In the latest issue of Rock & Ice there’s story of a woman who fell bouldering, that is free climbing up to 20’ or so with pads and spotters. A spotter grabbed her leg as she fell and the other leg hit hard and shattered. Ouch.
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Look down below, all those trees are growing sideways out of the vertical ground! How can this be?
Weirdly, that description gave me even bigger willies than the video.
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yeah, I was expecting a much longer video. (Screw the technical challenges, I want 4K HDR video).
this. free climbing, it goes perfectly until it doesn’t, the end.
on one hand we only get a max of 100 or so years, if someone wants to gamble with their remainder to push boundaries like this then that is their choice…
on the other hand that sort of thrill seeking is a bit selfish as it trades a hit of hormones for risking some pretty horrible aftermath for emergency workers, and horrible loss for friends and family…
as the long history of free climbers has show, even those with mad crazy skills eventually make a mistake or encounter a piece of rock that fails, and when they do it is the end.
as someone who used to free climb and grew up climbing who is now a parent i have very mixed feelings about it. when safety gear exists, and reasonable precautions can be taken, then shirking those is a pretty selfish choice.
the russian crane/skyscraper kids give my stomach more trouble…a lot of them have fallen and died.
At least Alex Honnold is a world class climber and prepared extensively for the attempt.
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I think part of the appeal is that a free solo climb takes hours instead of days,
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i get it, i was a pretty avid climber. i’ve been into a lot of different risky outdoor sports. i love parkour. there is a reason i live in a town focused on outdoor sports of many kinds.
when i used to free climb it was more about “being one with nature/the rock and unencumbered by gear” then risking all your future years to save a few hours.
i just also have some life under my belt and am a parent now, so i also see how younger people are more, um, self focused and willing to take risks without considering the impacts they have on other people’s lives.
when i do stuff now, i take extra precautions. i want to be around for my kids, they depend on me. i don’t want my parents to have to outlive their children. i think about more then just myself, they aren’t just taking their own risk, their loss would have a much wider impact that many aren’t considering.
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Putting on my bureaucrat hat for a second… does the NPS issue permits for climbs? Does the permit for a free climb of this sort require some kind of bond that will cover the significant expenses associated with body recovery? I don’t mind taxpayer funded shared spaces and I don’t mind when things turn sideways and the helicopters come save someone’s life. But I think taxpayer-funded rescue/recovery operations after someone chooses to take a risk like this is not really terribly fair to the rest of us.
-jeff
I see the argument, but don’t agree with it. If things were run that way, it’d be prohibitively expensive to leave tarmac at all. Hillwalking, kayaking, etc. are inherently dangerous activities, even if that’s walking on gentle hills or kayaking on placid lakes. Requiring some sort of insurance would kill outdoor activities outright.
There are some services a nation state should cover, for the benefit of a vibrant society, even if individuals don’t use them or don’t individually want to fund them. Like libraries (“buy your own books!”) or art galleries holding/acquiring collections worth billions (“which could be spent on hospitals and roads!”) - it just makes the nation better if its citizens are spending time in the hills.
That said, in the UK rescue/recovery isn’t taxpayer-funded (maybe partially; I’m not certain): Mountain Rescue teams are volunteers funded by charitable donations, as are lifeboats. And air ambulances, though I don’t know the arrangement for rescue helicopters.
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Duration, I think. A four hour accent without doing anything wrong.
Hmm. I don’t think they have a webcam covering that route:
https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm
I hypothesize that there’s some kind of bias in who they interview.
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My palms are sweating just reading that.
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I had to pull a good friend off the wall for a far less than 50’ drop because he wouldn’t listen to reason and as the guy in charge of his safety, I said fuck it and yanked hard. And I’m glad I did because any further on his fucked up path would have put me in as much danger as he was in. A few months before that, two friends of mine were found on a wall…one with a broken neck and the other hung upside down as the rope somehow snagged him and he couldn’t get free. He probably struggled for an hour before passing out and dying. They were both at fault for their own deaths, but I know she was a daredevil much like the friend of mine that I pulled off the wall.
Then two years ago, I get a call and I’m told they find my friends body out in Utah…I was convinced he finally took someone else out with him. Nope…only a heroin overdose. I’ve never been so happy to know someone killed themselves without hurting others.
Free climbing is stupid. There is nothing to be gained from it. Sometimes the danger/stupidity outweigh the risk to society. For every person doing something like this, they are encouraging a dozen more to follow in their footsteps. I get it, man vs. nature. You can still do this with protection. It isn’t cheating to use ropes, and it isn’t cheating to not encourage others to die simply because their body wasn’t designed like yours.
I guess this means I wouldn’t be a very good libertarian.
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There are some services a nation state should cover, for the benefit of a vibrant society, even if individuals don’t use them or don’t individually want to fund them.
Over here, guys, I found the commie!!! 
(for the record, totally 100% agree with you, but our current government and orange marmalade in chief believe the only thing that matters is profits uber alles).
I didn’t know there were still volunteer rescue units in Britain, that’s interesting. That was certainly common back in the day in the United States as well, I’ve heard plenty of interesting stories about the rescue guys who went out in storms to help survivors of shipwrecks.
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Greetings. They do not need a permit to climb, not even check in! A Ranger told me they know how many climbers on the face by the number of lights at night. Most people can’t climb it in a single day.
This was hardly the most dangerous free solo of all time. Most difficult, but nowhere near the most dangerous. The most dangerous free solo is some inexperienced idiot trying to onsight a 5.6 crack and getting in way over his head.
Alex is different form other free soloists. The only reason this was possible is because he’s not approaching this as a daredevil. He climbed this route frequently enough to know all the moves and be reasonably sure he was going to come out alive. Was he taking a 1-in-100 chance? 1-in-10? 1 in 2? I have no idea. I have to defer to his expertise, because literally no one else in the world can do what he does.
He’s said he’s never fallen without knowing he was about to fall. I dunno if that’s hyperbole, but it may be totally true. He’s the best in the world and no one else in history has climbed like him. He’s the most precise, static, cautious climber on earth.
I see people making the “what if someone else does it because they saw him do it” argument all over the interwebz, and that holds no water. All climbing is dangerous. My form of climbing is only “safe” because I know what I’m doing.
People may get inspired to go out and climb because they see it me or my kids or my friends or whoever doing it and it looks cool. They buy some gear and go out with no training and get hurt making incredibly stupid mistakes. It happens all the time. “YER GONNA DIE” is a running joke in climbing forums, as a response to people posting photos and videos of themselves doing stuff that is, y’know, obviously going to get them killed.
I hope Honnold is done with the epic free solos, but he knows the risks. He knows that and I think his attitude toward it is as healthy as is possible. Paraphrasing here, but he did an interview in which he said “people criticize me all the time for taking these risks that might get me killed. They’re right, I might die doing this. But at the same time, I’m out here eating well, training hard and hiking up mountains all day. Most of those critics are spending all their time sitting in front of the TV eating junkfood, which will definitely take years off their lives. People need to spend more time worried about that than about what I’m doing.”
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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/06/07/alex-honnold-just-completed-th.html
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As seen previous on Boing Boing:
