Free Solo Climbing

Picture this: you are suspended on a sheer cliff face hundreds of feet above the ground. The wind ruffles your hair and the rock grips your fingertips as you survey a natural kingdom of which you are the singular ruler. You turn your gaze toward the open sky above you, broken only by the towering face that you will conquer by the time the sun slips beneath the treeline. Your arms begin to ache, so you know it is time to move on; you can’t afford to let fatigue start creeping into your limbs. Scanning the rock in front of you, you choose your next thumbhold and begin creeping upwards, knowing that your next move could be your last, that that tiny crack in the glass-like rock is the only thing holding you to this world. If you slip, there is nothing stopping you from plummeting to the forest floor below.

You are free solo climbing, the pinnacle of mountaineering reserved only for the sport’s elite. Those armed with the rare combination of peak physical fitness and a brazen confidence in one’s abilities verging on the suicidal, take on some of the world’s challenging cliff-face climbs with one vital difference; they do so without a rope, so one wrong move is absolutely fatal.

For years, free solo climbing was considered a niche of a niche, a fairly obscure subgenre of a sport with a relatively small community. But this changed when Alex Honnold made international headlines by becoming the first person to scale Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope, the story of which would later be released as an Oscar-winning documentary. Yosemite has long been the mecca of the climbing world, where the community was allowed to flourish throughout the 1960’s before the commercialisation of its natural wonders, and El Capitan is its crown jewel. The first time it was climbed the team took 48 days to do so — Alex Honnold did it in just under 4 hours.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to understand the appeal of climbing without equipment, especially for a sport that is all about immersing oneself in the grandeur of the natural world, although plenty of legendary climbers have met untimely ends whilst free soloing. But perhaps this is also part of the appeal. Many free solo climbers talk about the level of concentration required resulting in a zen-like state, a total immersion in absolute presence as they move meditatively up the cliff-face. As with so many other extreme sports, it is the pursuit of flow, the state of mind that can only be brought about only by complete focus on what one loves, in which the mind and body attain a spiritual transcendence that echoes religious experience, where en-heightened ones become en-lightened ones.