- Alex Honnold, the climber and star of the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo, planned two major expeditions where he biked between climbs.
- The rides, nicknamed “Sufferfest 1” and “Sufferfest 2,” took Honnold and climber Cedar Wright hundreds of miles through California, Arizona, and Utah.
- Honnold rode a hybrid bike and noted many parallels between cycling and climbing.
Even before Free Solo won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary, Alex Honnold was a household name.
A free solo climber—one who works alone and without the aid of safety ropes or harnesses—Honnold, 33, has made a number of legendary exploits, including his untethered ascent of the 3,000-foot granite monolith El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Fellow climber Tommy Caldwell called the achievement, which was documented in the film, “the moon landing of rock climbing.”
But few know that Honnold is also accomplished cyclist. In fact, he and Cedar Wright, another free soloist, have been on two climbing expeditions where their hybrid bikes played a key role.
In the first outing, taken in 2013 and nicknamed “Sufferfest 1,” the pair biked more than 500 miles through northern and central California to climb every one of the state’s 15 mountains with elevations exceeding 14,000 feet (known as “14ers”). In “Sufferfest 2” the following year, they switched from asphalt to dirt and rode 700 miles through the desert from Moab, Utah, to Arizona, climbing 45 iconic free-standing towers along the way.
“For Sufferfest 1, we felt like it was important to climb all the 14ers by human power. It just seemed like the appropriate kind of challenge,” Honnold said. “Neither of us had spent much time on bicycles, so it really added to the whole experience. We decided to use bikes again for Sufferfest 2 specifically because it had been such an incredible, immersive experience.”
Honnold noted parallels between climbing and cycling. “They’re both really great ways to experience a landscape, to really feel like you’re a part of the natural world,” he said. “In both cases, you move through the terrain relatively slowly, and it gives you a lot of time to look around and think about your surroundings.”
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Yet for two relative newcomers to the sport, cycling had its challenges. “On Sufferfest 2 I popped my tires entirely too many times, which drove me crazy,” Honnold said. “But that’s the peril of riding a hybrid on rough dirt roads at too high of a speed. I think that the biggest challenge for both of us was just the mileage. The total amount of exercise slowly ground us down to dust.”
Honnold is arguably the most accomplished free soloist of his generation. By adding a cycling component to their expeditions, he and Wright had a new skill to master. “Cedar and I would just bumble along and get by, which was really part of the appeal,” Honnold said. “It’s fun to be a beginner at something new.”
Honnold also took a philanthropic approach to Sufferfest 2, stopping along the route to install a solar panel on the house of a Navajo Nation member, bringing electricity to the remote building.
“Sufferfest 2 was my first explicit attempt to combine a climbing trip with a Honnold Foundation project,” he said. “Obviously they’re both important parts of my life, but could I bring them together? And I think it worked pretty well... We’ve subsequently done similar things with a project in Angola and an expedition to Kenya.”
For Honnold, who made history with the first free solo ascent of El Capitan in 2017, the last few years leading up to both the climb and the documentary have been a whirlwind, and he hasn’t had time recently to take on any major rides. We likely won’t see him signing up for, say, the Dirty Kanza anytime soon. But will he keep a place for cycling in his climbing career? Clearly, Sufferfest left a lasting impression.
“I think that biking is a really great, enriching way to interact with a new landscape,” he said. “I definitely wouldn’t want to do every trip by bicycle, but for the right places and the right times of year it can make the whole experience far more memorable. After both trips Cedar and I felt like we’d done a year’s worth of living in only 20 days of adventuring.”
