The climbing team settled into their wall camp at night on a tepui face deep in the Amazon. In photos: NASA's Perseverance rover mission to the Red Planet And also, the scales are so different - there are just these giant, giant mountains on Mars. Honnold: And with gravity, you're just bouncing away anyway. : You would have to be in a spacesuit, first of all, so I don't see you getting onto ledges and getting into cracks with spacesuit gloves and boots on - that would be pretty difficult. I would love to, if given the opportunity, but not for the climbing experience, because it just won't be the same thing. I feel like it's not that unrealistic that, in my lifetime, I probably will be able to go to space and experience it - go to the moon or something. Honnold: You're kind of like, "Wow, what a nice, shapely mountain." But with less gravity and no oxygen, everything about it - it would not really be a great climbing experience. : Do you ever look at some of these vistas coming back from the Mars rovers, see those big red rock walls on Mars, and think what it would be like to climb them? And I think that that same kind of curiosity on the human scale will eventually lead to exploring space. I like experiencing new climbs I'm just curious about new things. But I would say, actually, maybe it's just curiosity. Honnold: On a very different scale, and it's slightly embarrassing to even make that comparison. ![]() I mean, you're an explorer yourself - you pioneer routes up mountains, and that's what space exploration is doing, pioneering routes to new places. I just think that's exciting, in the same way that folks 500 years ago looked at the blank ocean to the west and were like, "I wonder where that goes." At some point, humans will almost certainly go beyond where we live now. So I've seen like every episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," which is slightly hokey or whatever, but I don't know - I've just always seen space as the next frontier sort of thing. Honnold: My mom was a huge " Star Trek: The Next Generation" fan. : When did that love of space start? Can you trace it to anything in particular? What a crazy scene the night sky is incredible here in the middle of nowhere - you can really see stars - but then you can also see this crazy city 100 miles away because there's nothing else in between. It's like 100 miles away, but you can see this giant glow on the horizon. įrom Telescope, you can see Vegas shimmering in the distance. I live on the edge of town, right by the mountains, so it's an interesting combination of mountains and vastness but also, like, the freaking light at the Luxor shooting straight at the moon. It's funny I live in Las Vegas now, and it's probably one of the most light-polluted places on Earth. And when you think of the infinite abyss - that's kind of what some of these big mountain landscapes feel like. I think that part of the appeal of big mountains is the vastness and the grandeur, and I think that can definitely be most exemplified in space. I like the vastness of it, and I've always sort of loved space. ![]() : What's your relationship with the night sky? What's it like looking up at the stars from those cliff walls?Īlex Honnold: I've spent a lot of nights out, and I've slept out in the open in some of the most remote parts of Earth. (Image credit: National Geographic/Renan Ozturk) Climber Alex Honnold trekked through the Amazon jungle for days in order to make a first ascent up the tepui face of Mount Weiassipu in western Guyana.
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