Edge of Oblivion

Free-solo rock climbers feel spiritual lure.

by Sheila Mulrooney Eldred
Fresno Bee - April 8, 2004

Turquoise and mustard-yellow tents have begun to dot the landscape at Camp 4, as sure a sign of spring in Yosemite National Park as the snow melting into waterfalls.

The climbing season is just beginning, and safety gear - carabiners and harnesses and crash pads - already is strewn about the most popular campsites. Occasionally, though, some climbers forego this complex safety net and climb hundreds of feet up the park's legendary granite walls with only the aid of their skill and a chalk bag.

It's a practice known as free-soloing, and, though seldom talked about, it has been part of the sport longer than Yosemite, the birthplace of U.S. rock climbing.

Even to many seasoned climbers, free-soloing - climbing without ropes or other protection - is simply crazy.

"Even if you're climbing an easy route, you could grab the rock the wrong way and die," said Nick Anderson, a San Diego climber visiting Yosemite. "That's not so good."

True free-soloing involves climbing higher than one could safely fall onto a crash pad - 30 feet or so. Some climbers spend hours climbing to heights upward of 2,000 feet. Others do short routes in minutes.

Howstuffworks.com defines it like this: "Free solo climbing is like sport climbing except you use no rope. If you fall, you die."

But those who free-solo say the practice is no more dangerous than hiking close to precipices.

"It's not necessarily just this wild, crazy, thrill-seeking activity," said Jeff Achey, editor of Climbing Magazine. "It's a natural part of climbing. It's just a way of taking scrambling around in the mountains and putting it into a much different terrain.

"People trust themselves not to trip and fall over their own feet. Climbers are very used to traveling on vertical terrain. It's a no-fall situation, just like looking over the visor of Half Dome. You can't trip and fall. If you do, you die."

Indeed, there are few injuries to free-soloists, said Yosemite climbing program manager and park ranger Mark Fincher, because accidents usually result in death, not injury.

Between 1970 and 1990, a National Park Service study found that 14 climbers were killed and two critically injured while unroped - although none of those accidents involved true free-soloists. Climbers who temporarily unroped on easy
terrain during long, roped climbs accounted for most of the unroped accidents.

There has been only one confirmed death of a free-soloist at Yosemite - Derek Hersey, one of the highest-profile climbers ever to die while free-soloing. While climbing Sentinel Rock in Yosemite Valley in 1993, Hersey plunged several hundred feet to his death.

The climbing community mourned, but the death didn't result in a moratorium on the practice. Fincher said the
practice experienced a run of popularity in the late 1980s, and successful free-solo climbs still appear regularly in the news departments of the sport's two major magazines, Climbing and Rock & Ice.

Park rangers don't stop the practice; a certain amount of risk in the wilderness is considered acceptable and appropriate.
Fincher said. If accidents increase, he added, the park might re-evaluate its stance.

No one can say for sure how many climbers free-solo. Most of the time, though, climbers use ropes and other protection as they navigate upward. And many climbers say they never would climb without protection. The danger, they say, lies largely in factors beyond a climber's control.

"What if something random like a bird comes and hits you?" Anderson said.

So why take the risks?

For one, free-soloing allows climbers to move much faster than they would with a partner and ropes. A route that could take all day with ropes might take an hour without ropes.

"If I can't find a partner, I'll do easy routes that I've done 10 times before," said Trad Muenter of Davis.

He has done one route, rated a relatively easy 5.7, so many times he has the moves memorized.

"You've got a bomber crack, and you step over like this to another bomber crack," he explains, criss-crossing his legs as he pantomimes the move.

And then there's the rush. "You have a super-sharp focus on what's going on," Achey said. "It gives you real clarity; all the things you might be concerned about, like your mortgage, don't seem that important. You have an immediate sense of life and mortality that accompanies a situation that's so potentially dangerous."

Wyatt Thomas of Eugene, Ore., coils a rope around his arm as rain clouds threaten to cut short an early-season day of climbing in Yosemite.

"There's a certain level of stimulation you wouldn't normally get," said Thomas, adding he usually climbs with rope. "If you're in the zone and you're feeling all the moves, it makes it a little more exciting."

Of course, the danger comes when climbers get addicted to that feeling.

"There's a tendency to push things further, to keep that buzz going, kind of like a drug," Achey said.

The fun stops, he added, as soon as climbers realize they've gone too far.

"Once, I got halfway up and I couldn't come back down," Muenter said. "After that, I knew how to down-climb."

Climbers who safely free-solo take precautions. They climb at levels well within their limits, on solid rock such as Yosemite's granite walls. Many only free-solo routes they know well or have climbed before. Some climb shorter routes. They're prepared for the unpredictable - such as jamming a hand into a crack and getting stung by a bee.

And, like Muenter, they never climb farther up than they can climb down.

"At some point, you're so used to it, it's almost like climbing a ladder," Thomas said.

Muenter, who started free-soloing "easy stuff" when he first started, is reluctant to admit he still occasionally free-solos, worried that climbing partners might brand him as unsafe and refuse to climb with him in the future. His reluctance is not uncommon. The perception that free-soloing is dangerous explains some of it. The best free-soloists often choose not to advertise their exploits, partly for fear of spawning copycat attempts by unqualified cIimbers.

"Climbing is not overtly competitive, but it certainly is competitive in a lot of ways," Fincher said. "It's not a place, perhaps, to be competitive because people will get killed. It's also seen as more of a spiritual thing. It's a very real experience - a spiritual, inward experience - so people talk about it less. It goes around the parking lot - it gets around - but it doesn't tend to get as publicized in the media as much as other exploits.

Before he died, Hersey told the New York Times: "Observers think [I've] got a death wish. But there's nothing else that makes me feel so alive. . . When you're free-soloing, you can't afford to be distracted. You concentrate on the flow from move to move to move. You exist only in the present."