Meet Lincoln Knowles: Utah’s record-breaking free soloist

At the base of Rock Canyon in Provo, Utah, towers the tallest bolted big wall in North America. Squawstruck stretches 1,900 feet into the air and puts climbers through 22 continuous stretches of climbing, over half of which are classified as intermediate to advanced.

The vertical ascent ends atop Kyhv Peak (formerly Squaw), and the journey there is punctuated by roofs, ledges, loose rock and water-streaked limestone — and for the first time in recorded history, it was free soloed by 21-year-old Lincoln Knowles this summer.

On July 11, Knowles set out to climb Squawstruck for the third time, and he did it without gear. What usually takes a speedy climber at least 12 hours, Knowles did in just a little over four.

Knowles documented the feat on Instagram. Captioned, “Day 12 of Free Soloing a Harder Route Every Day Until I Fall,” Knowles caught the attention of the climbing work, including Alex Honnold, who famously free soloed El Capitan in Yosemite.

But who is Lincoln Knowles?

From Kansas, to China, to Kansas, to Utah

Knowles grew up in Shanghai and Kansas City with his younger brother Fletcher, his mom and an adventure-loving dad.

In an interview with the Deseret News, Knowles reminisced about racing behind his dad through golf courses on their ATVs, running from golf wardens. “He’d be like, ‘run, run,’” Knowles said, laughing. “He was just always doing mischievous stuff, but then when I started doing mischievous stuff too, he pretended like it came out of nowhere. But really it was just from him.”

Between basketball, diving and tennis practice, Knowles started spending time at climbing gyms and free soloing buildings and churches.

During a boating trip with friends in Arkansas, Knowles soloed his “first real rock.” It was 30 feet tall, and his friends were “freaking out.” The calm demeanor Knowles has is apparently not new, as he recalled, “I was like, ‘Guys, it’s like — just chill.’”

Once he finished high school, Knowles decided to go to the University of Utah to study computer science, but during a study abroad in Greece, Knowles said, somewhat facetiously, “I realized that I didn’t actually like school, and I just wanted to be an influencer.”

So Knowles has quit school for now and has been testing his success in Utah’s outdoor climbing world.

The complicated lead-up to feeling comfortable without a rope

It’s not unusual for Knowles to spend 12 hours at a crag, working the same route over and over again (with a Chick-fil-A lunch break in the middle).

“I’ll just like, scramble up to the top of whatever I want to climb,” he said. “Depending on how long it is, I’ll do certain sections, and I’m basically just listening to music, vibing, making sure I remember all the sequences.”

If he’s doing a 5.12 or higher (advanced grade), he’ll do 10 laps up and down and see if he gets tired.

For harder routes he doesn’t feel comfortable with yet, Knowles will set up a rope. “Sometimes I will purposefully make it so that if I fall, I’ll like fall almost to the ground but not die. It’s to train my brain for when a rope isn’t there, which is kind of insane,” he said.

When asked if he’s ever fallen at that stage in training, Knowles said, “No, I never fall. That’s why I am comfortable doing it.”

He continued, “If I know I’m about to be able to free solo it, I’ll do that stage first just to make sure that I can actually free solo and that I don’t randomly freak out.”

Knowles explained that having a rope near him, even if he’s not attached to it, is mentally reassuring during the lead-up process. If he feels scared while training, he won’t solo it that day. Instead, “I’ll just do like a bunch of laps, and then I’ll climb the gym. I’ll train a lot. I’ve been kind of over-climbing recently,” he said.

One of the most difficult parts in his process is pioneering new areas. “Sometimes there’ll be a route, and you have to solo a bunch of random dirt and stuff above it to get to the actual top and safety,” he explained. “So like today, I was up on this face — it was basically vertical, covered in trees and moss and loose rocks. And I was trying to traverse it. And then I was like, this probably is not gonna work."

What was it like to free solo Squawstruck?

The first time Knowles summited Squawstruck, he was a freshman at the University of Utah, and he did it with his friend Eli Smith. “We pitched out everything with a 40-meter rope. It took us 13 hours,” he said.

Then on the first warm day in February this year, Knowles went back to Rock Canyon alone with a daisy chain, which is basically a 3- or 4-foot leash that helps you anchor into bolts.

“I just skipped all the hard parts by clipping into the bolts, resting and then pulling on bolts,” he explained. The whole route felt doable, Knowles said, except for one move on the hardest part. “Realistically, I probably could have on-sight soloed it, but it would have just been so scary.”

After about six months, Knowles went back to the base of Squawstruck and ascended alone. “It was crazy,” he said. “Like, it just made me realize that I can do anything.”

Death, freedom and becoming the best

Free soloing is a perilous sport, and its heightened risk increases everything else about it.

“I just want to inspire people to have the freedom to not care what other people think and not be afraid of death,” he explained. “And if you’re gonna die, you have to live your life and do the things that you actually want to do instead of just doing things you think will keep you safe, and then having a bunch of things you wanted to do and never did.”

However, figuring out what really can and will make a person happy is no small feat, Knowles acknowledged. “If I wanted to become a really good soloist and be professional and be the best soloist to ever live, I would need to dedicate all my time,” he said. “And then it’s like, well, do I even really want that?”

“I always feel really good when I complete something that I’ve wanted to do for a while,” he continued. When he completes one of his project routes, he said he’ll be stoked about it for the next week.

But the expectations of free soloists in 2025 have naturally risen to the highest they’ve ever been. “When there’s someone ahead of you who does the same stuff you do, you just want to do everything they do,” he said. “But then it’s like, it’s not even your own goal. It’s their goal, right?”

“I need to be better than Alex Honnold was, which is like impossible,” he said.

Knowles’ divisive Instagram presence

But one thing Knowles has mastered that Honnold has not is “rage-baiting” kids on Instagram.

Knowles has curated an image of irony and self-deprecation on his account, which has over 82,000 followers. In most of his videos, he pokes fun at “influencer culture,” while being an influencer. He’ll sometimes even roast himself in the comment section from his personal account.

“I try not to take myself too seriously, because no one takes me seriously,” Knowles told the Deseret News.

For example, in a video Knowles captioned, “When you’re trying to lock in but your Spotify keeps playing trash😭," Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off” plays from his phone as he free solos hundreds of feet in the air with a GoPro strapped to his head. He down-climbs a few feet, takes his phone out of his pocket and starts playing “Wake ‘n Bake” by Kodak Black.

In many of his posts, it’s clear Knowles is playing a caricature, leaning into the reckless image of a free soloist. His online presence is loud and somewhat in your face, but in reality, Knowles is soft-spoken and thoughtful.

While many who engage with his online content egg him on, there are others who appear to be worried about him.

“Oh man, please be safe brother. You seem really experienced and really comfortable, no need to throw any bit of it away. Even if you survive a fall you’re losing something,” one commenter wrote on Day 2 of “Free Soloing Every Day Until I Fall.”

Another climber, Mary Catherine Eden (known as tradprincess), said, “Be careful out there ❤️ I think about my best friend who died soloing every day. His people love him so much, just like yours love you."

“Please stop. I can’t follow and support you in this quest. God speed,” another said.

But Knowles doesn’t seem to mind. He responded to the comment, “:( but I would love ur support, how bout just for a week.”

The ever-present climbing culture war

There has been a culture war in the climbing world since it rose to popularity in the mid-20th century, and Knowles’ reception by Climbing Magazine and others is evidence it is still alive and well.

In the early days of climbing in Yosemite, a rivalry arose between climbers Royal Robbins and Warren Harding (not the president): the former had deep philosophies about the ethics and spirit of climbing, while the latter saw it more as a personal adventure and a way of living counterculturally.

Robbins famously put up the first ascent of the face of Half Dome in 1957, and his alcoholic rival Harding put up the first ascent of the face of El Capitan the next year.

The pair took turns one-upping each other for a decade and a half, and then in 1970, Harding and his climbing partner spent 27 days making their way to the top of El Capitan’s 3,000-foot section, called the Wall of the Early Morning Light. About three weeks in, a storm halted any upward movement, and the Yosemite Park Service embarked on a rescue mission.

The pair only had candy bars and dried beef left in their food supply, but they threw down an old can with a note inside, declaring, “A rescue is unwarranted, unwanted, and will not be accepted.”

They made it to the top shortly after, and Robbins was furious, calling the route “contrived and artificial.” In 1971, Robbins began Harding’s route with a hammer and chisel and the intention of removing it from the wall. However, that night in his hammock, Robbins decided to stop chopping bolts and just climb the rest of Harding’s route out of respect for how difficult of a climb it was.

So far, Knowles’ Instagram is giving Warren Harding energy, and the purists are ticked.

Climbing “doesn’t have to be spiritual,” Knowles said. “Even though you can make anything spiritual or make skydiving spiritual, for example. Like you’re literally actively looking down at something that could kill you, and then you just do some backflips and lifts and stuff.”

The same sort of seriousness that surrounds freesoloing doesn’t seem to surround other adventure sports, like skydiving, he explained.

When asked why, Knowles reasoned, “It’s because climbers are pretentious, in their own words. But it’s also much slower, much chiller and more methodical.”

The self-taught outdoorsman

Knowles taught himself much, if not most, of what he knows how to do in the wild. He taught himself how to multi-pitch, how to climb trad (traditional climbing with nuts and cams) and how to ice climb.

As freshmen, Knowles and Smith (who he first climbed Squawstruck with) rented ice-climbing gear from Mountain Works and drove down to Spanish Fork Canyon to attempt the 60-foot Pricecicle.

Though they’d never done it before, it turned out just fine, and two days later, they climbed Provo Falls.

Knowles didn’t ice climb again until the next winter. He set out for Colorado, where he soloed 10 days of ice in a row. He’s now ice climbed Lincoln Falls by Breckenridge, Colorado, and The Great White Icicle near Salt Lake City.

Knowles joins a long history of the adventurous men of the West

In addition to climbing hard and long, Knowles has also been working on setting speed records.

In Big Cottonwood Canyon, he climbed Outside Corner (450 feet) in eight minutes and 42 seconds, bottom to top. He also climbed Steorts’ Ridge in four minutes and 55 seconds, adding to the climb’s near century-long history of ascents.

The legend goes that Lee Darwin Steorts, having just returned from World War II, set out with his friend Harold Goodro in Big Cottonwood Canyon to ascend a corner of the mountain that looked climbable.

Goodro stood at the base, holding a braided rope, and Steorts climbed with it tied around his waist. He wore metal-tipped work boots and lodged his own self-made gear in the cracks as he rose the 250 feet.

In his 89 years, Steorts survived the Second World War, survived a “near-drowning” in Yellowstone while he searched for a missing Boy Scout, and survived being “buried alive in an avalanche” during a backcountry ski trip with his fellow Mountain Club members, per his obituary in 2011. Steorts’ Ridge is his namesake and an homage to his lifetime of pioneering the Wasatch Mountains.

The most extreme forms of mountaineering have always brought on the question of why. As Jon Krakauer wrote about the early pioneers of Everest, the same can perhaps be said about free soloists. Soloing “has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.”

But for what reason does Knowles solo? When asked, he said, “You’re my horoscope, you tell me.”