I think so personally. I haven't had the chance to really talk to him about it, he was still kinda in shock a few days ago. But the rope being there, maybe he thought it as a way out if things went bad, subconciously. In soloing its probably better to just think falling = death. Deffinately not Mike at his best. haha But i had to put it out there, hows many good decking videos have you seen?

Every time Ive climbed solo I'm always thinking, Yeah baby that's a perrty line, I wanna climb that son na biatch, and I just do it MJ style. Being 50 - 100ft otd is fun stuff, however before I climb the fricken thing, I know I can do the darn moves w/ my feet. And soloing does not equal death, for most.

Wwhoooooaaaaaaaaaa
Whooooooohhaaahaahaaa
Whoooiooooeeeehahahaha. Ha. Ha h

one of the best RC's posts in 2009 with 550+ score

There is no way anyone can post something like this and get so much attention before the end of the year unless i die.

Waste of an hour of on and off reading, two monitors, no climax. I knew a girl like that on........
Bob

tossing = recycle bin

... or continue being a mod and enforce the rules, which point towards this thread either being moved to Campground or removed altogether. Simple enough, no?

As I said earlier, the video was well done and instructional. I sent it to some of my sons and a grandson (12). The grandson and I talked about it yesterday. The video had the advantage of showing him the dangers of free soloing without the gore that would have occurred if the climber’s landing was a few inches farther out. He was impressed and we had a good talk about soloing. It’s a great teaching tool.

Incidentally, a video that convinced him that he needed to learn more about rappelling is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RncnnVST-0. A disaster but no gore.

I said earlier that I thought CP was a terrific troll. CP even agreed and yet was able to keep the responses coming. I finally decided no teen ager is that smart. CP is a mole from the management who’s posting to drum up eyeballs so the advertisers can be charged more.

I encourage CP to put the video back up. It’s too valuable to not be shown.

Cheers,
Rob.calm

As I said earlier, the video was well done and instructional. I sent it to some of my sons and a grandson (12). The grandson and I talked about it yesterday. The video had the advantage of showing him the dangers of free soloing without the gore that would have occurred if the climber’s landing was a few inches farther out. He was impressed and we had a good talk about soloing. It’s a great teaching tool.

Incidentally, a video that convinced him that he needed to learn more about rappelling is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RncnnVST-0. A disaster but no gore.

I said earlier that I thought CP was a terrific troll. CP even agreed and yet was able to keep the responses coming. I finally decided no teen ager is that smart. CP is a mole from the management who’s posting to drum up eyeballs so the advertisers can be charged more.

I encourage CP to put the video back up. It’s too valuable to not be shown.

Cheers,
Rob.calm

I hadn't even really thought about that until you mentioned it, but the absence of injuries and gore keeps the video on track as an educational tool. It's so easy to get side tracked with injuries, and we all know of someone who got hurt some way that we could have endless conversations about. Without the injuries to talk about, we are much more likely to stay focused on the steps that contributed to the accident and maybe learn something about how to avoid following in that path.

Very perceptive, as usual, rgold.

You may have single handedly resuscitated this thread.

Oh, I dare.

Although to be honest I don't care enough to keep debating this and will throw it back to General momentarily. I still think the content past page 15 is out of place, so kindly get things back on track.

{insert whatever noise it makes when threads are moved}

There is the old saying about and experienced climber being one who hasn't been killed by his stupid mistakes. Personally, I have no memory of my first free solo. I woke up in the boulder field underneath a climb feeling kinda sore. I had a faint of memory of intending to solo the climb, but no recollection of starting up or falling off. There was a little water streak up a ways that would have made things slippery---maybe that had something to do with it. Of course, there were no cameras and not even another person around to tell me what had really happened.

I took the experience as a warning, but cannot say it ended the free soloing part of my career. I've done hundreds of free solos on crags and in the mountains, and think of it as part and parcel of my generation's climbing practices---virtually everyone I know did the same thing. One or two paid the ultimate price for it. But most of us didn't climb at the very edge of our roped climbing ability; my hardest solos were still at least a grade, usually two or more grades below what I could lead without falling. When my daughter was born, I stopped entirely.

I think some of the condemnation generated by the video is a result of the climber's substantial level of incompetence. Whatever grade climbs he has somehow gotten up, his technique classifies him as a beginner, and one out of place without protection. He appeared to start up mindlessly, then seemed to panic up high at the hard move, and didn't have the mental control to back down.

It is an interesting feature of modern climbing and the way people progress that someone with such poor technique has a host of "hard" climbs under his belt. I guess it is a testimony to what can be accomplished with a go-for-it attitude and lots of natural strength, fueled by an apparent lack of restraining consequences. Performing in a safe environment where there are no consequences of a blown move and every difficulty is solved by moving up is not good training for trad leading, much less free soloing. Attitudes and approaches actually have to be unlearned.

If it is possible to overlook the incompetence of the climber in this episode, there is another underlying message, and that is the ingredients in trad leading and even more so in free soloing include aspects of mental control as well as technical ability. What this means, as we saw, is that something done repeatedly with protection becomes another proposition altogether when one's ass is on the line. Looking at that fall as some sort of random failure that might have happened during any of the roped ascents but most unfortunately happened the one time the climber was unroped is, in my opinion, a dangerous misunderstanding of a very demanding game, because it suggests that the climber was the innocent victim of a random event, rather than having made a laundry list of misjudgements leading to an almost predictable end.

This puts me in mind of another personal experience, another type of failure. There is a climb I wanted to solo for years. It's 5.11 low down at bouldering height; I've done that part a countless number of times---its just a boulder problem. Then, higher up, in either the death or serious injury zone, is a 5.10 section. I've been up there 20, maybe more times over the years. I have moved up and down and into those moves and back. I always figured I could eventually learn enough about them to do the whole thing reversibly, and there was some truth in this, since I always did climb back down. But I never obtained the level of mastery I needed to push on, and so, in spite of years of attempts, I've never done it. Solo is the only way I've ever tried this particular route, and so in fact I never did do it, and now I'm way too far past my prime to even contemplate such an effort.

I could still easily top-rope the thing, but prefer to leave it as it is, with a bit of mystery which will be eternal for me, a challenge I confronted at length and ultimately declined, a failure that somehow seems to me to be more of a success than many of the harder routes I've managed to get up with a rope. It was a long path from the concussed awakening youth at the base of that unremembered wall to the aging greybeard smiling up at a lovely line never to be completed, a path I've managed to travel thanks to the imparted wisdom of many companions and the profound good luck to have survived my many mistakes.

So is that guy an idiot? The sad and terrible reality is that anyone who falls off free-soloing is an idiot, no matter who they were or what they did before that terrible last moment. Yeah, he's young, stupid, unskilled, and inexperienced, like me and a lot of other people who turned out ok in the end. He's been given an incredible gift, his life back, his health and vitality intact, when he had no right to expect it. The measure of the boy, or man, will be what he does with that gift, and really, we can only wish him the very best.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

Alright, peep show is over people! Nothing to see here. If you've already seen it, you probably know where to find it.

Editing is weke.

So were the bullshit coward attacks on crazypete's family. Don't see you calling that sonoabitch out. Weak indeed. I'd delete my OP too.

DMT

So were the bullshit coward attacks on crazypete's family. Don't see you calling that sonoabitch out. Weak indeed. I'd delete my OP too.

DMT

I didn't see any attacks on his family on the first page, which is about all I read through.

Come on Dingus, quit being so damn melodramatic. Only one person responded to CrazyPetie's comments about his uncle, and while it was in poor form it was hardly an attack on the uncle. Shit, he praised Pete's uncle repeatedly to make it clear that he was simply calling Pete's bluff and NOT attacking the uncle. And he personally knew the man he was referring to. No-one even touched it beyond that, except to call it bad style.

Frankly, you calling him a "coward" and a "sonoabitch" is clearly a personal attack, and considering that Chad was directing his venom at his target while you sprinkle yours around, I'd say that you are the one who should be considering the merit of your words.

Pot, meet kettle.

So were the bullshit coward attacks on crazypete's family. Don't see you calling that sonoabitch out. Weak indeed. I'd delete my OP too.

DMT