Alex Honnold was halfway through a salad and fries at Souvla in Dogpatch when a woman who had been watching him from across the room made her move. She waited until he finished eating, then approached for a selfie. He obliged with a nod and smile. It didn’t matter — within minutes, he couldn’t take more than a few steps without someone else stopping him.

This is what life looks like for one of the world’s most celebrated free climbers. After the 2018 Oscar-winning documentary “Free Solo” made him a household name among climbing enthusiasts, a live Netflix broadcast of him scaling the Taipei 101 skyscraper (opens in new tab) in January introduced him to a broader audience.

“Turns out a lot of people watch Netflix,” he said. 

Even though he’s no longer living in a van (which he did for 10 years while camping out at climbing spots, including Yosemite), Honnold is always on the move. 

This week, the 40-year-old flew to Los Angeles, then to Dallas, and finally to San Francisco, where he went straight from the plane to the offices of Everpure (formerly known as Pure Storage) in Santa Clara on Wednesday morning for a corporate speaking event. Later, Honnold visited a girls school in Pacific Heights for a meet-and-greet with students and attended a business dinner near Union Square. 

But before those engagements, he had to get in his daily climb. So after motivating a room full of tech workers with his stories about perseverance and risk-taking, he took a Lyft to his favorite gym in town, Dogpatch Boulders. 

Honnold, who is from Sacramento and went to college in Berkeley, returned to the Bay Area this week to raise awareness for his eponymous foundation, which has been giving money to organizations dedicated to bringing solar energy to impoverished communities around the world since 2012. His visit included an appearance at SF Climate Week (opens in new tab), an annual gathering timed around Earth Day that brings together people and organizations focused on finding solutions to climate change. 

This time last year, the Honnold Foundation doubled its grant-making capacity thanks to a $5 million donation from San Francisco billionaire Chris Larsen. Their relationship started with a chance encounter when a mutual acquaintance introduced Larsen to Honnold after a screening of his nonprofit’s film “Our Children’s River (opens in new tab)” at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. The film spotlighted how solar-powered technologies transformed the lives of an Indigenous community in Ecuador. 

“You never know who you’ll meet here,” Honnold said of San Francisco. “Transformational change is always just around the corner.” 

As Honnold’s profile has risen over the years, so has the foundation’s roster of corporate donors, which now includes Rolex, Okta, Salesforce, and Baillie Gifford. Every year, the nonprofit gives away all the money it raises in the form of direct grants; Honnold pays the organization’s operating costs with his own income. On top of climbing skyscrapers for the internet, Honnold hosts a podcast (opens in new tab), partners with brands, and has speaking engagements. 

In a world where other philanthropists spend their careers accumulating wealth before investing in charitable causes to improve their reputations, Honnold stands out for having started his initiative 14 years ago, when he got his first six-figure paycheck for a Citibank commercial in which his face was shown for less than a second (opens in new tab). 

“That’s how misaligned our economy is,” Honnold said. “My sister was making $40,000 working her ass off as a teacher in Portland, and here I was getting paid way more for nothing.”

Since then, Honnold’s philosophy on wealth hasn’t changed. “You have money. You give it to people who need it. That simple,” he said with his signature deadpan look before warming up on a V5-level boulder. 

Back at Dogpatch Boulders, Honnold is powering through his two-hour climbing session. Dozens of people interrupt him for selfies, while others stand back and stare as he works through the gym’s most difficult bouldering routes — often, to their surprise, failing on his first attempt. His methodical problem-solving after each fall is where his genius shows. 

Like Stephen Curry getting up practice shots at a YMCA or Lionel Messi drilling a free kick in a recreational Sunday league game, Honnold climbing among normies has a certain aura. He can and will try any move on the wall with ease, never yelling or breaking a sweat. 

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Honnold can be short in conversation, but he is generous with his advice to other climbers.  

When people meet Honnold, they tend to ask what he wants to climb next (maybe another building, depending on the deal (opens in new tab), he said) or whether he’s scared of heights (no) or death (yes). But they rarely ask about things outside of the sport, like “Marty Supreme” (“respect his craft, but he’s psycho”) or President Donald Trump. An hour into climbing, noticeably more relaxed, he reflected on the latter.

“The current administration isn’t setting us up for the future,” Honnold said. “But the transition to renewables is happening one way or another.”

Before “Free Solo” propelled him to a new level of stardom, Honnold had been personally choosing the organizations he wanted to fund. In the foundation’s first year, he handed out a couple of thousand dollars to an Oakland solar installation company and an African charity working on electrifying rural places. 

“I was just googling stuff and reading books,” Honnold said.

Now, the Honnold Foundation has a six-person staff and a board of directors, who vote on an annual slate of awardees after months and sometimes years of advisement and review. This year, the nonprofit received 1,200 applications from more than 100 countries, which the staff has whittled down to about 96 candidates. Last year, it gave out $4.2 million to 35 grantees. 

The nonprofit has always focused on solar energy projects because of its potential for an immediate impact, said Emily Teitsworth, executive director of the foundation. Since the technology is proven, it can be deployed quickly in homes still using kerosene for indoor lighting, for example, or power lightweight batteries that can propel riverboats, as it did in Ecuador. 

Honnold said his travels around the world for climbing (opens in new tab) have helped him “see the need” firsthand. “Some of these communities are never going to have access to power because no one is ever going to build power lines their way,” he said. 

“Look, in climbing, I’m probably going to be surpassed in five to 10 years,” Honnold added. “But having a tangible impact on other people’s lives? They’ll never forget that.” 

For Larsen, a tech billionaire who is constantly solicited for various causes, humanitarian aid has taken more of a front seat with U.S. Agency for International Development cutbacks affecting lives around the world. He told The Standard that it’s important that philanthropists not just sit on the sidelines when the government does. 

His donation to Honnold’s nonprofit came with a personal touch — a stipulation that at least a fifth of the amount would go toward projects in his wife Lyna’s home country of Cambodia. Since 2020, Honnold’s nonprofit has been supporting a project there called The Lake Clinic (opens in new tab), which provides medical care and health education to communities in the country’s isolated Tonle Sap Lake region. 

“In San Francisco, you’re always meeting with people who say they’re into climate … but often you’re just getting lost in the theoreticalness of it all,” Larsen said. “Policy is a key thing … but you can’t lose sight of the practical ways of getting immediate help to the people who need it most. That is just super satisfying.

“Solar might not be medicine,” he said, “but it changes everything.” 

Honnold’s trip to San Francisco was a way of “firming up relationships” with Larsen and others to ensure his foundation’s fund keeps growing. His moonshot goal is for the nonprofit to give away $15 million a year. 

To do that, he’s willing to take on even bolder climbing challenges to raise its profile. 

Honnold doesn’t consider that extra work. He’d be doing it anyway, because it is interesting and fun, he said. That’s why he once lived in a van (opens in new tab), going from place to place in search of adventure.

But that was a lifetime ago. Honnold is now a married father of two kids, ages 4 and 2, with a house in Las Vegas. He dispensed one more thought as he stepped into another stranger’s car, this time wearing his “work uniform”: a North Face polo and blue quarter-zip. 

“Batch as many things in life together as possible,” Honnold said. “Fun, work, family. Do all the things. I don’t even like [to] rest anymore.”