5/8/2023 0 Comments Free texting icons![]() Dean Potter? Henry Barber? Steph Davis? Michael Reardon? Russ Clune? Mark Twight? Marc-André Leclerc? Hazel Findlay? Jimmy Jewel? Dan Osman? John Long? John Bachar? Basically everyone else? Check, check, check, check, check. *Does he write about Alex Honnold? Check. Haskett-Smith, who “viewed climbers who used ropes and equipment as incompetents,” and Georges Whinkler, who was perhaps the world’s first trust fund climbing bum, and Austria’s Paul Preuss, who was “a genuine madman,” according to his rivals, and “viewed pitons as unnecessary, even for safety, and as cheating when used as aid.” (After Preuss helped kick off the great piton debate of 1911, he fell “victim to his own theories,” as a German paper put it, taking a thousand-footer off the North Ridge of Mandlkogel, in Austria.)Īnd that’s just part one of a five-part book. He walks us through the role of soloing from mountaineering’s golden age in the late 18 th century to the early decades of the 20 th century, introducing us to folks like Walter P. Easter Island, where climbing (alongside other feats of bravery) replaced clan warfare as a way of electing tribal leaders. He describes climbing’s ritualized role on the island of Rapa Nui, a.k.a. Kilda, in the Outer Hebrides, where the endemic community of “bird snatchers” often roamed rope less up and down the sea cliffs, gathering the puffin eggs that played a crucial role in their diets. In addition to covering nearly every famous (or accidentally infamous) modern soloist*, Smoot’s inquiry brings us to the world’s oldest known rock climb (the Thamudic Route on Jebel Rum, in Jordan’s Wadi Rum) where the presumed first climbers, presumably free soloing, “carved their names into the rock more than two thousand years ago.” He takes us to St. The result is both fascinating and exhaustive. But these short sections function as decoration in a wide-ranging and painstakingly researched investigation into free soloing’s history, psychology, philosophy, morality, and cultural significance. These are the questions that Smoot explores his new book, which is worth your attention.Īs in his previous book, titled Hangdog Days, All and Nothing contains elements of memoir. It gnaws at you.” Just a few years after ostensibly quitting forever, he found himself regularly free soloing once more.īut why? Why wager your life against a piece of rock? Why risk leaving your kids without a parent? Why does “the impulse to climb rocks without a rope” constitute, for so many climbers, “the strongest in their life”? Within a year Smoot “got married, started a career, had a kid.” But then? Well, then he found out that “it’s hard to quit. I realized, with absolute clarity, that if I didn’t quit free soloing, I was going to end up dead at the bottom of a cliff.” “I had gotten away with something, barely pulled it off. “The stark reality of what I had just done overwhelmed me,” he writes. Having no other option, he continued upward-only to have his feet cut yet again. He swung away from the wall but managed to hold on and snipe his feet back on the footholds. ![]() ![]() And shortly after passing the point of no return, the point at which the moves he’d executed were too hard for him to down climb, his foot slipped. “That night I drew up a diagram of the crack in my journal and wrote detailed notes describing each jam, each foothold, each sequence of moves,” he writes. That same afternoon, bolstered by his experience with Croft, Smoot redpointed a gently overhanging 5.12 crack with ease-so much ease, in fact, that another friend jokingly said, “You could solo it.” If Peter Croft had that much confidence in my ability, I must be pretty good.” ![]() If I had fallen, I would have knocked him off the wall. He was out soloing one day in Leavenworth, Washington, when climber Peter Croft, as Smoot writes, “started up behind me, climbing directly below me as I pulled through a 5.10 crux. Counterintuitively, however, it was these exact facts-that he was strong, that he was solid, and that other people seemed to know it-that nearly killed him. Back then, Smoot was one of America’s strongest climbers he wasn’t uber-elite like Lynn Hill or Todd Skinner, but he was deep in the scene, a regular contributor to magazines like Climbing and Mountain, strong enough to send routes near the top of the grade scale, and solid enough to go tandem soloing with the likes of Peter Croft. Jeff Smoot begins his latest book, titled All and Nothing: Inside Free Soloing, by describing a moment in the mid-1980s when his life nearly came to an end.
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