Watch This Rock Climber Scale San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts

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Professional rock climber Alex Honnold is famously fearless. He’s a free solo climber, which means he climbs without ropes or protective gear of any kind. He’s the only known person to complete a solo climb of the Yosemite Triple Crown, and he’s constantly seeking out new, unthinkable adventures.

In this video from Stride Health, Honnold is filmed conquering a totally new kind of challenge: San Francisco’s buildings. He scales the Palace of Fine Arts—a monumental structure covered in carvings, built in 1915—as well as a pretty nondescript San Francisco apartment building. The sight is surreal in its incongruity, and completely breathtaking. Rather than calculating the strength of rock outcroppings, he tests the sturdiness of the apartment building’s decorative facade; instead of charting a route up the face of a cliff, he makes difficult transitions between several stone columns. Even Honnold seems to sense the strangeness of his accomplishment—after climbing the Palace of Fine Arts, he describes the sense of awe he felt, looking into the eyes of the sculptures around him as he climbed.

[h/t: The Atlantic]

Images via YouTube.