When 21-year-old Lincoln Knowles spoke with GearJunkie this week, he had (of course) just finished another morning of climbing without a rope. He was attempting a two-pitch climb in Salt Lake City’s Little Cottonwood Canyon, but decided to bail halfway up after a hornet stung his hand.
“I realized I wasn’t mentally prepared, so I came back down,” he said. “I was worried if my hand was going to swell up … It was kind of exhilarating.”
Over the last year, this young crusher from the flat plains of Kansas has made himself into a social media star — primarily for dangerous climbing stunts that cause consternation (and even condemnation) from much of the climbing community.
A quick perusal of his Instagram page reveals why: Knowles doesn’t just climb big walls and buildings without a rope — he often films himself during these stunts, explaining his predicament into his smartphone while perched or hanging hundreds of feet off the ground.
In one video, Knowles smokes a joint while free soloing a moderately difficult route (5.10b). Another post sees him hanging by one hand from a massive water tower, his tongue out and the other hand raised in a rock-and-roll salute.
In yet another, he promised to scale a 150-foot building “before getting arrested.”
It’s not so much that Knowles is doing anything radically different than other free soloists. After all, Alex Honnold (one of Knowles’s inspirations) won an Oscar for a documentary about his ascent of El Capitan’s 3,000-foot face without a rope. Similarly, many other climbers, including phenoms like Seb Bouin, have spent time free soloing buildings.
More than anything, it seems to be Knowles’s provocative attitude that’s causing a stir. In a long interview with GearJunkie, Knowles said he just wants to climb, and he sees social media as his best bet for funding a full-time, outdoor lifestyle that’s the dream of many a young crusher. With his social media accounts booming in 2025, he may already have arrived.
A Gen Z Climber
Like so many of Gen Z, Knowles has difficulty drawing a clear distinction between the persona he embodies in his social media accounts and the person he is in real life.
In many of his videos, he’s “trolling” his online audience in order to provoke interest, Knowles said. He knows he’s doing something that “most people will see and get a little bit annoyed or angry.” That includes videos like “free soloing every day until I fall,” (another troll-like experiment that did not, in fact, end with him taking a fall).
“They’ve never seen someone smoking a joint on a 5.10 free solo before ‘cause in their mind it should be taken seriously,” he said. “A lot of videos portray that I have a feeling of invincibility. It’s a juxtaposition of this guy who seems like he doesn’t care, but really he’s in this insane predicament that most people would die if they tried to do it.”
Knowles maintains that he’s more careful than his online braggadocio might suggest. On his YouTube account, he made a video explaining how he prepares for free soloing difficult, 5.11 climbs. He also decided that he won’t film himself climbing grades harder than 5.10c (though he still breaks this rule if he finds a safe perch on a multipitch climb).
At the same time, his nonchalant attitude toward life-or-death climbing hijinks isn’t just an act: He genuinely thinks videos about smoking while climbing are “cool and fun.”
“I’m kind of leaning into the surrealism side. Social media is already fake,” he said. “So these are just the most outlandish moments of my life.”
Precedence in Climbing History
Knowles’s outrageous behavior has clearly struck a nerve among climbers. In a lengthy feature story this week for Climbing Magazine, writer Owen Clarke included the thoughts (and judgments) of fellow climbers like Honnold, who called Knowles’s approach to free soloing “deeply unhealthy.” A popular climbing podcast also took issue with Knowles’s “rage bait free solo videos.”
But for those familiar with the history of rock climbing, Knowles’s attitude is hardly novel. The Stone Monkeys, a group of Yosemite rock climbers in the 1970s, were well known for taking drugs while scaling big walls and taking unnecessary risks just because they could. Before them, Warren Harding became a legend for his big-wall ascents, often with a bottle of wine in his hand while hanging thousands of feet above Yosemite Valley.
The difference, of course, is that none of those people climbed in the age of social media. When I asked Knowles about Harding, one of climbing’s more famous dirtbags, he leapt on the comparison.
“Warren Harding was literally fighting poverty and homelessness and still managing to do these incredible things,” Knowles said. “I think if he saw there was a way to not eat cat food, and just post videos in a provocative manner, he would do it.”
Clarke ends his Climbing Magazine piece by lecturing Knowles about his responsibility to the young and impressionable minds that may see his videos.
“Surely you have more to offer the world than ‘rage bait and shock value’,” Clarke writes. “I’m grateful I’m not a kid today, scrolling Instagram, being introduced to climbing by Lincoln Knowles.”
Posting to Resist Social Media?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Knowles doesn’t agree that he’s somehow responsible for the behavior of those who watch his videos.
“If you see the movie Free Solo, and it inspires you to go free solo — you’re a very risk-tolerant person if that’s your reaction to that,” he said.
But it’s Knowles’s strange relationship to online judgment that may confound understanding from older generations. Like so many of the free soloists who came before him, Knowles says it’s important to maintain mental distance from negativity.
I asked him how that’s possible when he’s courting that judgment through social media posts. He described it like weight training for the mind.
“If the point is to not care what other people think, then you have to have a lot of people think about you and hate you,” he said.
He likes to call his attitude “free will maxxing” — his modern verbiage for the radical freedom sought by 20-somethings since time immemorial.
“We live on a floating rock. You can climb a mountain, listen to rap music, and defy death every day and no one can stop you.”
Knowing the Risks
Knowles says he understands that free soloing is a sport with massive risks. He knows that most of the discipline’s most famous climbers have died on the wall doing what they loved.
Earlier this year, another provocative social media influencer, Eugene Vahin, died while ice climbing. Knowles claims to have made his peace with the danger, though “external pressure and fear of death” have been his main thoughts lately, he said.
In the last few months, he’s made more money than ever before, mainly through ad revenue from Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. If someone came along and promised to fund his lifestyle, Knowles would love to give up on social media and just focus on his passion, he said. Until then, he has no plans to slow down.
“The price that I’ve paid is that I can’t be taken seriously. But the positive is that now I can do what I love to do,” he said.
