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What Will Alex Honnold Climb Next

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Upgrade your lifestyleDigital Trends helps readers keep tabs on the fast-paced world of tech with all the latest news, fun product reviews, insightful editorials, and one-of-a-kind sneak peeks. Like certain types of holds might cut your finger and then for the rest of the climb, you’ll be leaving a bloodstain. Puffy, red-purple, and sometimes painful toes were one of the odder symptoms seen early in the pandemic. But experts are debating their cause—and whether COVID-19 is even to blame. Just above the last few moves, Jimmy Chin’s film crew had set up two remote video cameras on tripods to film Honnold. The crack slowly widened into the “Monster Offwidth,” a 200-foot section where the fracture in the stone is gaping enough that Honnold could’ve fit one of his legs into it and one of his arms, too, up to his shoulder.

“It was just me donating money to environmental projects that I found inspiring.” “The thing is,” he says, “I never had to rob anybody. I grew up in middle-class California. Totally comfortable. I’ve never been in a position where I felt I should take something from somebody. I never needed to.” The hardest free solo multi pitch was when Alex Honnold solo’d “Freerider” on El Cap. The pitches vary in difficulty with the hardest being 5.12d and 5.13a with the “boulder problem” crux of just a few incredibly specific moves. Alex Honnold earns around $200,000 a year, although he’s likely earned more from the release of Free Solo.

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Of course, as soon as the person let go with the one hand, they barn-doored in the rushing wind and off they went! Using one’s evolved brain, it’s quite straightforward to avoid serious injury while climbing. We all face uncertainty, just like Alex, and we are all prepared for this uncertainty. Above that, each of us have the tools to thrive in our environments already.

I was totally not bothered, even though I thought I’d be quite scared. If he started freaking out, you’d be like, “Oh shit,” but he doesn’t do that. I’ve worked with a lot of soloists— Marc-André and Ueli Steck—and I’ve lost a lot of the climbers I used to work with.

Honnold was born in Sacramento, California, the son of community college professors Dierdre Wolownick (b. 1953) and 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.

Join us to hear the voices and stories of climbing’s past and future. A podcast hosted by Alex Honnold and created by Duct Tape Then Beer. “I’ve sort of committed myself to a path. And so you just sort of lose that feeling of freedom a bit.”

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Free soloing is the most dangerous form of climbing, and is only done by the elite of the sport. Most world-class climbers, particularly athletes like Adam Ondra or Alex Megos at the forefront of roped sport climbing, tend to move fast on the wall, racing against the slow build of lactic acid in the forearms. Despite holding multiple Yosemite speed records, Honnold is a marathon man. In the gym at least, Honnold climbs slowly, deliberately — focusing on perfect technique.

They’d be eating dust, dislodging wheels stuck in sand. It didn’t take long for Honnold to realize his mother,Dierdre Wolownick, also an accomplished rock climber and marathoner, probably wasn’t going to receive one. In some ways the diversity makes perfect sense. His is the schedule of a celebrity and, in 2019, Honnold is without doubt the most famous rock climber on the planet. Black-haired and dark-eyed, he squints purposefully, scrolling on a busted iPhone SE he has no interest in replacing. A man engrossed in the process of trying to find the perfect equilibrium on a friend’s rocking chair in Salt Lake City.

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He smiles and dangles from the rope, 75 or so feet high, and unties his shoes. He is belayed down, like cargo, and when his feet touch the ground, he smiles and raises his pumped arms into a bodybuilder’s flex. His chest is sweaty, his hands white and rough-he punctured a hole in one of his fingers on the climb-but he’s happy. Others could climb this cliff faster and prettier-indeed, when he watches video of it later he’s surprised at how slow he was-but he just climbed something he’s never done before. It was a milestone, even if it won’t be featured at a film festival, and as always, he responds to throttled fear with throttled enthusiasm. After he summited El Cap, he said he was “so delighted.” Today’s climb was, he says, “pretty satisfying.”

Honnold says he likes tall, long routes and that he tries to do them quickly. He is the author of the memoir Alone on the Wall and the subject of the 2018 biographical documentary Free Solo, which won a BAFTA and an Academy Award. Honnold is sponsored by The North Face, Black Diamond, La Sportiva, Ando and Stride Health and is a board member of El Cap Climbing Gyms. He is the founder of the Honnold Foundation, an environmental non-profit.

He offered to sleep on the floor rather than buy a bed. He wanted a small and unsexy fridge, white plastic instead of stainless steel. After they bought the house, he still slept in — still preferred — the van. Tahoe doesn’t offer much by way of climbing, but it does offer the lakeside sunsets stamped in Honnold’s memory of an otherwise “melancholic” childhood growing up outside Sacramento. He was a smart but socially awkward “dark soul” of a kid, unmotivated except for a love for going up things. He bought the family cabin, he says, because he wants it to remain the family cabin.

On December 25, 2019, Honnold announced, via social media, that he and McCandless were engaged. On September 13, 2020, Honnold announced via Instagram that he and McCandless had married.On September 12, 2021, he and McCandless announced they were expecting a baby girl. On February 17, 2022, Honnold and McCandless welcomed their daughter, June. Dierdre Wolownick, Alex Honnold’s mother, started climbing at age 60 and is the oldest woman to climb El Capitan . To promote the film directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Chin, Honnold traveled around for months, which meant putting his outdoor climbing pursuits on the backburner. Along the way, he met some big names — Prince William, actor Bradley Cooper — and lost some privacy.

In the 90s, a climbing friend was choosing a new set of shoes when I bumped into him in the gear shop. His consider/ reject criterion was if he could twist the soles of a pair together and they’d stick well enough to support the weight of the free shoe. If they didn’t do that, he just didn’t consider them.

He participated in many national and international youth climbing championships as a teenager. There are a few climbers amongst the younger people in my company. None of them have ever climbed on real rock. I find that a little bit sad, especially as we live in one of the few English cities that has good access to reasonable crags. “Everybody comes out of the film taking what they want. They cherry-pick the lesson they want, cherry-pick the personality traits they want. Everybody chooses their own adventure.” Alex Honnold isn’t resting on his laurels, instead he’s continuing to push speedy free-solos and establish big wall routes.

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