For nearly a decade Matt has been living on the road solely to climb, and six of those years have been without a car. He lives seasonally between Yosemite National Park, CA in the summer and Bozeman, MT in the winter, where he rides his bike back and forth with the changing of the seasons. Focusing predominantly on alpine and ice climbing, he spends his winters climbing technical ice around Hyalite Canyon where he is known for making bold solo ascents of the canyon’s hardest climbs such as the “Nutcracker” and “Come and Get it”.
Cornell grew up in Grand Rapids, MI where he began climbing in the Keweenaw Peninsula at age 13. From then his love for climbing and the outdoors grew, constantly making trips to the Red River Gorge at any opportunity. At age18 he left home for the mountains of the West, living out of the back of his Subaru for three years until he sold it a week before his first trip to Alaska in 2016. Since then Matt has been pursuing difficult new routes in the Greater Ranges. He’s spent five spring seasons in Alaska, three seasons in Patagonia, and was part of a 2019 expedition to Pakistan with Jackson Marvell where they completed the first ascent of Sherpi Kangri II, a 7,100m peak in the Karakoram. Matt continues to live on the fringes searching for the next big adventure in the harder to reach mountains of the world.
