Background and career
Alexander J Honnold (born August 17, 1985) is an American rock climber best known for his free solo ascents of big wall climbing routes. Honnold rose to worldwide fame in June 2017 when he became the first person to free solo a full climbing route on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park via the 880-metre (2,900 ft) big-wall route known as Freerider at the technical grade of 5.13a, which was the first-ever big-wall free-solo ascent at that grade, a climb described in The New York Times as "one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever". In 2015, he won a Piolet d'Or in alpine climbing with Tommy Caldwell for their completion of the enchainment (known as the Fitz Traverse) of the Cerro Chaltén Group (or Fitzroy Group) in Patagonia over five days. On January 25, 2026, he free soloed the Taipei 101 tower in Taipei, Taiwan, the tallest buildering free solo climb in history and graded at circa 5.11. Honnold is the author (with David Roberts) of the memoir Alone on the Wall (2015) and the subject of the 2018 biographical documentary Free Solo, which won an Academy Award and a BAFTA.
Honnold was born on August 17, 1985, in Sacramento, California. His mother, Dierdre Wolownick (b. 1951), is a community college professor. His father was Charles Honnold (1949–2004). His paternal roots are German, and his maternal roots are Polish. He started climbing in a climbing gym at the age of 5 and was climbing "many times a week" by age 10. He participated in many national and international youth climbing championships as a teenager. "I was never, like, a bad climber [as a kid], but I had never been a great climber, either," he says. "There were a lot of other climbers who were much, much stronger than me, who started as kids and were, like, instantly freakishly strong – like they just have a natural gift. And that was never me. I just loved climbing, and I've been climbing all the time ever since, so I've naturally gotten better at it, but I've never been gifted." After graduating from Mira Loma High School as part of the International Baccalaureate Programme in 2003, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to study civil engineering. His maternal grandfather died, his parents divorced during his first year of college, and Honnold skipped many of his classes to boulder by himself at Indian Rock.
Honnold dropped out of Berkeley and spent time living at home and driving around California to go climbing. "I'd wound up with my mom's old minivan, and that was my base," he said. "I'd use it to drive to Joshua Tree to climb or I'd drive to LA to see my girlfriend. I destroyed that van fairly quickly; it died on me one day, and for the next year, I lived just on my bicycle and in a tent." In 2007, he bought a 2002 Ford Econoline E150 van, which allowed him to focus on climbing and following the weather. According to a 2011 Alpinist profile:
In the mind of the climbing world, Honnold emerged from the goo fully formed. In 2006 nobody had heard of him. In 2007 he free soloed Yosemite's Astroman and the Rostrum in a day, matching Peter Croft's legendary 1987 feat, and suddenly Honnold was pretty well-known. A year later, he free soloed the 1,200-foot (366m), 5.12d finger crack that splits Zion's Moonlight Buttress. The ascent was reported on April 1. For days, people thought the news was a joke. Five months afterward, Honnold took the unprecedented step of free soloing the 2,000-foot (610m), glacially bulldozed Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome. Croft called this climb the most impressive ropeless ascent ever done. He gained mainstream recognition after his 2008 free solo of the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome was featured in the film Alone on the Wall and a subsequent 60 Minutes interview. In November 2011, Honnold and Hans Florine missed setting the speed climbing record on the famous Nose big-wall crack climbing route on Yosemite's El Capitan by 45 seconds. At the time the record stood at 2:36:45, as set by Dean Potter & Sean Leary in November 2010. On June 17, 2012, Honnold and Florine set a new record of 2:23:46 (or 2:23:51) on that same route.
In November 2014, Clif Bar announced that they would no longer sponsor Honnold, along with Dean Potter, Steph Davis, Timmy O'Neill and Cedar Wright. "We concluded that these forms of the sport are pushing boundaries and taking the element of risk to a place where we as a company are no longer willing to go," the company wrote in an open letter. In 2016, he was subjected to functional magnetic resonance imaging scans that revealed that, like other high sensation seekers, his amygdala barely activates when watching disturbing images. He however confesses feeling fear occasionally. Through imagination and practice, he has desensitized himself to most fearful situations.
On June 3, 2017, he made the first-ever free solo ascent of El Capitan by completing Alex Huber's 884 m (2,900 ft) big-wall crack climbing route, Freerider (5.13a VI), in 3 hours and 56 minutes. The climb, described as "one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever," was documented by climber and photographer Jimmy Chin and documentary filmmaker E. Chai Vasarhelyi, as the subject of the documentary Free Solo. Among other awards, the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (2018). On June 6, 2018, Honnold teamed up with Tommy Caldwell to break the Nose on El Capitan speed record in Yosemite. They completed the approximately 914 m (3,000 ft) route in 1:58:07, becoming the first climbers to complete it in under two hours.
