Alex Honnold, a 33-year-old free climber who scales the world’s tallest rock faces without rope or harness or anything else that might keep him from plummeting to an inconceivably awful demise, doesn’t have trouble justifying what he does for a living. “Anyone can conceivably die on any given day,” he said. He’s not wrong. But, on any given day, Honnold makes sure that he has a much higher chance of dying than the rest of us. On some June or July mornings, before most people are awake, Honnold has already climbed thousands of feet in the air and entrusted his existence to a bump of granite the size of his big toe.
It’s hard to imagine why someone would choose…