Alex Honnold: Ben Mayforth on a Growth Mindset
November 1, 2024
This is the latest episode of Climbing Gold with Alex Honnold. Ben Mayforth’s strength is a sight to behold. The professional paraclimber’s social clips of campusing…
Professional Rock Climber, Star of the Academy Award-Winning Documentary, "Free Solo", Star of the Disney+ Earth Day special "Explorer: The Last Tepui", Podcast Host of Planet Visionaries and Climbing Gold
Alex Honnold is a professional rock climber whose audacious free-solo ascents of America’s biggest cliffs have made him one of the most recognized and followed climbers in the world. The pinnacle of his career and maybe also the sport of climbing, as captured in the Academy Award winning film, Free Solo, was his 2017 rope-less climb of El Capitan in Yosemite, an accomplishment which The New York Times called “one of the greatest athletic feats of any kind, ever.”
Alex Honnold is a professional rock climber whose audacious free-solo ascents of America’s biggest cliffs have made him one of the most recognized and followed climbers in the world. A gifted but hard-working athlete, Honnold is distinguished for his uncanny ability to control his fear while scaling cliffs of dizzyingly heights without a rope to protect him if he falls. His humble, self-effacing attitude toward such extreme risk has earned him the nickname Alex “No Big Deal” Honnold.
This Sacramento, California-native’s most celebrated achievements include the first and only free-solos of the Moonlight Buttress (5.12d, 1,200 feet) in Zion National Park, Utah, and the Northwest Face (5.12a) of Half Dome (2,200 feet), Yosemite, California. In 2012 he achieved Yosemite’s first “Triple Solo”: climbing, in succession, the National Park’s three largest faces—Mt. Watkins, Half Dome and El Capitan—alone, and in under 24 hours. In 2017 Alex completed the first and only free-solo of El Capitan’s “Freerider” route (5.13a, 3,000 feet), a historic accomplishment which has been hailed by many as one of the greatest sporting achievements of our time. The story of this feat was told in the Academy Award winning documentary, FREE SOLO. Whether climbing with a rope or without, Honnold believes climbing is a fantastic vehicle for adventure, an opportunity to seek out those high-test moments with uncertain outcomes in which you’re forced to push through to survive.
Though Honnold often downplays his achievements, his rope-less climbs have attracted the attention of broad and stunned audience. He has been profiled by 60 Minutes and the New York Times, featured on the cover of National Geographic, appeared in international television commercials and starred in numerous adventure films including the Emmy-nominated “Alone on the Wall.” He is the founder of the Honnold Foundation, an environmental non-profit.
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