Some of my earliest memories come from Yosemite National Park. I grew up in Sacramento, California, only a few hours away from Yosemite, and my family camped there sporadically throughout my childhood. I have vague memories of jumping between rocks in a dry creek bed in the Porcupine Flat campground. Once a torrential thunderstorm turned our campsite into a river. But the clearest memory from our trips to Yosemite was my father taking us to Tunnel View (Wawona Tunnel at the time) to soak in the scenery. He would always bring Chips Ahoy cookies for us, with a little cooler full of milk, and lead us up a granite slab behind the parking lot to take in the grandest view of Yosemite Valley.

El Capitan is the center of that view, though as a child I did not yet know enough about rock climbing to differentiate one cliff from another. They were each just epic pieces of stone, fantastical in size and scale. I had no idea of the place that El Cap held in climbing mythology, or the role that it would play in my life.

I returned to Yosemite for the first time as a real rock climber at age 19. I was a college student on the verge of dropping out to climb full time. On that trip, I saw everything with a fresh set of eyes—the cliffs looked more imposing. My first rock climb was on Middle Cathedral rock, directly across from El Cap. My partner and I only climbed a few hundred feet before rappelling, but it gave me a sense of how vast the walls were.

Two years later, I had my first real climbing season in Yosemite; El Cap was my main goal. My partner and I spent a few months building up to it, climbing the smaller walls and refining our skills before we finally attempted El Cap. We spent the whole day slowly laboring our way up the wall. I thought that we had reached the summit in the middle of the night, but the sun rose just after. Somehow we’d spent the entire night climbing the last several hundred feet; the route took us 22 hours in total. It was by far the most taxing climb I’d ever done.

From that season on, I made the pilgrimage to Yosemite every spring and fall, often spending three or four months a year in what climbers affectionately call the “ditch.” The scale and difficulty of the walls meant there was always a new challenge, a new opportunity to test myself. I free soloed, attempted speed records, and combined routes into long enchainments. There was always something harder to work on.

After more than 10 years of consistent climbing in Yosemite, I finally felt ready to free solo El Cap, a climb that became the subject of the Academy Award winning documentary “Free Solo.” Though the final climb took me under four hours, I spent many months living in Yosemite, preparing. I’d hike on my rest days, or do easier scrambles. I’d boulder to maintain strength and technique, and I’d occasionally bike around the valley floor, just to enjoy the trees changing colors. Yosemite is one of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth, a fact that’s never been lost on me, even in the midst of my most consuming climbing projects.

Since my free solo of El Cap, I’ve gotten married and had kids—now we bring the van to Yosemite as a family. Last season, my wife and I took our older daughter on a hike up the old Foresta road; a road that, according to family lore, my great aunts used to access Yosemite in the 1920s and ’30s. Now it’s decommissioned and overgrown, offering a wonderful way to hike away from any crowds while still providing incredible views of the valley.

During a hike, my wife pointed out El Cap to our one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, who then spent much of the hike pointing at it and saying, “Hi, El Cap!” That, to me, is the true wonder of Yosemite—it’s been an inspiration to my entire family; it’s been a motivating force in my life, and it will probably be home to some of my daughters’ first memories. Yosemite is a true intergenerational experience. It’s an opportunity for me to experience the same wild beauty that my forebears have, and to pass it along to my daughters unchanged.

About the Author

Alex Honnold is a professional adventure 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, Alex “No Big Deal” Honnold is known as much for his humble, self-effacing attitude as he is for the dizzyingly tall cliffs he has climbed without a rope to protect him if he falls. Honnold 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.

Honnold is sponsored by The North Face, Black Diamond, La Sportiva, Ando, and Stride Health. He is a board member of El Cap Climbing Gyms and a founder of the Honnold Foundation, an environmental non-profit. And to this day, he maintains his simple “dirtbag-climber” existence, living out of his van and traveling the world in search of the next great vertical adventure.