Alex Honnold is an American professional rock climber who has defied the odds in his sport. In this article, we will discuss Alex Honnold’s net worth, early life, climbing career, and personal life.
Alex Honnold Net Worth
Alex Honnold’s net worth is $2 million as of 2021. His income comes from his successful climbing career, sponsorships, and his nonprofit organization, the Honnold Foundation.
Early Life
Alex Honnold was born on August 17th, 1985, in Sacramento, California. Both of his parents worked as community college professors. He began rock climbing at a gym by the age of five and showed his commitment to the sport by going to the gym several times a week at the age of ten. He won various rock climbing competitions as a teenager, but his first year of college at the University of California, Berkeley, was challenging. After taking a semester off to train for the National Climbing Championships in Scotland, he did not return to college. Instead, he spent time traveling around California and living off less than $1,000 a month from 2004 to 2009.
Climbing Career
Although Honnold had been climbing in competitions for most of his life, he was relatively unknown even in the climbing community until around 2007. In that year, he free soloed Yosemite Valley’s Astroman and Rostrum in a single day, which was a feat only matched by climber Peter Croft in 1987. It was only after this accomplishment that he gained more widespread recognition in the climbing community. The next year, he free soloed a 1,200-foot-tall finger crack that splits Zion’s Moonlight Buttress. Later in 2008, Honnold free soloed the 2,000-foot-tall Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome in Yosemite, and in 2012, he set a new record for fastest ascent at one hour and twenty-two minutes.
By 2009, Honnold had achieved a degree of fame in the climbing community and signed a three-year contract, but he remained relatively unknown to the public at large. In 2010, he received a Golden Piton Award for endurance rock climbing. He was beginning to receive more recognition outside of the climbing community in 2011, when he was featured on the cover of National Geographic. In the winter of that year, he attempted to beat the record for fastest climb of El Capitan but missed the mark by just 45 seconds.
In 2012, Honnold gained mainstream recognition after appearing on “60 Minutes” to talk about his free solo climb of the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome. He was also featured in the documentary climbing film “Alone on the Wall,” and together with fellow climber Hans Florine, he set a new record of 2 hours, 23 minutes, and 46 seconds for the fastest ascent of El Capitan in June of that year. In 2014, Honnold was featured in the documentary about the evolution of rock climbing in Yosemite Park titled “Valley Uprising.”
On June 3rd, 2017, Honnold made the first free solo ascent of El Capitan via the 2,900-foot Freerider route. He completed the climb in 3 hours and 56 minutes, an impressive feat that was documented by climber and photographer Jimmy Chin as well as his wife documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. They released the documentary film “Free Solo” in 2018, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature that year.
Personal Life
In 2015, Honnold met Sanndi McCandless at a book signing, and they got engaged in late 2019. They married in September of 2020, and their relationship was one of the focal points of the documentary “Free Solo.” Honnold’s mother, Dierdre Wolownick, climbed El Capitan at age sixty-six, making her the oldest woman to have completed the climb.
Honnold is also an environmentalist. In 2012, he began giving a third of his income away to fund solar projects to increase energy availability worldwide. He expanded this into the nonprofit the Honnold Foundation, which promotes and supports the use of solar energy in developing nations.
Conclusion
Alex Honnold is an exceptional climber who has managed to make a name for himself in his sport. Despite the inherent risks, he has made history with his free solo climbs. While his net worth may not be as impressive as others on this list, his accomplishments and contributions to the world are worth more than their weight in gold.
