- - Who Is “Free Solo” Star Alex Honnold's Wife? All About Fellow Climber Sanni McCandless Honnold

Christopher RudolphJanuary 24, 2026 at 5:45 AM

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National Geographic/Pablo Durana; Paul Archuleta/Getty for Film Independent

Alex Honnold; Alex Honnold and Sanni McCandless -

Free Solo star Alex Honnold met his wife, Sanni McCandless Honnold, at a book signing in 2015

They married in 2020 and are now parents of two

Sanni is a life coach, who co-founded an outdoor retreat company in 2018

Alex Honnold is known for free-soloing, but he's not going through life alone with his wife, Sanni McCandless Honnold, by his side.

Alex is an American climber who has been scaling rocks and walls for 30 years. He is famous for being featured in the Oscar-winning 2018 documentary Free Solo, and he is now attempting to climb Taiwan's Taipei 101, the 11th-tallest building in the world.

The Netflix special Skyscraper Live on Jan. 23 will showcase the daring attempt. "It's been a lifelong dream of mine to climb a skyscraper," he said in the trailer for the event.

Alex was featured in Free Solo, as was his now-wife, Sanni. The two met more than 10 years ago and have since gotten married and welcomed two children. But fatherhood hasn't stopped Alex from embarking on new climbing adventures.

"People question soloing now that he's a dad, but this is who Alex is," Sanni said in the Skyscraper Live preview.

So, who is Alex Honnold's wife? Here's everything to know about Sanni McCandless Honnold.

She grew up in Washington and North Carolina

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Alex Honnold and Sanni McCandless at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival

Sanni was born in Washington state, where she grew up backpacking and hiking with her family. When she was 11, her family moved to North Carolina for her dad's work.

"For the next 11 years, I lived out there. I went to high school. I went to college," she told the BOLOTOR podcast in April 2025. "I hadn't even gotten into climbing at all yet, but loved growing up there."

Sanni continued, "When I graduated from college, I moved back to Washington State and ... that's when my personal relationship with the outdoors really began to blossom."

Her sister eventually introduced her to rock climbing.

She is a life coach who previously worked in tech

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Sanni McCandless and Alex Honnold in April 2018

Sanni worked at an "energy efficiency-focused tech startup in Seattle" before leaving her corporate job to travel, according to the bio on her website.

During this time, she decided to switch career paths and become a life coach. After earning her certificate, she launched Sanni McCandless Coaching.

"My coaching practice has a strong emphasis on value‑alignment, mindset, and communication," she wrote on her website. "I created my own approach to coaching specifically for folks who want to make a leap in life but aren’t sure where they want to land."

She met Honnold at a book signing in 2015

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Alex Honnold and Sanni McCandless at the 2018 LA Film Festival

Sanni met Alex when he was doing a talk and book signing in Seattle in 2015.

"I hadn’t known a single thing about him, but after listening to him speak, I decided he was cute and funny," she recalled in a May 2021 essay for Outside magazine. "So I left my phone number on the table as I walked away. A few weeks later, we went on our first date."

Six months later, in June 2016, Sanni quit her job and traveled across Europe with Alex for the summer.

"He was like no one I had ever met: incredibly brave, quietly in need of love and approval, confident, and whip-smart," she wrote, adding that he was also "playful and made me laugh."

They married in 2020

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Alex Honnold and Sanni McCandless at the EE British Academy Film Awards in 2019

In September 2020, Alex announced he and Sanni had tied the knot, posting photos from the wedding on his Instagram.

"We got married!! Small family ceremony on the lake," he captioned the images, sharing that it was "totally lovely all the way around" and that Sanni "was radiant as always."

She and Honnold share two kids

Sanni Honnold/Instagram

Alex Honnold and Sanni McCandless Honnold with their children

Alex and Sanni are the parents of two daughters: June, born in 2022, and Alice, born in 2024.

"We found out I was pregnant at my best friend's wedding, which I was officiating!" she recalled to PEOPLE in February 2024, while announcing Alice's arrival. "It reminded me of the scene from Friends where Rachel keeps spitting out the champagne at Monica's wedding."

"We had decided we wanted our kids to be close together in age and had been trying for a few months," she added. "We were very happy when we got the good news!"

In a June 2025 Instagram post wishing Sanni a happy birthday, Alex wrote, "We’ve been together for 10 years now and have two wonderful babies — life has changed so much but in some ways not at all."

These days, Alex, Sanni and their daughters live in Las Vegas.

"When you say 'Las Vegas,' everyone thinks of The Strip,” he told Men’s Fitness in January 2026. "But Vegas actually has the best outdoor rock climbing in the country. It has incredible access to the outdoors.”

She is the co-founder of an outdoor retreat series, Outwild

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Sanni McCandless and Alex Honnold at the 2018 LA Film Festival

In 2018, Sanni co-founded Outwild, an outdoor retreat series "where participants learn how to reprioritize their values and push their comfort zone in the outdoors," according to her website.

Sanni launched Outwild with co-founders Courtney Sanford and Jeremy Jensen, hosting their first retreat that year, in Malibu, Calif. The goal of the multi-day experience is to push people out of their comfort zones and open them to self-discovery, sparked by being in nature.

"I think we both really zeroed in on this idea that it’s hard to do life design sometimes when you’re just so in the day-to-day, when you’re so in the routine," Sanni told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in March 2024. "We both just kind of realized, 'If you really want this work to be impactful, you have to really get people out of that.' "

She continued, "We kind of knew, 'We want to be this entry point, but we’re gonna have to get people away from their desks and their homes and their routines for a couple days.' "

According to its website, the next two Outwild retreats are set for April and May 2026.

She is writing a children’s book

Sanni Honnold/Instagram

Alex Honnold and Sanni McCandless Honnold

Sanni is teaching her love of the outdoors to a new generation.

According to the Transatlantic Agency, she is working on a children's book titled Be a Mountain.

on People

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”