The Freedom of Solo

Lately I have been thinking about the art of climbing free solos and why the hell anybody would do it. To be clear a free solo is a climb without assistance from anyone else or protection from a falling to your death. The climb could be done with another person but they aren't belaying you and thus, from a climbing perspective, you are on your own.

Why would anyone want to free solo? Don’t expect an answer somewhere in the text because I have free soloed and I still don’t know. I will likely free solo again and I still don’t know why a person would. My thinking process turns to free solos more recently when I watched an interview and a video of Alex Honnold. For any non climbers, Honnold is the most famous free soloist in the world right now and perhaps the second most famous climber of all time. Nobody has surpassed Edmund Hillary.  Honnold and I have never met and everything I know about him comes from video footage and the fact that I once met a guy that knows him personally who said he is absolutely the most humble guy you could ever meet. That is so rare in climbers.   Like Edmund Hillary, Alex Honnold does mind boggling feats in the mountains and acts like it’s no big deal at all when he is back on flat ground. The humility of both climbers impresses me not just for their achievement but for the contrast with their peers who are often first class egomaniacs. Many are also delusional to the point of believing that death is for somebody else. I kid you not. I watched video footage of a climber that thought he had the soul of a raven with a cosmic understanding of flight and I believe that delusion led him to smash into a cliff in Yosemite Valley where he fell a thousand feet and exploded like a bag of water. He was base jumping, not climbing when he died.  The metaphor “explode like a bag of water” came from Alex Honnold who said, “If you fall from fifty feet, you die a slow painful death but if you fall from a thousand, you explode like a bag of water.”  To be fair Honnold said that before Potter fell to his death and not about Potter specifically. I think the two were friends.

Honnold spoke of a body breaking like a bag of water to downplay the fact that he climbs without a rope thousands of feet off the ground. Lots of people climb fifty feet off the ground and in Honnold’s view it’s better to fall from a thousand than from hundred.  I feel bad speaking ill of the dead but the facts are that I always thought Dean Potter was an egomaniac that tried to make up for low IQ with bravado. In contrast Honnold seems intelligent and completely lacking in bravado; I admire both traits. I first took note of Honnold last fall when Pete Boyd and I were preparing to go to El Potrero Chico in Nuevo Leon, Mexico and I did an internet search for the area. Video of Honnold’s 2012 free solo of El Sendero Luminoso topped my search for El Potrero Chico. The video is here LINK . I was even more impressed when I saw the wall from the ground up. Pete and I walked right past El Sendero Luminoso and toward the easy stuff but looked up long enough to marvel that anybody could climb that wall with nothing more than rock shoes and chalk bag.

Alex Honnold in Yosemite. Photo from National Geographic. 

Like Alex Honnold I have been climbing since what seems like birth but few people have Honnold’s talent and I am no exception. According to my mom I started singing before I could speak and started climbing before I could walk.  My first attempted ascent was when I climbed to the top bunk in my sisters’ room, climbed out the window, and into Box Elder tree. I didn’t make it far after that. I don’t remember this attempt to summit the Box Elder tree and not because I lost consciousness but because I was two years old. The details are obscure but what is known is that my mom found two year old me screaming outside the house below an open window. The fact that I dislocated my shoulder is recorded at the Utah Valley Hospital. My parents presume climbing the Box Elder tree was why I climbed out the window because I had tried before. I first learned to use a rope and a harness at age 35 so I spent a good bit of my life free solo, though the term wasn’t in my vocabulary. I got a concussion while climbing in a tree in the White Mountains of Arizona when I was fifteen.  I recall a lesson about climbing that occurred in the Peralta Canyon, Arizona when I was 21.

My brother Garth, his brother in law Dan, and I went hiking up Peralta Canyon in the Superstition Mountains. Peralta Canyon is about an hour east of Phoenix and I had been there many times before as it’s a family favorite hiking spot. The west side of the canyon has a vast array of hoodoos, spires created by wind and rain. Hoodoos are sometimes called Goblins and they are often fantastically shaped formations that remind people of metaphysical creatures. The Peralta Trail doesn’t go up through the hoodoos but you can see them upslope. As a kid my mom called them petrified Apache Soldiers. Peralta Canyon is part of the Apache homeland. These hoodoos are some 75 feet tall and only look like soldiers from a distance. On this hike with my brother and Dan, we wanted a closer look so we hoofed it up there. I don’t recall whose idea it was for us to head up there but our desire to climb those hoodoos wasn’t different than my two year old desire to climb out the window and into the Box Elder tree.  Incidentally, Garth and I share the gene that leads each of us to top of hoodoos so this crazy plan may not have even been his idea.  I don’t recall. 

Some of the hoodoos in Peralta Canyon. There are hundreds.

Peralta Canyon is comprised of Breciated Granite and other igneous and metamorphic rock (Stocknicki and Ferguson, Arizona Geological Society 1995). Breccia is “rock composed of broken fragments of minerals or rock cemented together by a fine-grained matrix that can be similar to or different from the composition of the fragments.” What this means is that most of the hoodoos in Peralta Canyon feel and look like granite but the rock is a matrix of granite rather than solid granite and that means it can break apart and crumble. It doesn’t actually take much push or pull on the rock to know that it’s crumbly but we did not trouble ourselves with such tests.  This type of rock is also called Superstition Tuff and it is not the sort of rock one ought to climb, a fact that I learned later in life. Nothing bad happened in the hoodoos that day. Elsewhere in the world billions of people sat on couches and added a day’s layer of saturated fat to their arteries.

Carotid Endarterectomy removing the fat from the carotid artery.

Dan, Garth, and I started early because we thought Peralta Canyon was a big hike. It isn’t. We thought it would be a long day because all our previous encounters there were with our family and we generally carted a couple babies and toddlers up the hill with us. .  It’s 4.5 miles round trip to Peralta Pass so we found ourselves with lots of time in a beautiful winter day in Arizona.

Peralta Pass, the Hoodoos are on the right.

So we went up there and we climbed a whole bunch of those hoodoos without rope, harness, rock shoes, or chalk bag and no knowledge that chalk even existed for climbers. We climbed those things like falling off them wasn’t possible and we even jumped from hoodoo summit to hoodoo summit when the gap between them was close enough to do so. We tossed rocks off the top of hoodoos and had a grand ole time. 

Chuck Taylors

I recall I was wearing black high topped Chuck Taylor’s and I remember this because that detail is seared in my head. I was standing on a ledge and the ledge broke under my right shoe. I quickly shifted all my weight to my left foot. I was out of balance for about half a second at most. With my right foot back on another foothold, I looked down at my Chuck Taylors with my toes on the ledge and noted that I was about 45 feet off the ground and had an understanding of Honnold’s comment about falling fifty feet even though this happened before he said it. My right leg started to shake uncontrollably. I seriously could not stop my right leg from shaking.  Climbing slang calls this phenomena “Elvis leg” and it’s just like Elvis shaking his leg. I didn’t know any climbing slang at the time and that wasn’t the only thing I didn’t know.  I sure as heck didn’t know Chuck Taylors are a poor choice for rock climbing shoes. When the foothold popped I was out of balance long enough for me to poop bricks. I didn’t curse much back then due to my religious choices, though I curse a shitstorm now.

Hoodoos in Peralta Canyon.

After a few moments of Elvis leg, I gathered my crap together and climbed to the top of the hoodoo and there was enough space up there for Garth and I to comfortably sit and breathe. On the way home Garth said, “I don’t plan to do anything like that again. It was fun but I have children and can’t justify the danger.” I don’t think he ever has.  I was single at the time but I figured my life was valuable with or without kids. Being young and full of bravado, I didn’t say anything about quitting climbing. If you get nothing from this story, understand that I don’t like bravado and I really don’t like to see it in myself.  However, I made up my mind that if I ever climbed anything vertical that could kill me I would do so with training and know how to not get killed. I have since climbed considerably but for many years I did not.  

This Peralta Canyon climbing trip happened the year Alex Honnold was born.

Years later I bought my first rope and used it to climb at cliffs at the beaches in Humboldt County, California. Lots of folks climbed there and top ropes were easy to set up. My daughters were a little into climbing, especially Sydney but Aubrey as well. By and by we moved to Alaska where I started climbing mountains, mountaineering style. I got an ice axe and crampons and pickets and learned how to use them. I started climbing regularly in a climbing gym. Why not? It rains a lot here, I needed a workout, and I didn’t have any friends. All my friends are climbers and mountaineers.

Moonstone Beach, Humboldt Country, California

We all free solo whether we acknowledge it or not. With time and experience I gained a much greater understanding of what I can do and what I can’t do. I have also gained an understanding of my surroundings and the consequences of being wrong. Dean Potter was a great climber but he actually thought he could fly. I free solo on those places on a mountain trip where the ridge is thin and you just know you would die if you fell off but you know you won’t fall off. It’s a little like standing on a curb knowing that if you fell three feet into the street, you might get hit by a bus. Any time you are one step away from death you are philosophically on a free solo whether you are on a curb, driving a car on hill, or standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon taking photos. If your brakes fail, you make a mistake driving, you step into the street at the wrong moment, or pay too much attention to your camera when you should pay attention to your feet, it’s a “death fall” but you have so much experience walking on the sidewalk side of the curb, driving a car, or standing on cliff's edge with a camera that you don’t even think about the potential.

One of my big problems in Peralta Canyon was that none of us understood rock. This applies to all climbing in the sense that once a climber has done a maneuver safely a thousand times or more, he or she figures out it’s safe to do without a rope. These skills have to be practiced and placed in context of environment.  Most climbers don’t know what breciated granite is and it isn’t necessary to know. I looked it up online yesterday. But you do need to know that some rock fractures easily and other rock does not and that making that distinction wrongly can  mean your life.  A climber needs to spend enough time climbing to differentiate a difficult climb that might lead to a fall from basic easy going. Before climbing anything that is not protected, like a free solo, you should know for damn certain you aren’t going to fall.  

Years ago in Peralta Canyon, I didn’t know any of that stuff. None of those climbs were tough and I could probably climb them now but the rock was and is choss and we didn’t have any clue what the fetch we were doing. Even though I never met him, I am sure that Dean Potter for all his bravado didn’t want to fall. He wanted to fly and he thought he could and few things are more dangerous than a person that thinks they know something that can't actually be known.  Once a person decides they can't be wrong, they are in dangerous space. 

I haven’t met Alex Honnold either but he seems like he most definitely doesn’t want to die. I am 53 years old and I hope that Honnold lives to be my age and longer. Considering the risks he takes, that may not happen. Then again it might. I am always surprised by the fact that climbers seem to live to old age.

I have zero illusions that I will ever be talented at climbing. Yet I climb on. I don’t remember being two years old but I am sure I didn’t climb out the window and into the Box Elder tree for fame or peer approval. I climbed out there for reasons I can’t put into words.