Alex Honnold free soloed El Capitan (via the route Freerider) in 3 hours 56 minutes on June 3, 2017.

Quick Scoop: The Ascent Time

  • Route: Freerider on El Capitan in Yosemite, about 3,000 feet of climbing.
  • Style: True free solo – no ropes, no protective gear.
  • Time: 3 hours 56 minutes from base to summit.
  • Context: Most teams take 3–5 days to climb the same route with ropes and gear.

How Fast Is That, Really?

  • Many climbers break Freerider into 33 pitches over multiple days, sleeping on the wall.
  • Honnold moved so efficiently that reports note he was “taking the final moderate pitch at a near run.”
  • In big-wall terms, doing a nearly 900‑meter route in under 4 hours, alone and ropeless, has been compared to a “moon landing” level achievement in climbing.

Why This Became a Trending Topic

  • The ascent was widely covered in mainstream media and later featured in the Oscar‑winning documentary Free Solo , which helped the climb go viral well beyond climbing forums.
  • Climbers and non‑climbers still discuss it online as one of the greatest athletic feats ever recorded, often revisiting the exact time—3:56—as a shorthand for how extreme it was.

In forum and social media discussions, “how fast did Alex Honnold free solo El Capitan” usually gets answered in a single number: 3 hours 56 minutes —but the surrounding awe is about how calmly and precisely he did it, not just the stopwatch.

TL;DR: Alex Honnold free soloed El Capitan’s Freerider route in 3 hours 56 minutes, a sub‑4‑hour ascent of a wall that normally takes climbers several days.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.