LEGENDS ON STONE

He began climbing at the break of dawn, wedging his foot into a vertical crack and then moving fluidly up the sheer face of Yosemite’s El Capitan, unsupported by rope, hardware or a partner.

By mid-morning, less than four hours later, Alex Honnold pulled onto the summit, 2,900 feet up, having completed a solo climb that takes days for a strong team. His feat in June 2017 made headlines and sent a shock wave through the climbing world. Many rushed to call it the greatest climb ever accomplished, maybe even the greatest athletic achievement of all time, and it’s hard to argue with either.

Yosemite icon Royal Robbins died a couple of months before Honnold’s climb, but their lives intertwine hold-by-hold a half-century apart on the same route up the Big Stone. When Honnold reached the top of El Capitan after his daring ropeless solo, he was following a route called Freerider, a variation of a line up the Salathe Wall formation that was first climbed by Robbins during Yosemite’s Golden Age in the early 1960s.

CLIMBING BECAME A PRACTICE, INSTEAD OF A SPORT.

A lot of history is wrapped up in the Salathe routes. As only the second path ever forged up the massif, Robbins’ ascent in 1961 was similarly big news. Those early climbs were almost exclusively “aid” climbing, standing in nylon stirrups hung from pitons, iron blades hammered into the long vertical cracks. In 1988, the Salathe became the first route up El Capitan to be entirely free-climbed — with a rope for safety, but not hanging from it or the hardware.

Doing the climb free was so radical an evolution of this “don’t-call-it-a-sport” that many did not believe it and called the free climbers liars. Now a dozen other lines up El Capitan have gone free; it’s the cutting edge. (Just to be clear, “free climbing” means making upward progress with hands and feet gripping the stone, a rope trailing behind to catch a fall. “Free soloing,” Honnold’s specialty, is the same sort of climbing directly on the rock — only without the rope. A fall is almost certainly fatal.)

To Honnold, the crux of his climb was not the patient focus, move by move, spidering from handhold to handhold, crack to crack. There were two particularly difficult sections he was proudest of. One section, everyone suspected: The “boulder move,” just over halfway up,