EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Climbing All-Stars Alex Honnold & Tommy Caldwell Reveal Hardest Part Of Their Climb Up Devil’s Thumb, Filming Their New Doc

All-star rock climbers Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold revealed the most difficult challenges of climbing the infamous Devil’s Thumb in Canada while filming their new Nat Geo documentary The Devil’s Climb in their new uInterview.

The Devil’s Climb sees Honnold and Caldwell journey 2,600 miles through the Alaskan wilderness on a world-speed record attempt to climb the five spires of Devil’s Thumb. The 9,000-foot peak is known as one of the most dangerous mountains in North America.

Caldwell gave insight into the root of the film’s concept. “The conception of the trip started because I was on calls with this environmental non-profit called the Alaskan Wilderness League trying to figure out ways to get involved in this effort to protect Tongass National Forest from logging and when I was learning about Tongass. I realized at one point that the Devil’s Thumb, which is this mountain I’d heard about, was right in the middle of Tongass forest,” he recalled. “So I was like, the conservation side of me and the climbing side of me merged, and I was like, ‘This is perfect, I have to do this, I have to make this trip happen.'”

Honnold shared his initial reaction to Caldwell’s proposition. “At first I thought it was crazy, but I mean, originally Tommy wanted to sea kayak through the inside passage, all the way up, fully human-powered, and walk, and I was like, ‘That is crazy,'” he said. “So initially I thought that I would just join him for the climb objectives along the way.”

He continued, “But it’s not that easy to get to those places and it just seemed a little bit silly to sort of drop in and out of this incredible adventure that he’d be having without me. So I was like, ‘Oh if I’m going to climb these peaks with him, I really should just do the whole adventure with him and share the real experience.’ So then I was kind of like, ‘Well if we’re going to do it, let’s just do it.'”

Both climbers shared what they felt were the most harrowing or dangerous moments of the journey. Honnold said, “I think the climb actually went well. I mean, the whole time you always have question marks looking over you, because we haven’t been there. Don’t know much about it. There’s not much information, hadn’t really been done much,” he said. “And so every step of the way we’re sort of wondering what might come next, might it suddenly get harder, might it get more extreme…the uncertainty getting into it, that’s the real challenge.”

Caldwell explained, “This was a two-month trip, and they had to make it into a 90-minute film one of the things I think ended up getting cut mostly was the approach to the climb we had to pioneer a new approach up this forested valley, which meant hellacious Alaskan bushwhacking for days – and that for me was the most arduous part of the whole trip, and that was kind of a big surprise I didn’t know that that part of the trip was going to be actually in some ways harder than the climb itself.”

Honnold joined in to concur, “Yeah physically it was way harder. Through the bush we were doing one mile every two hours of like, hard, hard effort that’s like basically a quarter or sixth of the speed you would normally travel while backpacking.”

The Devil’s Climb can be streamed on Nat Geo, Hulu and Disney+.

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