It's like you're used to getting up that early, you're used to climbing on the wall, and you're just kind of like, oh, it's going to be another beautiful day on the rock.

And actually the day that I did the free solo of El Cap, it was actually a little more humid and a little warmer than I maybe would have been optimal.

It's not what I would have chosen, but that's just the way it was that day.

And I was kind of like, well,

this is my day.

You know, you kind of just have to do the thing.

Um, but it'd been like overcast that night and you know, when it's cloudy at night, the lows don't drop as low.

And so I woke up and it was like kind of muggy ish feeling.

I was like, it's not, it's not great for being four in the morning.