Joe Rogan with Alex Honnold: the greatest athletic achievement of all time

[lake]

Posted by sunwings (here)
Just found a great documentary showing a free solo slackliner. Starting at 19.30 mins you can see a world record attempt that he had twice failed before.

oh. my. god. .... that is also unreal

The things that people do for 'fun'!
I couldn't even go near the edge .... have that 'call of the void' thing .... just want to jump off to see what it is like

This below may not be in the right thread (please move or delete if not) but I have always loved motorbikes (even though I am not very good on them and crash often lol)

GUY MARTIN VS MICHAEL DUNLOP ISLE OF MAN TT RACES 2014

This is one lap (17 and a half mins), 37 miles at an AVERAGE of 130+ mph, and no it has not been sped up ....
Follow Guy Martin and his Tyco Suzuki Superbike weapon for a mad dash around the famous Isle of Man TT course in 2014, as he chased BMW mounted Michael Dunlop!

Source: https://www.bitchute.com/video/RAaUmrBLOprT



This below is a documentary about the TT (1 hour 40 mins)

CLOSER TO THE EDGE

Closer to the Edge is a British documentary film by first time director Richard de Aragues. The film is narrated by Jared Leto and charts the Isle of Man TT motorcycle race that takes place on the Isle of Man every year. It follows the leading riders in the 2010 race, most notably Guy Martin and Ian Hutchinson.

Source: https://www.bitchute.com/video/hvIdLQIpW8e1

[Bill Ryan]

Bumping this thread with a new Alex Honnold solo video, just released. This time, it's only 9 minutes long, pieced together from 2011 archive footage together with interview clips of Peter Mortimer, the photographer who was there with him.

Anyone who enjoyed Free Solo will definitely appreciate this. It's a Yosemite climb called The Phoenix, quite short (just 130 ft) but super-scary and crazy-hard.

Death would be an absolute certainty if an unroped solo climber were to slip and fall. At one point, the camera begins to shake because Mortimer just can't handle zooming in too close to where Honnold's fingers are visibly holding on to almost nothing.

I didn't even know Honnold had done this. (OMG.) Back when I was a very active rock climber, The Phoenix had a fearsome reputation, one of the hardest climbs on the planet with the world's very best taking days trying to climb it (with ropes!), falling off repeatedly and often totally failing.

The idea of soloing it (then) would have been literally unthinkable, a sure suicide mission no matter how good you thought you were. So for me, watching this was really quite something.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WeUoLWiVH8U

[araucaria]

Posted by lake (here)

This is one lap (17 and a half mins), 37 miles at an AVERAGE of 130+ mph, and no it has not been sped up ....
Follow Guy Martin and his Tyco Suzuki Superbike weapon for a mad dash around the famous Isle of Man TT course in 2014, as he chased BMW mounted Michael Dunlop!

Source: https://www.bitchute.com/video/RAaUmrBLOprT

I know this is off topic (namely the climber), but let me tell you what is wrong with this video. I have driven the same ordinary road hundreds of times and have got into the habit of passing at the legal top speed, concentrating at all times on the road ahead. I have also been a passenger on a number of occasions, enjoying the view out of the side window. It is totally fascinating how much there is to see just outside of the peripheral vision of a driver completely focussed on what lies ahead. Nothing special of course: just people living their lives. But the faster you go the less you see. So the problem with this video is that it shows not what the driver experiences, but what his passenger suffers in coming to the conclusion that they are driving too fast.

Just how much of what goes on in the world is due to this spectator bias is completely underestimated. The spectator is someone extraordinary who can run 100m in under ten seconds, a marathon in under two hours, can climb Everest without oxygen, the list goes on. I can do none of these things, but as a member of the human race, I belong to a team that does them all.

What does this mean in terms of the man who mastered the ultimate cliff face? It suggests that he succeeded by coming closer to it than anyone had ever done before – or maybe it was the other way round. So, in a sense, we can take the man out of the equation and confront the cliff face itself: it is almost unclimbable; but the next step is to see oneself as its equivalent: how many people in the world are capable of surviving ME? Perhaps not many at this stage. In that case, ‘I’ may see ‘me’ as the unscalable mountain, and make efforts to be more approachable. Some day, this cliff face will be a Sunday afternoon outing for all the family.

[ExomatrixTV]

Posted by araucaria (here)

Posted by lake (here)

This is one lap (17 and a half mins), 37 miles at an AVERAGE of 130+ mph, and no it has not been sped up ....
Follow Guy Martin and his Tyco Suzuki Superbike weapon for a mad dash around the famous Isle of Man TT course in 2014, as he chased BMW mounted Michael Dunlop!

Source: https://www.bitchute.com/video/RAaUmrBLOprT

I know this is off topic (namely the climber), but let me tell you what is wrong with this video. I have driven the same ordinary road hundreds of times and have got into the habit of passing at the legal top speed, concentrating at all times on the road ahead. I have also been a passenger on a number of occasions, enjoying the view out of the side window. It is totally fascinating how much there is to see just outside of the peripheral vision of a driver completely focussed on what lies ahead. Nothing special of course: just people living their lives. But the faster you go the less you see. So the problem with this video is that it shows not what the driver experiences, but what his passenger suffers in coming to the conclusion that they are driving too fast.

Just how much of what goes on in the world is due to this spectator bias is completely underestimated. The spectator is someone extraordinary who can run 100m in under ten seconds, a marathon in under two hours, can climb Everest without oxygen, the list goes on. I can do none of these things, but as a member of the human race, I belong to a team that does them all.

What does this mean in terms of the man who mastered the ultimate cliff face? It suggests that he succeeded by coming closer to it than anyone had ever done before – or maybe it was the other way round. So, in a sense, we can take the man out of the equation and confront the cliff face itself: it is almost unclimbable; but the next step is to see oneself as its equivalent: how many people in the world are capable of surviving ME? Perhaps not many at this stage. In that case, ‘I’ may see ‘me’ as the unscalable mountain, and make efforts to be more approachable. Some day, this cliff face will be a Sunday afternoon outing for all the family.

My assessment of that video is: when you hit a tree with a speed like that >>> you most likely be dead ... same for hitting stonewall or stone fence ... there only have to be one small animal like a cat, a dog, a rabbit, a squirrel, a chicken, a sheep, a goat etc. etc. or a kid or older (maybe mentally disturbed) person walking on the road, and you try to avoid hitting that ... "where should you go?" ... breaking most likely won't help because you would slide directly towards the obstacle in front of you if you have 1 or 2 seconds to decide!

cheers,
John 🦜🦋🌳

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wkFKf-YnzvY

[ExomatrixTV]

• Alex Honnold: ‘My New Film Is Almost Too Much For Some People’

Alex Honnold soloing Desert Gold at sunrise in Nevada.

• source

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WCqrksBMnuw

Rock climbing without ropes or harnesses?! Welcome to the world of free soloing! 2-part VR documentary following Alex Honnold, the world’s greatest rock climbing soloist, on a soloing journey across the U.S. and Europe. Immerse yourself in Alex’s gripping adventures as he tackles some of the highest peaks in the European Alps, pushing the boundaries of climbing and human achievement.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dy4jGZ--grE

[ExomatrixTV]

• Arctic Ascent with Alex Honnold | Official Trailer | National Geographic:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=esfM1w2b0dQ

• An Unforgettable Greenland Adventure | Arctic Ascent with Alex Honnold :

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nQyNQOufLS8

[ExomatrixTV]

• Climbing with Alex Honnold **Insane experience**:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Cyya23MPoAI

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by ExomatrixTV (here)

• Climbing with Alex Honnold **Insane experience**:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Cyya23MPoAI

~~~

I found this very interesting. All super-trivial, but let me explain.

Most climbing videos show the tiniest number of elite climbers, with olympic-level strength and gymnastic skill, who train professionally every day and climb things that only a few years ago might have been thought impossible. Like this:



But this Alex Honnold video above shows a normal rock climb. For anyone who might possibly be interested (and maybe no-one is! ), this is the kind of thing I used to climb all the time.

The grade of the climb in the video is 5.9. To offer an interpretation of that, the '5.' part of the number simply means that a rope is needed. So 5.1 would be an easy scramble, something a child could do. 5.15 is close to impossible. (No-one has yet climbed a 5.16.)

And 5.9 is right in the middle. There are plenty of holds, it's steep though not actually vertical, but (of course) a fall without being held on a rope would be fatal.

So I used to do climbs like this every weekend (and still could if there was any good rock here in Ecuador and I had a climbing partner!), but always with a rope, never solo.

The difference is purely psychological, as Honnold expertly explains and coaches. (I'd never realized what a good coach he was.)

If you're on a rope, you don't fall simply because you have the confidence that nothing much can go wrong. If you're NOT on a rope, you have to mentally trick yourself into the same level of confidence that no harm can come to you, because you know you can do it and you're just not going to fall.

It's all in the mind.

[Mike]

Bill I think you'll really appreciate this one (or perhaps you've already seen it). I literally just finished watching this a few mins ago. It's called "Beckoning Silence". Joe Simpson from "Touching The Void" narrates this remarkable documentary that's every bit as dramatic as his own mountain climbing experience in Peru(maybe more dramatic). It's about Toni Kurz attempt to climb the north face of Eiger in 1936.

I know next to nothing about mountaineering, but I have seen nearly every documentary on the subject, and this is top 3 for sure.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ibrULCtvKkY

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Mike (here)
Bill I think you'll really appreciate this one (or perhaps you've already seen it). I literally just finished watching this a few mins ago. It's called "Beckoning Silence". Joe Simpson from "Touching The Void" narrates this remarkable documentary that's every bit as dramatic as his own mountain climbing experience in Peru(maybe more dramatic). It's about Toni Kurz attempt to climb the north face of Eiger in 1936.

I know next to nothing about mountaineering, but I have seen nearly every documentary on the subject, and this is top 3 for sure.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ibrULCtvKkY

~~~

Many many thanks. I'd not seen that, and I'm a huge admirer of Joe Simpson.

I wrote about the event here a few years ago, in which I posted what I described as the most iconic photo in mountaineering history — Toni Kurz's lifeless body slumped on the rope after a failed superhuman effort, both by himself and his rescuers, to somehow save his life.



There was a marvelous 2008 German film about the whole thing, fictionalized with actors but very true to what had actually happened. The German title is Nordwand, translated in English as North Face. The Wiki page about the film is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Face_(film). This is the poster:



There are English-language YouTube subtitles which can be turned on, and (somewhere) there may possibly be an English audio-dubbed version. It's excellent. (And there have been numerous documentaries, all excellent as well.)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jzv3pZT3BNU

[grapevine]

Posted by ExomatrixTV (here)

• Climbing with Alex Honnold **Insane experience**:

I watched the video with sweaty palms and marvelled at just how smooth and polished the rockface was. And then I got to wondering about body build and what physical attributes were needed for climbing. I rejected Usain Bolt as strong but too heavy, Mo Farah on the other hand probably not strong enough. Maybe a gymnast, with all that upper body strength, and then I got just a glimpse of a raised T shirt at the end of the video and couldn't believe my eyes. So I googled Alex Honnold abs and got this . . .

Like WOW



Mod note from Bill:
We can't see that image... could you maybe go to edit your post and try again?
I Googled Alex Honnold abs myself to see what generated the big WOW, and saw this.
(Yes, he doesn't have an ounce of fat, and his core is immensely strong. There are some better technical (gymnastic) climbers than him, though — his particular uniqueness is a total lack of fear.)

[Bill Ryan]

Alex Honnold has (sort of!) repeated Tom Cruise's famous opening-sequence stunt in Mission Impossible 2, by climbing a high sandstone pillar and then jumping out and down to cling on to its neighbor.

For those who may not be familiar, here's the sequence. (Tom Cruise is a real rock climber, but the safety ropes he used were CGI-edited from the film.)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HK53sqgm__w

Now Honnold has done a very similar thing — without ropes. He was alone, climbing solo, so there was no-one to film his jump. But in the Instagram collage below there are two very short videos showing what he did.

"Pretty sick", jokes Honnold in his windy video commentary just before he made the leap.

[Bill Ryan]

Alex Honnold has Free Soloed the Taipei 101 Skyscraper

https://explorersweb.com/live-covera...101-skyscraper

[onawah]

More here:

Posted by onawah (here)
Watch: Honnold's insane 95-minute climb of Taiwan's Taipei 101 tower
TVBS World Taiwan
7.6K subscribers
Jan 24, 2026

"American extreme rock climber Alex Honnold summited Taipei 101 at 10:43 a.m. Sunday (Jan. 25), completing his historic free solo ascent of Taiwan's tallest skyscraper in 91 minutes as thousands of spectators erupted in cheers below.

Honnold embraced his wife at the summit at 10:47 a.m., with the couple excitedly taking selfies together. His wife, who had been watching nervously from the tower's top, said she was "very happy" for her husband and joked that "he climbed too fast." Honnold quipped that he had tried to wave and greet people along the way."

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tzNFo2iXc8w

Posted by onawah (here)
Skyscraper Live | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
32.5M subscribers
Jan 13, 2026

"No Ropes. No room for error.
World-renowned American rock climber Alex Honnold will attempt to become the first person to free solo one of the tallest buildings on the planet: Taipei 101, LIVE only on Netflix."

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZXiEp_GGSpg

(The climb was broadcast live by Netflix though there was a 10 minute lag in case of an incident. He did it in 95 minutes non-stop, but for a brief stopover to greet his wife who was inside the building on the other side of a window.
A big enough gust of wind probably could have been fatal. )
Piece of cake! )

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by onawah (here)
Skyscraper Live | Official Trailer | Netflix

Jan 13, 2026

"No Ropes. No room for error.
World-renowned American rock climber Alex Honnold will attempt to become the first person to free solo one of the tallest buildings on the planet: Taipei 101, LIVE only on Netflix."

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZXiEp_GGSpg

(The climb was broadcast live by Netflix though there was a 10 minute lag in case of an incident. He did it in 95 minutes non-stop, but for a brief stopover to greet his wife who was inside the building on the other side of a window.
A big enough gust of wind probably could have been fatal. )
Piece of cake! )

Here it is, downloadable for the next 3 days. (Be warned, it's terrifying to watch! )

• https://we.tl/t-HKI2hR0rAz

[onawah]

“When The Crowd Stops Applauding…” FULL MOON at 13° LEO, Sunday 1 February 2026, 22:09 UTC
February 2, 2026
ASTROLOGY OF NOW
https://angstoic.com/2026/02/when-th...2026-2209-utc/

(This astrological report isn't ALL about Alex Honnold, but enough of it is to make it suitable for posting here, I think.)

"The hard climb gets you to the summit. The summit gets you to the door. From there, Pluto decides whether you get an invitation to the party…
It stands to reason that anyone still in possession of a soul should be so weary by now that holding it together has become the primary task. In a world where the news cycles faster than your nervous system can metabolise, where even the slightest hopeful development carries a faint aftertaste of dread, any feeling of genuine rest requires an almost total disengagement from the possibility of any outcome whatsoever. Unless you are trained in the art of Tao or Zen, or have utterly resigned from the material aspect of this world in some Diogenesian, Buddha or Christ-like way, I’d wager you’re sweating bullets in your sleep.

I understand. I am also weighing up what I can let go of and what still feels too costly, too painful to surrender.



We’re approaching something massive in the skies. Saturn about to meet Neptune at the Aries point; Uranus stationing, preparing to shift signs; Pluto settling into Aquarius for two decades; eclipses threading through like sutures on a wound that hasn’t even finished opening. People are getting excited, and I understand the enthusiasm. Multiple outer planetary shifts aligning all at once can seduce the astrological community into believing transformation is finally here, that the cavalry is coming, that the old rot will be swept away and something more luminous will take its place.

Ah… the rapture… the quickening… the spritual ascension. It’s like a prayer, really. The kind of wishful thinking that only the scoundrel turns to for refuge when all around appears to be caving.

Here’s the thing about outer planets, and I say this with the weight and weariness of someone who has watched these cycles for too long to anticipate any of it will be a smooth ride: their force is catabolic. It will break us down entirely. Outers don’t simply change one aspect of your life and leave the rest intact. They upend your entire perception of reality, your relationship to others, the inherited customs and beliefs you’ve been living under without question. Often, the transition to the brave new world you dreamed of shows up in the most upsetting, even savage way.

Yes, things probably need to get better. Yes, the mouldy old structures were failing us in ways we’re only beginning to articulate. But the process of transformation is excruciatingly painful in ways the astrology memes on Instagram neglect to mention. This large-scale awakening means discovering that the safety you once took for granted was indeed complacency, that national pride was built upon myth, propped by collective hubris, defended with the blood, sweat and tears of our youth, and that the truths you ignored to stay docile and comfortable were piling up in a dark corner under your bed, feeding the very monster of self-deception who has now grown large enough to devour you. Saturn meeting Neptune blurs the line between meaning and manipulation. Uranus accelerates change past the speed of consent. Pluto demands surrender to forces that have no intention of negotiating your loss and grief. Those sextiles and trines between them make the whole process feel inevitable, which can birth genuine repair, or a very elegant prison passed off to you as progress. I suspect we’re building both, in different rooms, at the same time, and the next few years will reveal which dimension of consciousness we choose to inhabit.

For now, I find myself watching the climbers. Feeling the altitude, the thin air, wondering whether any of it’s been worth the effort. And like you, trying to keep my footing while the mountain reorganises itself beneath me.

That’s where this story begins. And if you’re reading this, you’ve been climbing too.

It’s Cold and Lonely At the Top
I must confess, last week I went down a rabbit hole about climbers. It started with Alex Honnold scaling Taipei 101, which the algorithm decided meant I needed to watch Free Solo again, which led to Everest documentaries, which kept me up past three in the morning staring at macabre footage of frozen corpses in the death zone while the Sun and Mercury crossed into Aquarius, past Pluto. Much as I was intrigued, I found myself wondering what kind of person looks at an eight-thousand-metre vertical death sentence and thinks, yeah, that’s the goal for me.

Honnold is a Leo Sun with Saturn in Scorpio squaring it, which means nobody feels the gravity of guilt and public scrutiny more acutely than those carrying that particular fixed cross. No Sun is more averse to being tarnished than the Leo, whose entire spiritual ethos focuses on upholding integrity, on being seen as golden, as valuable, as incorruptible. And no Saturn corrodes more viciously than Saturn in Scorpio, inflicting a creeping death anxiety into every quiet moment, reminding you that the void is patient and your grip is temporary. That he climbs at all is remarkable. That he free-solos—no ropes, no wiggle room, no second chances—is something closer to metaphysical defiance. His natal Neptune, at the first degree of Capricorn, the final degree of his sixth house, opposing his Cancer Ascendant, is his strongest planet. The dream of reaching the summit meant leaving the comfort zone entirely, repeatedly, abandoning the inner securities that Cancer clings to, ascending into terrain where the body becomes the instrument of something the mind can barely comprehend.



I watched him scale Taipei 101 the same week Neptune entered Aries, and the timing felt like a stellar transmission. Neptune in Aries initiates all humanity into an era I would call a “slow, painful search for a masculinity that can act without apologising for existing.” Honnold embodies that search already: the audacity to act without hesitation, presence without pretence, courage so total it becomes invisible to itself and is at one with the creator and destroyer of all that is. What he accomplished at El Capitan remains, in my estimation, more death-defying than Everest. Everest allows for teams, for oxygen tanks, for the distributed weight of collective risk. El Cap allowed for nothing but Honnold, the rock face, and the absolute knowledge that a single miscalculation would convert him into a statistic. The achievement is the apotheosis of defiance against limitation, the triumph over one’s greatest terror through focus, perseverance, and the sheer will to accomplish a defined goal. It is also, and this carries primordial significance, the symbol of Capricorn itself: the mountain goat ascending impossible terrain by virtue of relentless, methodical discipline.

But here’s what captivated me as the Sun moved into Aquarius and my algorithm kept serving footage of humans risking everything for elevation: it wasn’t the climbing itself. It was the watching. Millions of us observed Honnold’s ascent of Taipei 101 from our living rooms, shared clips across platforms, discussed his technique in comment threads, all from the safety of our couches and the climate-controlled reception centre on the 89th floor where the cameras were stationed. We watched a man who could die at any second, and we called it entertainment.

This is where Capricorn ends, and Aquarius begins. The climb is Capricorn: discipline, preparation, the relentless upward grind, years of training that turn hands into leather and the mind into a single-pointed instrument of ambition. Capricorn endows us with the verve to get to the top. But the top is a door, and behind the door sits Aquarius, and Aquarius decides whether and to which room you belong. The summit is merely the entrance exam. What you did to get there, who you stepped over, what parts of yourself you left frozen on the ridge—that’s the application form. And Pluto, standing at the gate in early Aquarius, has recorded every line, every keystroke, and is about to make you an offer you can’t refuse.

We’ve all been climbing. These past sixteen years with Pluto in Capricorn, we’ve all been ascending something: the career ladder, the new social hierarchy, the credential mill, the desperate scramble for legitimacy in a system that kept moving the goalposts. We’ve all left something behind on the way up. We’ve all looked at the bodies frozen into the mountainside and kept moving, telling ourselves we had no choice, telling ourselves that stopping would only add our own corpse to the scenery. And now, one by one, we’re reaching the summit, catching our breath in the thin air, discovering that arrival is merely an audition; the real test happens at the door.



The Three-Headed Gatekeeper
So you step into the Aquarian clubhouse around late January 2026, and the first thing you notice is that the vibe has shifted. The old Capricorn establishment—the mahogany-lined rooms, the slick Italian suits, the practised handshakes and knowing which fork to use—has been gutted and rebuilt into something sleeker, colder, humming with server noise and the faint ozone tang of too many screens running at once. The walls are glass and steel now. Everything is visible as far as the eye can see. Everything is scanned, recorded, categorised and filed in real time. And there, at the door, having clearly appointed himself permanent security, sits Pluto.

He’s going nowhere. It’s a 20-year sentence, minimum. Old dark-face is cloaked with that tech-oligarch energy now, the kind of man who wears the same black turtleneck every day and speaks softly about “optimising human potential” while his eyes, still and emotionless, alert you to something your nervous system registers only as threat. He holds supreme power over you. Still only at 3° of Aquarius, everyone who enters has to pass him. Everyone who enters leaves something at the door. He doesn’t request permission to indoctrinate you. He knows you’re inextricably locked in, and he logs it, and you walk out lighter in ways you won’t fully understand until much later when you reach for something that used to be yours and find the coffers empty. “It’s in the cloud,” he says.

I passed him myself, somewhere in the blur of recent weeks. I felt the cold brush of his indifferent cyber-scan. I felt something unfurl from my chest, some fragment of my private heart, some trust, some innocence of relishing my long-held secrets or the luxury of being unobserved. Meh… I walked in anyway. What could I do? We all did, didn’t we? The mountain was behind us now, the glory was fleeting, and the only direction that remained was forward… onward and upward, into the humming room, into the network, into whatever this next chapter demands of those who made it this far.

Initiation Rites
The gaping fascination of the global Netflix crowd watching Honnold wasn’t merely collective awe at an athlete operating at the apex of human capacity. Disturbingly, it was also watching a man’s proximity to sudden death, the unspoken thrill that at any moment the family-friendly feed could become a snuff film, and we’d all be there to witness it, together in our living rooms, alone on our phones, consuming human mortality as content.

This is Pluto’s initiation rite into Aquarius: the chill at the entry point, the determination to make witnesses of us all, and more disturbingly, to sever us from the natural human responses that witnessing should provoke.

Over the past two years, as Pluto hovered back and forth over the Capricorn-Aquarius cusp, we have watched mortifying videos go viral that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Civilians, including children, slaughtered in Gaza, the footage slotting seamlessly between dance challenges and influencer hauls on our kids’ TikTok feeds. The public execution of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, the bullet grazing his ear in high definition. The neckshot to Charlie Kirk, captured from every angle in the crowd. And what followed these horrors was neither collective grief nor moral reflection but the crowd dividing into cheersquads, then the outraged backlash against the cheersquads, then communities ripping themselves apart over whose reaction was more appropriate, while the actual violence receded into background noise, another data point in the feed, scarcely investigated, barely processed, already replaced by the next outrage. Most recently, two protesters gunned down in separate incidents by ICE officers, the footage circulating before the bodies were cold, before anyone had time to feel anything that might interrupt the scroll.

This is what Pluto at the Aquarian gate is engineering: a new relationship with death, one stripped of horror, robbed of sacred gravity, dispossessed of the revulsion and pathos that once marked our species as human. The chief criterion for membership in this club is the capacity to bear witness to atrocity while feeling nothing that would slow your participation in the network. Watch the atrocity. Share the atrocity. Argue about the atrocity. Scroll past the atrocity. Stay numb enough to function, numb enough to have an opinion, yet fragmented enough to be divided, clustered enough to belong to a crowd, yet dissociated enough to be ruled.

Pluto is hideous, and he’ll accomplish his agenda incognito when he can. But with Aquarius occupying the top floor of every organisation’s summit, with walls made of glass and steel and transparency built into the architecture, his attempts to operate covertly are becoming absurdly obvious. His efforts to silence, to redact, to manufacture consensus, to keep things dark while standing in plain sight, all splutter under the incessant 24/7 glow of fluorescent lighting and exponentially multiplying camera angles. There have been furious efforts to stem the haemorrhaging of dark insight, laws drafted and rammed through with alarming speed, but imagine being so repulsive that you have to legislate against people calling you a grotesque monster. That’s Pluto in Aquarius trying to maintain mystique in an age of screenshots and digital virality.



Muster and Roll Call
And yet every planet, every asteroid, every luminary that has filed into Aquarius this month has had to pass Lord Dark Helmet at the gate and make their accommodation with whatever shred of dignity remained.

Pallas Athena came through first, back in late December, bringing her particular gift for pattern recognition and strategic vision, the one who sees the chessboard while everyone else sees a conversation. In Aquarius, that tactical intelligence turned collective, began tirelessly networking, oriented toward installing systems in place of individuals. After assisting U.S. forces to remove Nicolás Maduro from presidential power on January 3, Pallas spent the rest of the month helping you see who was aligned with whom, which alliances were genuine and which were self-interest wearing the mask of solidarity. Then she slipped into Pisces on the 24th, mumbled something about needing to feel into things for a while, and dissolved into waters where her designs have gone impressionistic. The room lost its best analyst the moment the games got interesting.

Vesta entered on 11 January and immediately began tightening the screws. Vesta in Aquarius treats devotion as an engineering problem: what serves the mission stays, what wastes energy goes, and all sentiment gets chilled and filed under operational inefficiency. She’s been rifling through your mundane routines like an AI auditor with a devotion-coded flamethrower, interrogating what you’re actually committed to versus what you’ve been continuing out of habit, guilt, or the fear of what stopping might reveal about why you started. The shadow shows up as ascetic pride, the quiet martyrdom of someone who has stripped their life to pure function and mistakes that hollowness for discipline. She remains until 10 March, so the audit continues through the eclipses.

Venus crossed the threshold on 17 January, and you’d think she’d warm the place up, but Venus in Aquarius is the lover who parks you in the friend zone and says “I think we should define our terms” the moment you reach for a hug. She’s been scanning every relationship in the room, coldly exposing where conviviality was leverage and where closeness was self-interest flagging a hashtag. After passing Pluto at the door on the 20th, something shifted behind her eyes, a new knowing about who truly values whom, and she’s been about as forthright about sharing intel as the FBI has been in releasing those Epstein files. She leaves on 10 February, days after the Full Moon, so whatever relational recalibration she’s been engineering, expect the invoice next week.



Then came the rapid escalation, three ingresses in five days, each one passing Pluto at the gate, each one adding voltage to a room already crackling.

The Sun breezed in on the 19th and immediately started interrogating everyone about what future their current behaviour was building toward, one of those annoying questions that also happens to be necessary, the kind that makes you squirm precisely for the reason you already know the answer and would rather leave it unsaid. The Sun, in his detriment through icy Aquarius, turns identity into experiment and ego into hypothesis, useful if you’re genuinely evolving, unbearably partisan if you’re resisting, and he’s been illuminating the network ever since, showing everyone where they actually sit in the structure versus where they’d been telling themselves they sat. He brushed past Pluto on entry and by 2 February (like the groundhog) catches a glimpse of his own shadow, discovering how much of the self was built for audience approval versus how much from actual centre.

Mercury entered Aquarius on the 20th, practically vibrating, already mid-sentence about pattern recognition and systems thinking and how everything connects to everything if you’d only look, speaking like a policy document having a manic episode, upgrading everybody’s rhetoric while downgrading everyone’s patience for small talk. He passed Pluto at the threshold and his words got weightier, more consequential, more likely to serve as propaganda rather than proper dialogue, and since he leaves on 6 February, whatever manifesto you’ve been drafting in the back of your mind, leave the final edits in a blue manila folder by week’s end.

And then Mars shouldered through at 4:16am on the 23rd, and the room tensed in that particular way rooms tense when someone with a grievance and the muscle to back it up walks in looking for answers. Mars in Aquarius is reform energy with a YouTube channel, who, passing Pluto at the gate, began to spruik of revolution, rallying his droogies to hand out pamphlets on street corners, or in shadow expression, hand out black eyes to anyone who questions the pamphlets, pledging some pact about what he’s willing to fight for, die for, and burn. Twenty-four hours later, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot and killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, the second such killing in that city within days, and something in the collective body shifted. The footage circulated, yes, but this time the numbing scroll encountered resistance, the crowd hum turned to tremor, the tremor turned to bodies showing up in numbers, a collective refusal to absorb another execution as content, and the government, reading the room for once, backed down. Mars in Aquarius had drawn blood, but Mars in Aquarius had also drawn a line, and whether he proves to be security or liability remains to be seen, yet for one moment the network remembered it was made of humans, and the humans remembered they could refuse.

The View from the Top
So here we are, all of us who made it, standing in the hum of the server room with our metrics intact and our receipts logged and whatever we traded at the door already fading from memory. The walls are glass. All our digressions and human vulnerabilities exposed, two clicks short of being streamed live. The algorithm curates what you witness and calibrates how much you’re permitted to feel about the witnessing. Membership in this club requires something your grandparents would have found monstrous: the capacity to watch anything, absorb anything, scroll past anything, and still show up tomorrow with your empathy safely in airplane mode.

What did you leave on the mountain? What part of yourself got filed under acceptable losses? What warmth, what softness, what capacity to be moved by beauty or horror or the simple fact of another person’s existence, got edited out of the final version of you that walked through the door?

And on 1 February, rising in the opposite sky like a diva who’s had quite enough of the committee meeting, the Leo Full Moon enters the frame with warmth, with pride, with that unmistakable glint that says she came here to pose one question and she intends to make it personal:

Who among you still has a heart, and what exactly are you planning to do with it?

The Heart of the Machine
This Sunday’s Leo Full Moon is intense and does not occur in isolation. Bearing the brunt of a hive of planets around the Aquarian Sun, it feels as though this regal sign is being accosted by an army of radical free-agents—like an empress ambushed by anarchists who’ve scrolled too many timelines but haven’t read a history book. Perhaps that’s for the best. But it occurs in a web of minor aspects that most astrologers gloss over, those 45° and 135° angles that operate like hairline fractures in the psyche—easy to ignore until the weight of the whole structure groans like tectonic plates pushing up continents. The last lunation before the eclipses activates the upcoming Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and though we can sense our world about to shift in ways unimaginable, a serious jolt to the system may be precisely what we need to snap our fantastical fancies back into our mortal selves again.



By the sheer force of its polarity, this Full Moon helps you see the contradiction between the “me” and the “we” in your life. Do you see where you’ve been pressed, impressed, consigned, resigned into becoming part of the hive? Do you see where someone’s been too hot, too needy of attention, too hungry for a spotlight they haven’t earned? It’s been gathering steam for weeks. We have love to give—we love our kids, our playmates, our pet projects. But the rest… geez. There’s only so much warmth to go around these days. That long, wet, boundary-fudging, muck-making, delusional bubble-fart formed by Saturn and Neptune at the end of Pisces has drained us all. If there’s five drops left to spare at the top of this summit, let’s not waste them. Let us reserve them wisely for our own. And if we haven’t already, the blessed Aquarius Sun, and a host of other characters, will help to chill those cats riding on our goodwill, our philanthropic kindness, our strategic reticence to bruise their pride. But hey, hogging all of the attention without merit is a setup for a fall, and any fall from that height’s gotta hurt."

[Bill Ryan]

Dear Friends, this terrific article is very much in the spirit of this thread. For those who may not be too interested in all the details, the photos are impressive. And the short Steph Davis video below is inspiring. She's 52 years old (her Wiki page here), and is still BASE jumping and climbing solo.

• https://explorersweb.com/greatest-free-soloists

Buckle Up or Look Away: History’s Greatest Free Soloists

Stefan Glowacz free soloing 'Kachoong', on Mount Arapiles, Australia.

When Alex Honnold free soloed the 508m Taipei 101 skyscraper last month in just 1 hour and 31 minutes, the internet lost its mind. Headlines screamed “Greatest Free Solo Ever,” Netflix viewership exploded, and yes, it was wild to watch live.

But as mind-blowing as that urban stunt was, it doesn’t touch what he did on El Capitan’s Freerider back in 2017. That Yosemite granite wall is nearly twice as tall (884m of sustained, exposed 5.13-ish climbing), with way more complex sequences, tiny holds that crumble if you breathe wrong, and zero margin for error over hundreds of meters of air. No beams to grab, no predictable patterns, just you, the rock, and whatever mental steel you’ve built up over years of prep. That’s the kind of free solo that redefines what’s possible on natural stone.

So while the skyscraper headlines fade, let’s revisit some of the most iconic free soloists in rock climbing history beyond Honnold, the pioneers who pushed the absolute limits of unprotected climbing.

Honnold’s Taipei 101 free solo vs. his Freerider free solo.

Free soloing

Writing about free soloing feels a bit like analyzing a hurricane from an armchair. Even if you’ve watched videos, read several books, and imagined the vertigo, you never truly know the rush or the dread. Still, that’s part of what makes this topic so compelling. It’s a window into a world most of us will never enter, yet it stirs something primal in all of us.

Free soloing means climbing without ropes or other protection gear, or any aids beyond your shoes for grip and chalk to keep your hands dry. It’s you against the rock, pure and simple. No belay partner, no bolts to clip, and no second chances if you slip. A fall is game over.

Giving up everything

Unlike free climbing (where you use natural holds but have a rope for safety), or aid climbing (pulling on gear to progress), free soloing strips away everything. It’s the ultimate test of body and mind, where even a whisper of doubt can unravel you. As climber Alexander Huber wrote in his book Free Solo: Klettern ohne Sicherung und ohne Grenzen (“Free Solo: Climbing without protection and without limits”): ”Grab the stopwatch and you have speed climbing. Give up aid climbing methods, and you have free climbing. Give up everything, and you arrive at free soloing.”

Free solos on rock can happen in two main ways: on-sight (climbing the route for the first time without any prior rehearsal or beta, no top-roping, no watching others, no notes on the moves), or rehearsed (the climber has climbed the route multiple times before, often roped, to memorize every hold, sequence, and rest spot). Onsight solos carry an extra layer of raw commitment because there’s zero room for error in figuring out the puzzle on the fly.

Free soloing isn’t just difficult, but it’s a cocktail of physical precision, mental fortitude, and uncontrollable variables that can turn a climb into tragedy in a heartbeat. Imagine hanging by your fingertips on a crumbly hold, wind whipping at your back, 500m of empty air below you. One gust, one loose flake of rock, and it’s over. External dangers may appear at any moment. Sudden rain slickens the rock, a bird startles you in mid-move, a snake suddenly appears from a small crack, or fatigue cramps your calves.

Preparation is everything. But mental strength is almost everything, too. Climbers often rehearse routes obsessively, sometimes for years, climbing them roped dozens of times to memorize every nuance, such as the texture of a hold, the precise sequence of moves, and even how the sun warms the stone at certain hours. It’s about mastering fear through preparation, turning terror into focus. Climbers describe entering a flow state where the world narrows to the next hold, the next breath.

Alex Honnold on the monster off-width section of ‘Freerider’ during his free solo ascent of El Capitan.

The point of no return

Free solo is also about crossing that point of no return: the critical moment on the route where the moves you’ve just done become too hard or too insecure to safely reverse. From there, downclimbing is no longer realistic, and the only way out is up.

The point of no return can come early, sometimes just 10m or 20m off the ground on overhanging or technical lines, or higher up. However, once you’ve passed it, hesitation turns deadly. Free soloers manage fear not by ignoring it, but by building mental armor. Deep breaths to calm the pulse, rational self-talk to push through doubt. Many have paid the ultimate price, and that knife-edge tension is what makes every climb a wild ride for the soul.

Compiling a list of history’s greatest free soloists and their most iconic climbs feels subjective, almost arbitrary, and it would never be absolute. But let’s try, anyway.

Paul Preuss.

Paul Preuss, the ‘father’ of free soloing

Paul Preuss was an Austrian climber and philosopher from the early 20th century, recognized as a pioneer of free soloing. He advocated a radical purity in climbing, believing that a climber should rely solely on his own abilities, without external aids such as ropes or pitons. Skill, judgment, and physical ability should overcome difficulties, not equipment.

He applied this ethic to free soloing and completed approximately 300 solo ascents out of 1,200 total climbs. Preuss is the ideological foundation of the sport. In the early 1900s, he argued that a climber should only go up what they can also climb back down without gear.

His most notable free solo was the first ascent of the east face of Campanile Basso (also known as Guglia di Brenta) in the Brenta Dolomites of Italy in 1911, when he was 25 years old. He climbed the route on-sight. True to his strict personal ethics, he descended the same route by down-climbing it without ropes. Preuss died in 1913 while attempting a new solo route on the north ridge of Mandlkogel in Austria, falling from a great height. (We recommend reading Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss, by David Smart.)

John Bachar free soloing New Dimensions.

John Bachar, the first icon

John Bachar was one of the most influential American rock climbers of the late 1970s and 1980s. A legend in the sport, he brought a professional, athletic rigor to the discipline of free soloing in Yosemite.

One of his most impressive free solos was on the 100m-long New Dimensions route (5.11a), a classic multi-pitch crack climb on Arch Rock in Yosemite. This groundbreaking climb pushed the boundaries of what was considered possible without ropes at the time.

Bachar treated highball bouldering like boot camp for these solos, knocking out hundreds of hard routes with little prep, basically inventing modern free solo training, until a fall claimed him at age 52 in 2009, while free soloing a route on Dike Wall, a climbing area near Mammoth Lakes in California. No one witnessed the accident, but other climbers nearby heard the fall and reached him quickly. He was taken to a hospital but succumbed to his injuries shortly after.

Wolfgang Gullich, the technical master

Germany’s Wolfgang Gullich brought the extreme difficulty of sport climbing to the world of soloing, and took it to another level. In 1986, he pulled off the first-ever free solo of a 7c (5.12) route with Weed Killer at Raven Tor in England. That climb was a huge psychological leap at the time.

The same year, he did his most iconic ropeless climb: Separate Reality in Yosemite. The image of him hanging from a horizontal roof above the ground is one of the most iconic photos in climbing history.

Tragically, Gullich died way too young at 31, in a car accident on a German highway in 1992.

Wolfgang Gullich during the first free solo ascent of ‘Separate Reality’ in Yosemite.

Peter Croft, the endurance king

Canadian Peter Croft grew up climbing in British Columbia’s Squamish and became one of the most respected figures in big-wall free climbing and free soloing from the 1980s onward. He’s known for his incredible efficiency, endurance, and calm approach to long, demanding routes, especially on Yosemite’s granite. He treated multi-pitch classics like they were casual outings. What really put him on the map was his free soloing. He started free soloing early in Squamish and Washington state, knocking off overhanging 5.11s like ROTC at Midnight Rock in 1984.

But his big breakthrough came in Yosemite in 1987, when he became the first person to free solo Astroman (a sustained, exposed 5.11c on Washington Column) and then linked it with a free solo of The Rostrum (another classic 5.11 multi-pitch) on the same day.

That link-up stunned the climbing world. Royal Robbins, one of the old Yosemite greats, called it astonishing mastery rather than just bold luck. Croft had already soloed Astroman alone a little earlier, and the combo showed he could handle long, technical, committing terrain ropeless, with total control.

Croft’s style was low-key and personal because he saw free soloing as an intimate thing, not something to hype or film much. He avoided the spotlight, stayed humble, and just kept moving over rock better than almost anyone.

Peter Croft, during one of his free solo ascents of The Rostrum. Once he free soloed it three times on the same day.

Dan Osman, the mid-air double dyno master

Dan Osman was an American extreme sports pioneer and rock climber, known for his high-risk approach to the mountains. He lived a bohemian lifestyle as a carpenter while pushing the limits of speed and safety in the 1980s and 1990s. Beyond climbing, he invented “rope jumping”: controlled free-falls using dynamic climbing ropes to catch himself in a massive pendulum swing.

With his signature long hair and explosive style, he became a cult figure through the Masters of Stone film series, bringing extreme climbing to a mainstream audience.
Osman’s most iconic free solo was on Bear’s Reach at Lover’s Leap, California, in 1997. He sprinted up the roughly 120m route (graded 5.7) in just 4:25 minutes. The climb became a viral legend for its mid-air “double dyno,” a terrifying leap where he completely detached from the rock. He died in 1998 at age 35 in Yosemite National Park when a rope system failed during a record-breaking jump. A post-accident investigation concluded that the failure was attributed to rope-on-rope friction that melted the line.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7ADOK6LD70w

Catherine Destivelle, the female pioneer

Born in Algeria and raised near Paris, Catherine Destivelle of France was the most famous female climber of her era. While her peers often relied on brute strength, she was celebrated for her balletic grace and an eerie, unshakable calm at heights that would paralyze most. Through breathtaking documentaries, she brought the terrifying beauty of solo climbing to a global audience, making the most technical movements look effortless.

Her most impressive pure rock free solo took place in 1987 on the sandstone cliffs of the Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali. Filmed for the legendary documentary Seo, Destivelle climbed technical, overhanging walls in the heart of Dogon country with zero equipment, no ropes, no harness, and no margin for error.

Beyond rock, Destivelle’s legacy was cemented in the high Alpine, where she became the first woman to complete the winter solo Triple Crown of the Alps: the Eiger, the Matterhorn, and the Grandes Jorasses. In 2020, she was the first woman to receive the Piolet d’Or Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dean Potter, the FreeBASE visionary

If climbing had a mystic, it was Dean Potter. Known for his imposing physical presence and a gaze that seemed to pierce the rock, Potter inhabited what he called The Dark Arts, which was a blurred communion between free soloing, high-lining, and BASE jumping. For Potter, the void was a space of meditation where fear transformed into absolute mental clarity.

His most visually terrifying achievement took place on Heaven, a brutally overhanging crack jutting out like a granite diving board at Glacier Point. Potter navigated this technical roof (5.12d/5.13a) with animalistic power and icy precision. As the pioneer of FreeBASE, he later integrated the parachute as a solo climber’s only safety system on higher walls. (Notably, Potter didn’t wear a parachute on Heaven, as the terrain below was unsuitable for a parachute deployment.) Potter lived on the impossible edge between total freedom and the ultimate fall until his tragic passing in 2015 during a wingsuit flight.

Dean Potter makes the first free solo ascent of ‘Heaven’.

Steph Davis, a bird that can’t be caged

U.S. climber Steph Davis redefined the modern era of free soloing by blending technical mastery with the freedom of flight. A former classical pianist, Davis brought the discipline of the keyboard, focusing on rhythm and repetitive precision, to the vertical world.

She first made history in 2005 as the first woman to summit Torre Egger in Patagonia. Often described by her partner as a “bird that simply cannot be caged,” Davis transitioned from an elite academic path to the climbing life. She became a female pioneer of FreeBASE climbing.

Her most defining free solo on rock came in 2007, on the East Face of Longs Peak, Colorado, known as The Diamond. Davis became the first woman to free solo this wall via the technical Pervertical Sanctuary (275m, 5.11a). For Davis, soloing wasn’t a gamble, but a way to belong entirely to the mountain, stripping away everything until only the movement and the air remain.

”For me, the thought of getting hit by icefall or falling from a rock face are totally acceptable possibilities,” wrote Davis in her captivating book High Infatuation. “The idea of being hurt by a person is not. It always surprises me to hear people talk about climbing being dangerous. I have always felt safest alone on the side of a hard-to-reach wall or mountain. Although I understand that I could die in the mountains, I trust the hand of nature, and I know it will do me no harm.”

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VAcnZYavgTE

Alain Robert, the mutant with vertigo

Long before he became the world-famous “French Spider-Man” for scaling skyscrapers, Alain Robert was a pure rock mutant. His story is a medical anomaly. Following several catastrophic falls early in his career, Robert was left with a 66% technical disability and suffers from chronic vertigo due to inner-ear damage.

Instead of retiring, he transformed his fractured balance into surgical precision, becoming the most audacious free soloist of his generation. For Robert, the vertical world was the only place where his body truly made sense.

In 1991, he etched his name into history with the free solo of Compilation in Ombleze, France. Graded at 8b (5.13d), it was the world’s first 8b free solo, a level of technical difficulty so extreme, with or without a rope, that it wasn’t matched by the rest of the climbing world for over a decade. While his building climbs brought him global fame, his legacy on the rock remains the gold standard for pure technical difficulty without a net.

Alain Robert during a hard free solo climb in Verdon.

Alexander Huber, the physicist of the void

While other climbers sought adrenaline or spiritual connection, Alexander Huber of Germany approached the abyss with the cold, calculated mindset of a laboratory. A trained physicist, Huber stripped his ascents of all emotion, transforming the gut-wrenching terror of free soloing into a series of equations involving friction and centers of gravity.

To him, climbing without a rope was an exercise in mathematical precision. If the preparation was perfect and the technical execution flawless, falling simply wasn’t a variable in the equation.

His technical masterpiece occurred in 2004 with the free solo of Kommunist (8b+/5.14a) in Austria. At the time, free soloing at this grade was considered a physical impossibility, as the holds are so microscopic that a slip of a single millimeter results in certain death.

In 2008, he applied his “up and down” philosophy to the massive 400m South Face of the Grand Capucin in the French Alps. By free soloing the legendary Swiss Route and then downclimbing it without any external aid, he honored the purest traditions of climbing, following in the ethical footsteps of Paul Preuss.

We highly recommend reading two compelling books by Alex Huber: Free Solo. Klettern ohne Sicherung und ohne Grenzen (in German and Spanish editions); and Die Angst- Dein Bester Freund (“Fear, Your Best Friend”), unfortunately available only in German.

Alexander Huber free soloing ‘Kommunist’.

Hansjorg Auer, the quiet revolutionary of the Dolomites

Austrian climber Hansjorg Auer possessed a rare, humble intensity, preferring the silence of the high mountains to the noise of fame. In 2007, he achieved what many still consider the most audacious big-wall free solo in history on the massive South Face of the Marmolada in Italy.

Without telling a soul and carrying only a small bag of chalk, Auer stepped onto the rock to face Via Attraverso il Pesce (“The Fish Route”), a terrifying 850m limestone wall.

Moving with a speed that defied the technical difficulty, Auer blasted through the 37-pitch route in just 2 hours and 55 minutes. Graded at 7b+ (5.12c), the route is famous for its “Fish” niche: a shallow hole in the middle of a smooth, vertical sea of limestone where the exposure is absolute. Though he later became a world-class alpinist, this accomplishment on the Marmolada remains his masterpiece.

Auer was a man who lived for the purity of the mountains until his tragic passing in a 2019 avalanche.

Hansjorg Auer free soloing the ‘Fish Route’.

Climbing has many more historic free solos: John Yablonski’s wild solos of Leave It to Beaver (5.12a) and Spiderline (5.11d), capturing the Stonemasters’ chaotic intensity, and John Long’s foundational pushes in Joshua Tree. The list extends to Stefan Glowacz on the spectacular roof of Kachoong (5.10d, 7b) in Australia, Ron Kauk’s bold lines on Middle Cathedral, and Michael Reardon’s prolific speed solos, along with countless unsung ascents that quietly redefined personal limits.

With all free solos, one question pulls at the edges of every ascent: What does it mean to stand at the absolute limit of human capability and choose to step forward anyway?

[JackMcThorn]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
With all free solos, one question pulls at the edges of every ascent: What does it mean to stand at the absolute limit of human capability and choose to step forward anyway?

I've watched a lot of survival material but the free climbers take my breath away. And what I thought initially is pure fear. If I climb a ladder beyond the first floor I start mildly shaking. So climbing even with gear would scare me pretty much. Had I grown up near mountains and was full of youth I still think I would never be a climber.

But what I realized is it isn't about fear. These soloists have a level of pure human courage that cannot be matched. It is a peaceful form of courage; unlike the courage of a battlefield for instance. This is why I watch the videos and read the articles and I just think about how much risk a person is willing to take. And not even necessarily for bragging rights.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by JackMcThorn (here)

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
With all free solos, one question pulls at the edges of every ascent: What does it mean to stand at the absolute limit of human capability and choose to step forward anyway?

I've watched a lot of survival material but the free climbers take my breath away. And what I thought initially is pure fear. If I climb a ladder beyond the first floor I start mildly shaking. So climbing even with gear would scare me pretty much. Had I grown up near mountains and was full of youth I still think I would never be a climber.

But what I realized is it isn't about fear. These soloists have a level of pure human courage that cannot be matched. It is a peaceful form of courage; unlike the courage of a battlefield for instance. This is why I watch the videos and read the articles and I just think about how much risk a person is willing to take. And not even necessarily for bragging rights.

Their unquestioned courage has them balancing not just on the rock, but on a very fine, wafer-thin line.

• Paul Preuss – died in a fall while solo climbing.
• John Bachar – died in a fall while solo climbing.
• Wolfgang Gullich - died in a car accident.
• Peter Croft – (still alive)
• Dan Osman – died while pushing the limits on an improvised 'rope jump' (like bungee jumping, but way more dangerous).
• Catherine Destivelle – (still alive)
• Dean Potter - died while wingsuit flying.
• Steph Davis – (still alive)
• Alain Robert – (still alive)
• Alexander Huber – (still alive)
• Hansjorg Auer – died in an avalanche.

A few notes.

• John Bachar was widely admired as a kind of god, and most thought he surely had to be immortal and could never fall.
• Wolfgang Gullich was one of the strongest, most respected and universally well-liked climbers of all time. His premature death on the autobahn was an incomprehensible shock to everyone.
• Steph Davis was in a relationship with Dean Potter for many years, but though she loved him deeply she eventually had to leave as "he was just too crazy". (my paraphrase)
• Dan Osman was also greatly loved — and was also a little 'crazy'.
  
  Do watch this short video of Osman doing his first 'rope jump'. But, as many had feared (even those who knew him well), his luck eventually ran out when one of the ropes broke.
  
  And turn the volume up... Dan Osman would want that. The action (and the Metallica soundtrack) starts after a few seconds. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

https://avalonlibrary.net/Bill/Dan_Osman_and_The_Leaning_Tower.mp4

[onawah]

I think I can understand the attraction of rock climbing. I did a little bit of it in the Rockies when I was growing up in Colorado.
There is such a solid, reassuring energy inherent in rock; in a meditative state, it feels like you can become One with it, that you will be as solid and unmoving and connected to the Earth as it is.
I have a harder time understanding why someone would choose to climb a manmade building in the middle of a big city, however!
...Perhaps it's to prove that one does not have to rely on the power of and one's connection to Nature to succeed in staying safe and sure while free climbing to a great height.
I would think that the resulting natural "high" would be much different, however.
(No pun intended. )