"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 November 2014, Clif Bar announced that they would no longer sponsor Honnold, along with Dean Potter, Steph Davis, Timmy O'Neill and Cedar Wright. On June 17, 2012, Honnold and Florine set a new record of 2:23:46 (or 2:23:51 ) on that same route. At the time the record stood at 2:36:45, as set by Dean Potter & Sean Leary in November 2010. In November 2011, Honnold and Hans Florine missed setting the record time on the Nose route on Yosemite's El Capitan by 45 seconds. He gained mainstream recognition after his 2008 solo of the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome was featured in the film Alone on the Wall and a subsequent 60 Minutes interview. Croft called this climb the most impressive ropeless ascent ever done.
Five months afterward, Honnold took the unprecedented step of free soloing the 2,000-foot (610m), glacially bulldozed Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome. For days, people thought the news was a joke.
A year later, he free soloed the 1,200-foot (366m), 5.12d finger crack that splits Zion's Moonlight Buttress. 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. In the mind of the climbing world, Honnold emerged from the goo fully formed.
In 2007, he bought a 2002 Ford Econoline E150 van, which allowed him to focus on climbing and follow the weather. 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." "I'd use it to drive to Joshua Tree to climb or I'd drive to LA to see my girlfriend. "I'd wound up with my mom's old minivan, and that was my base," he said. He dropped out of Berkeley and spent time living at home and driving around California to go climbing. His maternal grandfather died and his parents got divorced during his first year of college, and Honnold skipped many of his classes to boulder by himself at Indian Rock.
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." Īfter 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. "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. "I was never, like, a bad climber, but I had never been a great climber, either," he says.
He participated in many national and international youth climbing championships as a teenager. He started climbing in a climbing gym at the age of 5 and was climbing "many times a week" by age 10. His paternal roots are German and his maternal roots are Polish. Honnold was born in Sacramento, California, the son of community college professors Dierdre Wolownick (b.