Alex Honnold

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 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. He described the experience as "heinous. ... I didn't live in a dorm. We had a family friend who let me sublet his two-bedroom apartment in town. In my one year at Berkeley, I never met anybody. I never spoke to anybody."

In 2007, he bought a 2002 Ford Econoline E150 van, allowing him to focus on climbing and follow the weather.

In November 2011, Honnold and Hans Florine missed setting the record time on the Nose 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, the two set a new record of 2:23:46 (or 2:23:51) on that same route.

In 2012, Honnold started giving away one-third of his income to solar projects that increased energy access world-wide. Soon, this idea expanded to form the Honnold Foundation. The Honnold Foundation's mission is "promoting solar energy for a more equitable world.".

In November 2014, Clif Bar announced that they would no longer sponsor Honnold, along with four other climbers, mostly free soloists. "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.

Honnold met Sanni McCandless at a book signing in 2015; they became a couple soon after. Sanni and her relationship with Honnold feature prominently in Free Solo. On December 25, 2019, Honnold announced, via social media, that he and McCandless are engaged. On September 13th 2020, Honnold announced via Instagram that he had married McCandless.

On June 3, 2017, he made the first free solo ascent of El Capitan, completing the 2,900-foot Freerider route (5.12d VI) in 3 hours and 56 minutes. The feat, 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).

In 2017, Honnold bought a home in the Las Vegas area. "I didn't have any furniture at first, so I lived in the van in the driveway for the first couple weeks. It felt more like home than an empty house did." Around the same time, he replaced the Ford Econoline van he had lived in since 2007 and put 200,000 miles on with a new 2016 Ram ProMaster, which he still lives and travels in for most of the year.

On June 6, 2018, Honnold teamed up with Tommy Caldwell to break the speed record for the Nose on El Capitan in Yosemite. They completed the approximately 3,000-foot route in 1:58:07, becoming the first climbers to complete the route in under two hours.