As a free solo climber, Alex Honnold’s M.O. is to dump everything before he scales whatever mountain, cliff or skyscraper he pleases. Sometimes he has to dump a little more as he goes.
Honnold, 40, explained in vivid detail how he deals with instances of scatological scaling during the Wednesday, February 25, episode of Hasan Minhaj’s podcast, “Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know.”
“You just pee and poop,” he said. “I’ve never actually s*** my pants but I’ve had a lot of serious emergencies while rock climbing, yeah. You just go. But you’re in nature so it doesn’t matter. You just make sure you’re not impacting other climbers.”
When Minhaj, 40, pressed him for more detail, Honnold told a harrowing story of hanging from a cliff, trying only to release his bowels and not his grip.
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“There’s been like one-handed, hanging off the side of a cliff taking a dump,” Honnold said. “A couple times.”
He added, “When it happens, it happens. It’s better than pooping your pants. You make sure you’re off-route and you make sure it’s going to land somewhere OK.”
This isn’t the first time Honnold has opened up about, well, where he needs to open up. The climbing sensation who scaled Taipei 101 spent a decade living in his van. During that time, he learned to answer nature’s calls with the help of a bottle. When his van life ended and he began staying in hotels when he traveled, indoor plumbing became a tough adjustment.
“Sometimes you get put up in a really classy hotel room, and it’s really big, and you have to walk quite a ways to the bathroom, and you’re like, ‘Man, I wish I had my [pee] bottle,’” he explained to GQ in a video published in 2020. “Who wants to walk all the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night when you could just lean over and grab your bottle and go?”
Though free solo climbing as a sport has long existed off of the national radar, Honnold broke through with his 2018 Netflix documentary, Free Solo, which chronicled his effort to climb El Capitan, a 3,000-foot rock formation in Yosemite National Park.
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In January 2026, Honnold returned to Netflix, which broadcasted live his successful climb of Taipei 101, the 11th-tallest building in the world. With thousands watching a clear pass/fail test — one in which failure meant almost certain death — Honnold completed the feat in 1 hour and 36 minutes.
When he reached the top, he was joined by his wife, Sanni McCandless, where the two celebrated.
Honnold and McCandless married in 2020 and now share two kids. As a father, Honnold is often asked if having a family has changed his perspective about his dangerous job.
“I mean, implicit in the question is that I have more to live for, and, yeah, I have more to live for, and I’m still doing my very best to not die,” he told The Cut in January.
Honnold continued, “No one’s encouraging me to do harder things. Everyone’s kind of like, ‘Why don’t you stay at home, play with the kids?’ So it means that if I’m going to do something, I have to be really psyched about it.”
