What’s It Like to Climb a Skyscraper?

Few climbers take on this niche pursuit, where one mistake could mean death. Three of them talk about its unique mental and physical demands.Alain Robert, known as the “French Spider-Man,” climbing Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, in 2011.Credit...Emmanuel Aguirre/Getty ImagesWhat’s It Like to Climb a Skyscraper?Few climbers take on this niche pursuit, where one mistake could mean death. Three of them talk about its unique mental and physical demands.Alain Robert, known as the “French Spider-Man,” climbing Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, in 2011.Credit...Emmanuel Aguirre/Getty ImagesSKIP Jan. 23, 2026Dan Goodwin’s left shoulder felt like it was on fire and his right hand was covered in blisters by the time he finished climbing one side of Toronto’s CN Tower in 1986. Back then, it was the tallest structure in the world.“I was terrified,” he said, recalling the day he reached the base of the tower’s observation deck, 1,100 feet above a crowd of onlookers and with no rope, harness or other safety equipment. “Every move had to be perfect.”On Saturday, Alex Honnold, a rock climber who was the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary “Free Solo,” will attempt to get everything right when he climbs Taipei 101, a 1,667-foot-tall skyscraper in Taiwan, without a rope. With Netflix livestreaming the climb, this niche pursuit has never received such global publicity before.Scaling skyscrapers is not like rock climbing or going up smaller buildings. Those in the club of just a dozen or so known skyscraper climbers worldwide say it has unique and intense physical and mental demands.ImageA crowd waited for Dan Goodwin at the top of the John Hancock Center in Chicago in 1981. Police officers were also waiting there to arrest him.Credit...Focht/Associated PressochtIt is also a largely underground sport because it is usually illegal. Alain Robert, a Frenchman who has scaled some 200 buildings since the 1990s, mostly with his bare hands, said that he has been arrested more than 170 times.“You feel like you’re literally in a movie,” Mr. Robert said, with “cops that are trying to catch the bad guy climbing the building.”The obvious risks make it rare for someone to obtain permission to climb a tall building like Mr. Honnold did. “I’ve never been willing to get arrested,” the 40-year-old said in a recent podcast.Unlike the serene natural landscape surrounding climbers on routes like El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, which Mr. Honnold scaled in 2017, skyscraper climbers must overcome urban noise, crowds and, occasionally, police officers determined to arrest them.“You feel like King Kong in the city,” said Titouan Leduc, 24, a French climber who scaled Warsaw’s Varso Tower, the tallest skyscraper in the European Union, last year. He was briefly arrested after that.ImageTitouan Leduc climbing the Varso Tower in Warsaw last year. “You feel like King Kong in the city,” he said.Credit...Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThose who have climbed skyscrapers say their bodies face different demands compared with rock climbing. According to Mr. Goodwin, 70, it mainly comes down to repetitiveness versus variety.On a rock face, each move presents a new puzzle: climbers’ hands search for different holds — crimps, jugs, slopers — and they constantly adapt their bodies. But along the side of a building, climbers repeat the same few movements hundreds of times to pass over dozens of stories of windows, steel bars and concrete gaps.“You can do a pull-up and think it’s not all too bad, but try doing 20, 50, 100,” Mr. Goodwin said. “Doing the same kind of move over and over and over — it can really tax your muscles and fingers.”Over decades, Mr. Robert, 63, developed his own system for rating buildings based on how difficult they are to climb. A building’s grips mattered more than its height, he said.He gave the Brooklyn Bridge a difficulty rating of two out of 10 after climbing it in 1994. He gave the same rating to the Eiffel Tower, which he scaled with his bare hands in 1996. “It’s really like a ladder,” he said of the Paris landmark.He was also the last person to climb Taipei 101, in 2004, then the tallest building in the world. He completed the climb just days after having surgery on his left elbow, in heavy rain and with a top rope, which he said the authorities had required.Mr. Robert gave Taipei 101 a rating of six.ImageAlex Honnold will attempt to climb the Taipei 101 skyscraper without a rope.Credit...Chiangying-Ying/Associated PressIn contrast, the small gaps on the surface of the Sydney Opera House, which he climbed in 1997 and rated as a seven, allowed him to hold on only with his fingertips.In 1999, Mr. Robert scaled what he said was one of the most difficult buildings he had ever climbed, rating it a nine: the Sears Tower, now called the Willis Tower, in Chicago. He gave the Burj Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates, the world’s tallest building, the same grade after climbing it in 2011.The most difficult building he ever encountered? A relatively humble 44-story office building west of Paris in 1998. He said the only way up the Framatome, now called the Tour Areva, is by jamming one’s fingers into a vertical groove between glass panels. Halfway through that climb, he said, the crack unexpectedly became so narrow that his fingers could barely fit.“It’s like your entire life is hanging at the tip of your finger,” he said. He rated that difficulty a 10.ImageAlex Honnold training inside his home gym in Las Vegas earlier this month.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York TimesSome climbers said they were concerned that Mr. Honnold’s climb, carried live on Netflix, would encourage reckless, untrained attempts.“My message to kids: Don’t do it,” Mr. Goodwin said. “Unless you’re a world-class climber like Alex Honnold and Alain Robert, unless you have that ability, it’s a suicide mission.”For others, the danger keeps them going.“The only way I felt alive was when I was risking my life,” Mr. Robert said, adding that he might try climbing another building in the coming weeks.John Yoon is a Times reporter based in Seoul who covers breaking and trending news.SKIP