![]() ![]() ![]() She’s now in demand as a public speaker, serves as a senior advisor to La Sportiva outdoor wear and draws a small retinue of fellow climbers and admirers when she visits Yosemite Valley. Her famous son and occasional climbing partner, the 36-year-old Honnold, has helped amplify the attention. She was featured in USA Today after her birthday climb, profiled this week in the New York Times, as part of a series about people who pursue their dreams on their own terms, and soon will be the focus of the “70 Over 70” podcast, about late-in-life high achievers. But Wolownick’s attraction to Yosemite’s renowned “big walls,” including her 70th birthday jaunt up “El Cap” in September, has given her a special kind of celebrity. Other seniors - such as Japan’s Yuichiro Miura, who climbed Mount Everest at ages 70, 75 and 80 - have helped redefine what’s athletically possible for those in their golden years. ![]() It all started in early 2009, when Wolownick decided she had to try climbing if she ever really wanted to get to know her son. The one-time “lumpy old mom,” as she called herself, first set that record four years ago and has continued to finesse her way up several other fabled rock towers, emerging as something of an icon in Yosemite Valley’s climbing community. Yet even before the Academy Award-winning film provided a boost to a once-fringe sport, Honnold had inspired one important greenhorn to get up from her desk and out onto the rocks: his 58-year-old mother, who had never explored her daredevil side during a life as a writer, musician, artist and foreign language teacher.Ī dozen years after her son helped propel her renaissance, Dierdre Wolownick last month scaled the face of El Capitan on her 70th birthday, becoming the oldest woman to conquer the 3,000-foot-high expanse of granite that is climbing’s Mt. The film and Honnold’s quiet, self-effacing heroism helped transform climbing into a mainstream sport, one featured in the 2020 Olympics. The 2018 documentary “Free Solo” celebrates a wide-eyed, shaggy-haired ectomorph named Alex Honnold as he makes history - climbing Yosemite’s El Capitan without ropes or other safety gear. ![]()
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