mountaineering

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/features/athletes/alex-honnold/most-dangerous-free-solo-climb-yosemite-national-park-el-capitan/

Renowned rock climber Alex Honnold on Saturday became the first person to scale the iconic nearly 3,000-foot granite wall known as El Capitan without using ropes or other safety gear, completing what may be the greatest feat of pure rock climbing in the history of the sport.

instant legend status

i'll be amazed if he makes it past 40yo

i don't think i can ever watch footage of what he did. reading that article made me sweat

can't wait to watch it tbh

Climbers have been speculating for years about a possible free solo of El Capitan, but there have only been two other people who have publicly said they seriously considered it. One was Michael Reardon, a free soloist who drowned in 2007 after being swept from a ledge below a sea cliff in Ireland. The other was Dean Potter, who died in a base jumping accident in Yosemite in 2015.

John Bachar, the greatest free soloist of the 1970s, who died while climbing un-roped in 2009 at age 52, never considered it. When Bachar was in his prime, El Capitan had still never been free climbed. Peter Croft, 58, who completed the landmark free solo of the 1980s—Yosemite’s 1,000-foot Astroman—never seriously contemplated El Capitan, but he knew somebody would eventually do it.

“It was always the obvious next step,” says Croft. “But after this, I really don’t see what’s next. This is the big classic jump.”

reardon's death was kind of a bizarre accident iirc, but worth noting that croft (a hero of mine as a teen) is one of the only prolific soloists who got out alive, and i think that's because he stopped trying to push technical standards while free soloing. i think he continued to do it (and may still, even in his dotage), but i'm not sure he did anything harder/more bold than Astroman.

as he says, there's not really much left available to honnold that doesn't involve more technical difficulty (which greatly increases the already astounding risk of human error) or more objective hazard (like some kind of remote alpine wall, like the trango tower or mt thor on baffin island).

xp i too am pretty excited to watch, though i will probably have sweaty palms the whole time

he doesn't seem to have much reason to stop. not much close family, lives in a van, lives for climbing

and i don't expect he will, tbh -- i suppose he could try to free solo the dawn wall but, from a technical pov, that's like an order of magnitude harder

if it's been free climbed, it can be free soloed, would be his outlook i'd imagine

his life insurance is presumably a bag of chips and a sausage roll for whoever scrapes him off the valley floor

nice

went to a mountaineering event at caltech a while ago and was impressed by some of the video footage of some dudes

dear ilx: please see Free Solo (documentary about Alex Honnold, who free soloed El Capitan last year)

it isn't just a bro'd out depiction of what (imho) is one of if not the singular athletic accomplishment of the last oh hundred years, it's a pretty intriguing portrait of the person that did it

also it'll make your palms sweat

i really want to see this

it's very good!

even if you don't care about or even hate rock climbing/mountaineering as a selfish dangerous pursuit

I'll try to see that. Honnold is pretty amazing.

definitely looking forward to this

i don't have an issue with rock climbing being selfish or dangerous, i just find the personalities of climbers to be annoyingly alpha

over the past 5 years or so i’ve discovered that mountain climbing docs are one of my favorite things. i love watching ppl do stuff i would never in my life even attempt.

i love imagining myself running them over with my car.

*shrugs*

:(

lol sorry, i have feelings about climbers as i'm living in one of their meccas right now and i guess this thread at this moment gets to receive them. i feel like i get what makes climbers tick and i just don't care about witnessing their increasing degrees of fearlessness; nonetheless, the spotlight is always turned on them and the same old story of physical triumph over nature.

Funny, nature never understands that it has been subdued or conquered. It just keeps on being nature in the same old way.

also it'll make your palms sweat
first theater I've seen with chalk marks all over the seat arms. Xp

Re what makes ppl tick - I get your point, and it relates to a phenomenon I call "venue toxicity". I get it when trapped in any super intensive sports environment esp. med/long course tri dorks hang gravity riders. but it can be non sporting, like jam bands. after like 8 consecutive hours I'm was way done. bluegrass? pretty instantaneous for me.

living in Moab tho? so many offsets.

not hang, "and"

map! i agree that climbers can be aggressively self-aggrandizing w/r/t their accomplishments ("accomplishments") and certainly with how they turn the camera on themselves (cf conquistadors of the useless)

also: climbing is so fucking fun i actually don't care

anyway if/when i get to moab i'll buy you a beer if you let me

I like the close-ups in climbing movies to the extent that they show spots that are so impossible to see irl: high in the Himalayas, etc. The Meru film, for instance. I can take or leave the actual climbing and alphaness.

Freeskiing movies are even worse. The accomplishments are generally not as impressive and the skiers are just blasting through the terrain. Best part of big-mountain ski movies tend to be the slow ascent shots imo. When I watch one I often wonder why/how they get made. Who is financing this stuff and why?

I love skiing and find climbing insanely hard and not so much fun, fwiw.

I liked Free Solo a lot! It was a nice look at "excellence" and how that relates to normal human relationships. Like I can admire Honnold's ability and focus, but those ex-girlfriends who thought he was impossible to deal with weren't wrong. It was interesting compare Honnold to Tommy Caldwell, who has off-the-charts danger tolerance by any normal metric, but at this point isn't trying to die for his art, while Honnold is basically okay with that idea.

NB: I have basically zero exposure to climbing culture and have found in the handful of times I've tried anything more than scrambling up rocks that I get freaked out very easily.

There's plenty of GoPro-on-a-head mountain climbing videos on YT, but this one got my attention. Probably because there's no background music, no annoying editing tricks, just the sound of breathing, coughing, wind, and climbing. Watch it full screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhBzhi9jPFs

Was waiting for the traffic jam on the lhotse face, was not disappointed.

whoops, i meant the hillary step.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfpYNr7es0Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfpYNr7es0Y

yay finally saw Free Solo, it was a really satisfying piece of work. i enjoyed how they identified the key difficult pitches and allowed you to see them enough to understand them visually and as elements. and THEN they sorta surprise-introduced the arete/whatever that crazy, exposed, external overhang in the final effort was- it was visually stunning and comprehensibly hard and ~felt~ like a perfect climax, to me.

Part of me is like, it can’t be easy to find someone who’s a bit of a weirdo socially, who also comes across as nice and smart, but who ALSO has superpowers. If Stan Lee was still alive to review the storyboard, i think he’d be, “cool character, but this guy is not very realistic. he’s in the uncanny valley of superheroes, my dudes.”

(even if u hate armstrong it’s worth watching the interview he did with honnold recently- i enjoyed honnold’s “my neighbor’s are used to my shopping routes” a lot).

“neighbors”

I will have to watch Free Solo. I've got an appetite for this stuff (literature and film) that outweighs my dislike of the characters involved. Recently watched The Dawn Wall, which documents Tommy Caldwell's fucking mental attempts to free climb in Yosemite. It's not the most cinematic film and is overlong but it's compelling all the same.

My favourite books of this stuff are probably David Roberts' The Mountain of My Fear and the first chunk of Harrer's White Spider.

Part of me is like, it can’t be easy to find someone who’s a bit of a weirdo socially, who also comes across as nice and smart, but who ALSO has superpowers. If Stan Lee was still alive to review the storyboard, i think he’d be, “cool character, but this guy is not very realistic. he’s in the uncanny valley of superheroes, my dudes.”

otm

also man ueli steck was something else, rip dude

re books, i'll make a shameless plug for my pal freddie's book "one mountain thousand summits," notable largely because much of the focus is on the experience of the sherpas working on K2 who are every bit the incredible athletes (or more) as the alpinists they're working for

i watched Free Solo recently and speaking of something else, wow that guy is something else

https://enormocast.com/2017/07/episode-133-alex-honnold-kind-of-a-big-deal/

Long, interesting interview with Honnold on the Enormocast. Definitely a lot of inside baseball, but that's also sorta the point (it's a climbing-specific podcast). Good complement to the documentary, and actually makes Honnold seem even more affable?

he is pretty charismatic, will check. hey gbx, do you get DMs off ilx? didn't know how to ping you on bike stuff, so i tried a ilx-o-gram a few days back. my email off here is from 2002 i think, still exists apparently. "yahoo"!

i don't think i've checked my ilx-associated email in....many years?

take my govt name as shown on strava and concatenate without punctuation and geeee mail it

i thought he was kind of a sarcastic ass to his girlfriend

In the documentary? For sure

you mean free solo guy?
i didn't think he was sarcastic but he was definitely acting selfishly

yea honnold

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qSiEKntQA

dude presents as so megacharismatic to my type imo, even as a non-climber. im at min 7 and just 👀 lol

"Whoah that's not a thing." LOL

"Oh well he just died, that sucks."