Born in 1969 in the suburban shadow of Philadelphia, Tim O’Neill’s adventurous spirit was fostered climbing the fences, buildings and trees of his urban playground. Tim’s childhood version of open space was neighbouring Fernwood Cemetery, and it was on its monumental tombstones and mausoleums that he first felt stone under his fingertips. At age 19, armed with a $69 one-way ticket to Wyoming, he boarded a Greyhound bus bound for wilderness and freedom. He landed in Yellowstone National Park, worked in a gift shop, discovered rock climbing one weekend and never looked back. He travelled extensively in the western U.S. for seven years, living the iconoclastic "climbing bum" lifestyle. He’s still a bum.

During the past several years, Tim has been exploring the world’s great mountain ranges, climbing from Pakistan to Patagonia. His recent trip to South America, from December 2001 to April 2002, netted him a month of whitewater kayaking on the rain-forested rivers of southern Chile, seven weeks of bagging alpine first ascents in Argentine Patagonia, and finally a wild climbing adventure in the heart of Venezuela’s Orinocan jungle.

O’Neill is one of the fastest climbers in the world. He has set many on-sight speed records in Yosemite National Park, including the world-record ascent of the famed 3,000-foot Nose on El Capitan in three hours and 24 minutes in 2001. Last fall in Yosemite Valley, he teamed up once again with Dean Potter, and the two became the first ever to link up, in a continuous push, three massive Grade VI walls, climbing over 80 pitches and 9,000 vertical feet in less that 24 hours.