The climber is the first person to reach the top of Yosemite’s 3,000-foot El Capitan wall without ropes.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, CALIFORNIA—Famous rock climber Alex Honnold on Saturday became the first person to scale the iconic nearly 3,000-foot granite wall known as El Capitan without using ropes or other safety equipment, completing the greatest feat of pure climbing in the history of the sport.

He reached the top in 3 hours and 56 minutes, making his last moderate throw at close range. At 9:28 a.m. PDT, under a clear blue sky and few clouds, he scaled the summit’s rocky edge and stood on a sandy outcrop the size of a child’s bedroom.

Honnold began his historic abseil—a style known as “free soloing”—in the pink light of dawn at 5:32 a.m. He spent the night in the custom van that served as his mobile base, rising in the dark, wearing his favorite red T-shirt and low-cut nylon pants, eating a standard breakfast of oats, flaxseeds, chia seeds and blueberries before driving to El Capitan Meadow.

He parked the car and walked up the gravel path to the base of the cliff. There, he put on a pair of sticky-soled climbing shoes, tied a small bag of chalk around his waist to keep his hands dry, found his first foothold and began his step toward climbing history.

For more than a year, Honnold has practiced climbing at locations in the United States, China, Europe and Morocco. A small group of friends and fellow climbers who knew about the project were sworn to secrecy.

A group of filmmakers, led by Jimmy Chin, one of Honnold and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s longtime climbing partners, seized the opportunity for the upcoming National Geographic Documentary film. Last November, Honnold tried his hand at free solo for the first time, but had to retreat after less than an hour of climbing because of unsuitable conditions.

Trained at a climbing gym in Sacramento, Honnold, 31, burst onto the international scene in 2008 with two high-risk, ropeless climbs—the northwest face of Yosemite’s Half Dome and Moonlight Buttress in Utah’s Zion National Park. Those free solos wowed the climbing world and set new standards in the same way that Roger Bannister redefined distance running when he broke the four-minute mile record in 1954.

“What Alex did on Moonlight Buttress challenged everything we were trained, raised and genetically engineered to think,” said Peter Mortimer, a climber who has made many films with Honnold. “It is the most unnatural place for humans.”

But those pioneering climbs pale in comparison to El Capitan. It is difficult to understate the physical and mental difficulties of freely climbing to the top of the mountain, considered by many to be the epicenter of the rock climbing world. It’s a vertical space that stretches for more than half a mile – taller than the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. From the grasslands at the foot of El Capitan, climbers on the summit are almost invisible to the naked eye.

Tommy Caldwell, who made his own history in 2015 with his climb of the Dawn Wall, the toughest climb on El Capitan, where he and partner Kevin Jorgeson used ropes and supplies Another, said: “This is the ‘moon landing’ of free soloing. the device is only for safety purposes and does not aid their progress.

(What Caldwell and Jorgeson did is called free soloing, which means climbers use no equipment to help them move up the mountain and are only attached to ropes to catch them if they fall. Free soloing is when the climber is alone and does not use ropes or any other device to support or protect him as he climbs, leaving no room for error.)

Climbers have speculated for years about the possibility of a free solo trip of El Capitan, but only two others have publicly said they were seriously considering it. One was Michael Reardon, a freelance soloist who drowned in 2007 after being swept from a ledge below a sea cliff in Ireland. The other is Dean Potter, who died in a base jumping accident in Yosemite in 2015.

John Bachar, the greatest free soloist of the 1970s, who died while abseiling in 2009 at the age of 52, never thought of it. When Bachar was in his prime, El Capitan had never been free climbed. Peter Croft, 58, who completed the landmark free solo of the 1980s—Yosemite’s 1,000-foot Astroman—had never seriously contemplated El Capitan, but he knew someone would eventually. get that.

“It was always the obvious next step,” Croft said. “But after that, I really don’t know what will happen next. This is the big classical jump.”