AIN'T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH ENOUGH

Alex Honnold cemented his status as a climbing legend when he free soloed the 900-metre-high sheer rock face of El Capitan. A new National Geographic documentary - The Devil's Climb – to capture him and his climbing partner, Tommy Caldwell, take on the 2,700m plus peak - all in a single day

- Dominic Bliss

For ten years, Alex Honnold lived in a van. Kitted out with a kitchenette, cabinets full of climbing equipment and energy bars, F and solar panels on the roof, the Ford Econoline enabled this rock climber to wander the western United States in search of challenging mountain faces. Between 2007 and 2017, he clocked up close to 200,000 miles, living the life of a climbing bum, as they call them in America.

"I don't think van life is particularly appealing," he said at the time. "It's not like I love living in a car.

But I love being wherever the weather is good. I love being able to follow good conditions and be relatively comfortable as I do it. And so that pretty much necessitates living in a car." It was towards the end of this climbing-bum period that Alex cemented his reputation as one of the greatest rock climbers of all time.

That was in June 2017 when, using a method called free-soloing climbing without ropes or any safety equipment - he scaled the 900-metre-high sheer rock face of El Capitan in California's Yosemite National Park. Free soloing is the most dramatic and dangerous of all climbing techniques - just the athlete versus the mountain. Alex's feat was famously recorded in a 2018 documentary called Free Solo which even the hardiest TV viewer will find vertigo-inducing. The New York Times called it "one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever." Eight years on, Alex now lives with his wife Sanni McCandless and his two young daughters, June, 3, and Alice, 1, in Las Vegas - in a real bricks-and-mortar house, this time.

"When you say 'Las Vegas', everyone thinks of The Strip," he tells Men's Fitness magazine. "But Vegas actually has the best outdoor rock climbing in the country. It has incredible access to the outdoors. I live on the west side of town, right by the mountains. In Vegas you're never more than 15 minutes away from full-on wild mountains."

The Devil's Climb