Looking Up The Yosemite Valley--From a different spot

- On a bright Saturday morning in September a young man is clinging to the face of Half Dome, a sheer 2,130-foot wall of granite in the heart of Yosemite Valley. He's alone, so high off the ground that perhaps only the eagles take notice.
- Hanging on by his fingertips to an edge of rock as thin as a dime, shoes smeared on mere ripples in the rock, Eminem blasting on his iPod, Alex Honnold is attempting something no one has ever tried before: to climb the Regular Northwest Face route on Half Dome without a rope. He's less than a hundred feet from the summit when something potentially disastrous occurs---he loses the smallest measure of confidence.
- For two hours and 45 minutes Honnold has been in the zone, flawlessly performing hundreds of precise athletic moves one after another, and not once has he hesitated. In the sport of free soloing, which means climbing with only a powdery chalk bag and rock shoes---no rope, no gear, nothing to keep you stuck to the stone but your own belief and ability---doubt is dangerous. If Honnold's fingertips can't hold, he will fall to his death. Now, the spell suddenly broken by mental fatigue and the glass-slick slab in front of him, he's paralyzed.
- "My foot will never stay on that," Honnold says to himself, staring at a greasy bump on the rock face. "Oh God, I'm screwed."
- Now, clinging to the granite, Honnold vacillates, delicately chalking one hand, then the other, vigilantly adjusting his feet on invisibly small footholds. Then, abruptly he's in motion again, stepping up, smearing his shoe on the slick knob, crimping his fingers on the tiny edge. Within minutes he's at the top.
- "I rallied because there was nothing else I could do," Honnold tells later, releasing a boyish laugh. "I stepped up and trusted that terrible foothold and was freed of the little prison where I'd stood silently for five minutes."
- Word of his two-hour-and-50-minute free solo of Half Dome flashes around the world. Climbers are stunned, and bloggers buzz. On this warm fall day in 2008 the nerdy, plays-Scrabble-with-his-mom 23-year old from the suburbs of Sacramento has just set a new record in climbing's biggest of big leagues. --[Images from May 2011 National Geographic by Jimmy Chin, text by Mark Jenkins. 1st photo by Mikey Schaefer]