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Adventure Video of the Week |
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Written by Poul
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Tuesday, 02 February 2010 |
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This past weekend I caught up with the travelling Banff Mountain Film Festival world tour in Glasgow. It was a great event and spectacle and the highlight, for me, was watching Alex Honnold solo a route called Moonlight Buttress as warm up for the more famous Half Dome in Yosemite.
Free solo climbing is defined by Wikipedia as a climber (the free soloist) that forgoes ropes, harnesses and other protective gear while ascending and relies only on his or her physical strength, climbing ability, and psychological fortitude to avoid a fatal fall.
It really got me thinking about what level of skill and precise mental attitude would be required to solo a 2000ft rock face that the vast majority of ordinary climbers would not even take on, even with the aid of modern climbing equipment.
One of my favourite scenes in the film was Alex carefully putting on his seatbelt in his van. Safety first, and irony, as they say. And then when he finds himself 1600ft up on a ledge and lets his mind unwind a little.... 'wtf am I doing here!' Funnily enough he meets some hikers on the top of half Dome and they found it way more radical that he was hiking back down barefoot.
As a climber I am hugely inspired by Alex but is free solo climbing for me? I don’t think so.
So, as the Banff Festival organisers have yet to upload a clip of Alex free soloing for my first video of the week I'll nominate this amazing clip of Dan Osman solo speed climbing a route called Lovers Leap.
Dan was well known for free soloing and rope jumping (falling several hundred feet from a cliff then being caught by a safety rope). He died after his rope failed during a jump from the Leaning Rock at Yosemite on November 23, 1998. He was 35 years of age.
This is truely amazing.....take it away Dan
And if you want to see Alex Honnold climb, all be it with ropes, check this out and look out for those crazy upside down moves – a case of 'unless you see it you'd not believe it'.
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