Alex Honnold’s Most Dangerous Adventure

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This transcript is lightly edited for clarity.

Alex Honnold: My dangerous idea is sort of a combination of many different adventure elements, focusing on climbing.Honnold: My dangerous idea is sort of a combination of many different adventure elements, focusing on climbing.

You go into the Karakoram Mountain Range in Pakistan to climb the Trango Towers without a rope. You're free soloing, climbing a 5000 foot granite wall by yourself.

First you have to cross Pakistan on the Karakoram Highway, which has a certain amount of danger there, both the driving and the political side of it.

From there, you make your basecamp. To climb this huge wall, you have to cross glaciers, which is quite dangerous by yourself, since you'll be making sure you don't fall into holes.

And then you climb the wall, by yourself, without a rope. Which has never been done, and seems completely insane. But is maybe possible! You're at 20,000 feet, so you're probably hypoxic and quite lightheaded. That might make the whole dangerous idea seem like a better idea, since you can't really get any oxygen to your brain anyway.

When you get to the top, you can wingsuit off, fly back down to your camp, and then maybe packraft out, just to go down one of the drainages off the Baltoro Glacier.

And then you have the ultimate adventure link up, where any aspect of the adventure could potentially kill you.

Funny enough, I kind of think someone will do this within the next 50 years. I mean, yes, it's possible, and probably will be done eventually. All the different aspects of it have sort of been done, to some extent. It just seems completely outrageous to do it all in one adventure.