Sacramento-area native Alex Honnold completes skyscraper climb live on Netflix
Around the 58-minute mark of his attempt to free solo climb a Taiwanese skyscraper, Alex Honnold reported that the headset he was wearing had died.
By this point, Honnold, who grew up in Carmichael and is still remembered locally, had ascended hundreds of feet up the side of the building during a live Netflix program titled “SkyscraperLIVE.”
While the event might have been nerve-wracking for the average Netflix viewer to watch, with Honnold wearing no rope or safety equipment of any kind, he offered a hint at how he was feeling when he soon reported he could, again, hear someone named James, who appeared to possibly be a producer.
“James, you guys want to put my tunes back on?” Honnold said. A commentator had noted earlier in the event that Honnold likes to listen to Tool.
With cool precision and physical resolve, Honnold once again completed something that had never been done before. He finished climbing the 101-story, 1667-foot tall Taipei 101 in 1 hour, 31 minutes and 34 seconds. The event streamed live on Netflix in prime time Saturday in the United States, though it occurred Sunday in Taiwan due to the time difference.
Honnold came to fame in 2017 when he became the first person to free solo climb Yosemite’s El Capitan. That climb was the basis for the 2018 National Geographic documentary “Free Solo,” which won an Academy Award.
How the climb proceeded
The climb started at about 5:12 p.m. Pacific on Saturday, with dry conditions and light wind at the ground level. One day earlier, Netflix had postponed the climb shortly before it was scheduled to begin. The attempt had been originally set to start at 5 p.m. Friday, with rainy weather cited as the reason for the shift.
Already, local people who’d climbed with Honnold, such as Ryan Rougeux, assistant manager at rock climbing gym Sacramento Pipeworks, had anticipated that Honnold was taking calculated risk.
“I trust that he has tried all the sections and he knows it’s well within his ability to do something like that live,” Rougeux said.
After relaxing with his wife Sanni McCandless Honnold prior to the climb, Alex Honnold shed a sweatshirt and began his ascent.
In the early part of the climb, he surmounted a part of the building known as “the slabs.” From there, he climbed a portion of the building described as the bamboo boxes.
A crowd of people watched as he climbed. Meanwhile, Sanni went up in the building herself. She greeted Alex from behind glass at the 60th floor, where he smiled at her.
“He’s doing what he loves,” she said early in her husband’s climb. She shares two young daughters with him. In a pre-recorded segment that played during the climb, Sanni said that ultimately, she just had to trust her husband.
Nerves of steel while climbing steel
If Honnold was stressed, it didn’t much show during his climb. While he kept a chalk bag strapped to him, allowing him to keep a tight grip and not slip from perspiration, he mostly moved methodically and with few breaks as he went up the skyscraper.
At one point, after climbing over the first of 10 “dragons” perched on the corner of each bamboo box, Honnold exclaimed, “What a day in Taipei.”
Aside from Sanni, a number of people greeted Alex as he passed different floors of the building, sometimes taking pictures of him. He didn’t seem to mind. At multiple points, he acknowledged the throngs on the ground below him.
Granted, there was at least one sign he might have been feeling the moment a little, with his heart rate tracked at around 165 beats per minute at the 53-minute mark of the climb, a graphic showed during the broadcast.
The climb ended at the spire at the top of building. Honnold made short work of it, then stood atop the spire and took a selfie.
The only question now was how he was going to get down.
He put on a harness and rappelled to the base of the spire, where his wife joyfully greeted him, hugged him tightly and kissed him. She admitted she had “basically been having a panic attack the entire time.”
They agreed to take an elevator down.
This story was originally published January 24, 2026 at 7:54 PM.
