Photograph by Martha Stewart
One spring day in Las Vegas, adventure-writer David Roberts ’65 set out for a round of golf with Alex Honnold, the world’s foremost free-soloist. More than a generation apart, the two men have shared a fanatical drive to ascend, and grew close while co-writing Honnold’s 2015 autobiography,
Alone on the Wall.
The younger climber, who scaled Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan without any gear, had never set foot on a green, but quickly found his stride: “To me, the pleasure of the sport was to whack the ball as hard as I could, every time—give it 100 percent—just to see it shoot across space.” Roberts, Honnold says, was more of a stickler for proper form and rules, and though weakened by cancer, he “still really wants to win.”