Alex Honnold on Free Climbing Guyana and Studying Frogs

and you have the opportunity, you kind of have to. Now when you see something like that, do you make a route first with ropes always? Yeah, yeah, so our, I mean, because we were there, I mean, it's a whole like complicated natural graphic TV thing. So we were there with biologists, we were like studying these endemic species of the tapuis, there's like this whole interesting natural history component to it, or sort of biology component, but we were just trying to climb this mountain that had never been climbed before. So the priority is obviously just to get up it, to like find these species of frogs, to like do all the things that are important for the TV show. But then because I was there, I was like, oh, you know, on the side, I can at least do something that I'm proud of in climbing that's also pretty cool. Oh, wow, that's pretty cool. Yeah, so it's like this, like pretty, and it wound up being totally insane climbing, like really cool, like this overhanging wall of six, 700 feet high, you know, like dangling. It was kind of the best style of climbing to solo because it felt secure, like it's the type of climbing where you feel safe, like it's very, very good rock, so anything you hold on to, you know, is solid and it's not gonna break. And it also lends itself to these sort of striations in the rock where you can like wedge your hand in and like feel really secure. But also it's incredible exposure because it's really steep, like because you're in the jungle, you can only climb stuff that's overhanging because anything that's like less, anything else accumulates like water and dirt and winds up with plants all over it. So like the only stuff that's really climbable is the stuff that is sheltered from the rain so that it doesn't have plants on it, so. So it's difficult just by nature. Yeah, so it's difficult because you're hanging and so you're like in these crazy positions where you're dangling from your arms, but you feel safe doing it because the rock's so good and the holds are so good and you're just like, what a crazy place. It's really cool. But then when you get to the very edge, you have to somehow make your way. And that's a bummer, yeah. That seems like the most gnarly part of it. It actually probably, in terms of risk, it probably was the final 20 or 30 feet of like getting onto the top, it's all like rotten soil and those rocks and like, you know, yeah, it wasn't ideal, but. How do you decide which way to go when you get to something like that? Just what's the most likely path to success? Yeah, well, so in that particular case, we had already established the route, you know, like because it's this TV thing, we'd already climbed it, we'd put ropes up it, we'd like worked on it, the camera guys had gone up and down, we'd like camped up on this ledge to look for these frogs. We'd like done this whole experience. So for the free solo, I already had a pretty good sense of like how I should tackle that part because you know, we'd already been sort of living up there a bit, but. Wow. But I'm like, what'd you do in February? You know, that was my February. So these frogs, like the idea is to, is it really an excuse to climb or is it like, do you really, are you really there for the frogs to check out these weird species? It's a little bit of both. Yeah, well, I'm like, I know this is a long form show, do you want to like go deep into it? Because it's actually really interesting. So, all right, long form. Okay, the trip was, the trip is crazy. I mean, we just talked about the whole time. I've read freaking eight books while we were there because it's the jungle and you know, it's the tropics. So it's dark from six to six every day. It's like 12 hours of dark and we're in our own little hammock. So I was just in my cocoon, like reading books every day. And so. Like a headlamp? Yeah, yeah, by headlamp. Because you have nothing else to do. It's like raining and you're just in your own little like personal cocoon, just like reading. But so I read like natural history of Guyana, natural history of like, you know, sort of the geology. So, like have you seen the movie Up? Like the Pixar or Disney movie, the cute thing with the flying house and the balloons? Yeah, so you know that's all modeled on like where they fly to the big rock things with the waterfalls. Those are tupuis, which are like real things in South America. That's in Venezuela, Guyana in the northern part of Brazil. Or if you've seen the new Point Break they filmed down there on the same rock features. I didn't see that. But so, you're not missing anything. It's really bad. But a lot of my friends worked on it. So it's like, it's cool. And it is like an incredible climbing place. Out of respect for Patrick Swayze. I just, yeah, exactly. Yeah, you didn't miss anything. I actually fell asleep watching it on a plane. Oh really? When you fall asleep during an action movie, you're kind of like, come on. Yeah. But the climbing in it, it's cool. And anyway, so it's on these things called the puis, which are like these big quercitic sandstone walls that stick out of the jungle. And so if you imagine a huge raised area of land that because it's in the jungle has been massively eroded by the constant rain over the last 40 million years. So now you wind up with all these slender towers and mesas. So do you know Angel Falls? No. It's one of the biggest waterfalls in the world here. Pull up a picture. Angel Falls is a, it's like, oh yeah, yeah. Whoa. Dude, that's a rhyme, man. That's, you know. That is wild. Yeah, that's so beautiful. It looks fake. Yeah, it does look fake. Isn't that crazy? I'm pretty sure that one is a rhyme. And if you look to the left of the one you were just on, that we climbed this little wall to the left of it. Can you go back to that one, Jamie? Because like if I was a dummy, I would think someone built that. Totally. So if you could pan that photo to the left, though obviously you can't because it's not in the frame, we climbed this little mountain to the left. And so this is a really famous peak because the summit of it marks the boundary between Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana. It's used as like the marker to separate those three countries. And so we were climbing this sort of little bastard step brother next to it. But that peak, though, had never been climbed. It was like new to science for the different species of frogs and all that kind of stuff. If you're an explorer and you've stumbled upon that, you would think that that was like a structure. Yeah. Like it's so square and flat on the top. And some of them did. Like European explorers that first came into the region had all kinds of names like the White Cathedral and things like that. Like that tower. They're just a bunch of. Wow, look at that one. Click on the one your cursor's on, Jamie. That's so wild. So actually, you see on the left side of that, there's like the hint of a little thing in the distance. I'm pretty sure that's the thing we were climbing. The thing to the left that's just starting to appear out of the clouds. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the peak that we climbed. God, it's so beautiful. Yeah, it's crazy. Except to be fair, the sun only comes out. So we were there in the dry season. And it rained like eight hours a day. And we were in the clouds nonstop. It was totally grim. And that's the dry season. Yeah, and so you see these pictures where you're like, it's so beautiful. And you're like, yeah, for 30 minutes a day. And the rest of the time, you're just in the water. Yeah, I get in a word. That's so wild, man. Like really, if I stumbled upon that, I would think someone built that. Yeah, no, it's totally incredible. What is the geologue? I didn't even get to the cool part of this. Oh, yeah, well, so yeah, asking about the geology. Yeah, like how does something like that form? It's so strange. Yeah, so that's the stuff I was reading while we were there. So it's like this huge bed of sandstone, which then gets metamorphose like compressed into quartzite. So like really, really hard sandstone. And then, you know, the Andes. So you have Gondwana, like one of the mega continents that predates Pangea, I think. Really? Yeah, so like, you know, if you imagine all the continents on Earth were once sort of combined. So South America and Africa, you know, fit together at the horn. And so this rock is most similar to rock in the parts of Africa, actually. And so, and part of what makes the biology there so interesting is that the creatures on the summit of some of the topuis are more closely related to creatures in Africa than they are to the ones in the jungle below them. Because the summits have been separated for so long. You see what I'm saying? Because the top of those islands, basically, they've been separated from the jungle below for so long that they more closely resemble where they came from in Africa than the creatures that live in the rainforest below. It's like this totally incredible, you know, I mean, it's just an interesting part of Earth. Are you aware of the Olmecs? Do you know what the Olmec civilization was? No. The Olmecs, it's really, it's quite a mystery. They don't exactly know what they did or, you know, what their culture was all about. But they had these heads that they left behind, these sculpted, gigantic stone heads that resemble African people. That's not the Easter Island stuff? No, no, that's different. That's different. This is the Olmecs. Oh, wow. And where were the Olmecs? In South America. Oh, yeah, it says Olmecs. Yes, South America, Mexico, Central America. And there's a lot of them. And these images are very African-looking faces. And they don't really know what the history of them were. And they know, they think some of them existed in the neighborhood of 6,000 years ago. But, you know, when you're looking at stone, it's hard because they just, they carbon date the stuff that's around the stone as they unearth it. But that doesn't really necessarily give them an accurate sense of when it was constructed. It just gives an accurate sense of how the sediment that eventually covers it. Yeah, of where it's around, totally. So they get it. The stuff in Guyana, though, is on a totally different scale. Like the stuff that I'm talking about, I think the DiPoois have been eroded away, like isolated for 40 million years or something, which far predates humans. And then I think the rock itself is like 1.5 billion years old. It's like ancient, ancient. It's incredible rock. It's really cool. It's just so wild, the way it formed, the look. Yeah. It's funny because, I mean, you saw the pictures. It looks like islands. And early explorers thought that they must be islands or something. But it's actually just the eroded remnants of what was once like a giant elevated plateau. Oh, yeah, totally. So this is what the summits look like. I have a bunch of photos like that on my phone, which is like scrappy little iPhone pics of like, here we are on this crazy. You know, because you're like in the clouds, you're in the mist. It's like kind of grim and it's raining. But then the summit is like this totally wild. So like all those plants are incredibly well adapted to this harsh environment. And they're really high rates of carnivory, like plants that eat things. Because they're busy, no soil. One of the books I read said that described it as a rain desert. Like you think of a desert normally as having lots of soil but no water. And there you have infinite water but no soil because it's a stone surface that's getting rained on so much that it washes all the soil away. Oh, wow. So for any of the vegetation to live there, they basically all have different strategies where they're rooted straight to the stone. And then they eat bugs and things. They eat insects. Or they eat other plants. Lots of plants that grow on plants. And it's just like a whole crazy web of life that's like really different than what you expect normally. It's weird because it's so abundant. It's an unusual form of life, but it's everywhere. Yeah. That's so rich and green. Yeah, though actually, I bet if in that photo, if you'd pan the photo a bit to the side, there'd be big expanses of bare rock. Because the summit's like, yeah, they're little pastures and things. It's almost like alpine meadows if you go into the mountains and in the northern hemisphere. There'll be high tundras and things where it's like, yeah, it feels really lush. But then there's also a lot of exposed rock. Because when the sun comes out, you're at 7,000 to 9,000 feet in the tropics. So it's really intense UV exposure. And it dries things out instantly. So it's really hard climatic conditions for life. Wow. That's wild. And so these organisms, these creatures that live up there, they're closely resembling creatures that live in Africa. And so that was part of what you were studying. Yeah, so we were with this biologist who was trying to do an elevational transect of the River Basin that we were in. So basically starting from the rainforest where the frogs are pretty well known. And then going up through the cloud forest, which is kind of as you gain elevation to the actual wall. And then the species all change as you gain elevation, which is kind of normal. And then the things on the summit of the tupuis, on the summit of the stone island, are completely different again. And so he was basically doing research on how the different species, basically what the deal is. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan experience for free, only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips. Easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background by using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs, all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan experience.