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Alex Honnold isn’t just an accomplished rock climber. He is one of the most daring free solo climbers around, scaling everything from gigantic rock formations to skyscrapers — without any safeguards.
Free solo climbing is a type of climbing that forgoes any safety equipment beyond climbing shoes and climbing chalk. That means no ropes, no harness, no anything.
Honnold is ready to electrify viewers on Friday, January 23, when he attempts to climb Taipei 101, a 101-story Taiwan skyscraper that is the 11th tallest building in the world. Netflix will air the event in a broadcast it has dubbed Skyscraper Live.
Honnold has been training for the stunt for months, and even downplayed the risk in a Thursday, January 22 interview with the AP.
“I don’t think it’ll be that extreme,” Honnold said. “We’ll see. I think it’s the perfect sweet spot where it’s hard enough to be engaging for me and obviously an interesting climb.”
Keep scrolling for everything to know about Alex Honnold.
Alex Honnold Started Climbing When He Was 5 Years Old
Born in 1985, Alex Honnold has been climbing for almost his entire life. He began in a climbing gym at age 5, often with the help of his dad. He told The New York Times in 2015 that he and his father spent “like, a million hours” in gyms all over California.
By the time he was a teenager, he was competing in national and international youth climbing championships.
Alex Honnold Was the Subject of the 2018 Netflix Documentary ‘Free Solo’
Jimmy Chin, Alex Honnold, and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
The 2018 documentary Free Solo tracked Alex Honnold’s attempt to be the first person to ever free solo climb El Capitan, a vertical rock formation in California’s Yosemite National Park. The film followed his training and the actual attempt, which came in June 2017.
Free Solo received critical acclaim, winning seven Primetime Emmy Awards in 2019.
Alex Honnold Married Fellow Climber Sanni McCandless
Alex Honnold and Sanni McCandless met in November 2015 when McCandless and some friends went to see Honnold speak on his book tour. They were dating soon after, and she was a prominent character in the Free Solo documentary. The two announced their engagement in 2019 and got married in September 2020.
The Pair Shares 2 Daughters
Alex Honnold, Sanni McCandless, and daughters June and Alice Courtesy of Alex Honnold/Instagram
Alex Honnold and Sanni McCandless welcomed daughters June in 2022 and Alice in 2024.
He told The Cut in a story published the day of Skyscraper Live that he is not any more worried about the risks of his job now that he has kids.
“I mean, implicit in the question is that I have more to live for, and, yeah, I have more to live for, and I’m still doing my very best to not die,” he said.
Honnold continued, “No one’s encouraging me to do harder things. Everyone’s kind of like, ‘Why don’t you stay at home, play with the kids?’ So it means that if I’m going to do something, I have to be really psyched about it.”
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Alex Honnold Spent a Decade Living in a Van
A true outdoorsman, Alex Honnold spent a decade living in a van and, as he put it, going “basically wherever the weather is good.”
“It’s not like I love living in a car, but I love living in all these places,” he explained to GQ in a video published in 2020. “I love being able to follow good conditions all over. And be relatively comfortable as I do it. And so that pretty much necessitates living in a car … If I could, like, miraculously teleport a house from place to place, I’d prefer to live in a nice comfortable house.”
The van, however, has one thing going for it — literally everything is within arm’s reach.
“Sometimes you get put up in a really classy hotel room, and it’s really big, and you have to walk quite a ways to the bathroom, and you’re like, ‘Man, I wish I had my [pee] bottle,’” he said. “Who wants to walk all the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night when you could just lean over and grab your bottle and go?”
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