Blog

Discipline

• May 2011
• Climb Travel

Hi Steph,
Just been on your website and was over the moon to see that I could send you an e-mail!

I’ve been climbing about a month, literally everyday. I’ve always been terrified of heights and wanted to conquer the fear, or at least get a hold on it. It has changed my life.

Anyway, I’m sure you’ve heard all this before! What I wanted to ask you was, when did you think to yourself, ‘I’m going to climb that without a rope!’ How did you know you were good enough that you wouldn’t fall? Out of all the climbing disciplines free soloing appeals to me a lot, just wanted to get your advice.

Thanks for the opportunity to get in contact.
Eam

Dear Eam,
I started climbing when I was 18. I was living in Maryland at that time, and the next year I did a student exchange program to Fort Collins, Colorado. In Fort Collins, I was able to go out bouldering between classes at Horsetooth. There was one wall there that was kind of tall, and I was afraid to climb to the top–it was sort of in between bouldering and free soloing height. I did the climbing up and down thing for a while, and then one day I brought out a rope and tied some knots in it and fixed it from the top. Then I climbed up from the ground and clipped the first knot into a locking carabiner on my belay loop. I climbed higher to the next one and clipped that one in when I got to it. It was sort of a primitive self belay method, but the idea was to just keep myself off the ground if I fell from really high up, which of course I didn’t. Anyway, that cracked the spell and after that I was able to climb up that wall without a rope.

I guess that experience got me going with wanting to climb more things without a rope, and I did lots of easier free solos from that time on, which has been about 20 years now. I take it pretty seriously, and one thing I have observed is that many people tend to fall and die on easy routes rather than their hardest testpiece solos. It seems like that happens across the board too, a lot of people who do really extreme things have their fatal accident in a situation which is supposed to be an easy, casual outing. I’m not sure why that is, but I have noticed it. And then the other thing I have observed is that we are all going to die, there’s really no way around that.

My general rule of thumb with free soloing is there has to be a very large margin between my actual climbing ability and the level of the climb I am free soloing. This is the way to create a conservative approach. So if you free climb 5.13 consistently with a rope, and you have many years of experience with free soloing, you could conservatively free solo up to 5.11 (depending on the style of the route–one of my most terrified moments was soloing Snake Dike in Yosemite when I was 23, and being totally unprepared for the 5.7 friction slab crux move, though at the time I was a solid 5.11 leader in the Valley. After that I learned to pay attention to the style of the climb, not just the number grade before thoughtlessly charging up it without a rope!). If you have less years of experience free soloing and/or your consistent free climbing level is lower, you would step it down with the free soloing level proportionately. This is my “formula”, what I have found as a deliberate approach that works well for me.

Because the whole idea is to enjoy these experiences, and live them in a beautiful way that I can sustain, not getting away by the skin of my teeth–to me that is an ugly experience and what I want to avoid. Also, I don’t do a free solo unless I feel 110% sure I can do the climb in a lockdown style and that I won’t fall. That gives me more margin for the unexpected, the things that are out of my control. Still, sometimes when you start, it feels different. Things change when the rope is gone. This is another reason I find it intelligent to step it down significantly with free soloing, compared to your consistent free climbing level with a rope. Like I said, this is my approach, what I have learned works for me and gives me good experiences.

So take your time. You have a lot of years to climb, and there are so many ways to enjoy going up….!
🙂 Steph