Lives on the Edge

 

Last night, we watched a DVD that has been lurking on the shelves for a good while now: "Free Solo" - it was released in 2018 - that portrayed one of the most astounding rock-climbing feats imaginable: a solo climb of the face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, USA. To anyone who doesn't know what soloing is, it's simply one person out there on whatever piece of rock they've chosen to climb, with no ropes, no gear, no escape route: about as pure as climbing gets.

Add to this the sheer scale of El Cap - 3,200 feet of climbing, and taking in many 'routes' in the process, some of immense technical difficulty, even roped and 'relatively' safe - and you have an undertaking that I think you have to have some climbing experience to appreciate. I am an ex-climber of no particular talent - a 'bumbler' in the old-fashioned jargon of the sport: well, maybe a little better than that, but not much - but I understand both the physical and mental aspects of the sport, and the motivations that make people do what they do.

Soloing is a very particular activity, something to which I was never psychologically suited, but I've known climbers who revelled in that tiny edge of existence that comes with the territory, where failure is not a just a matter of losing style or face, but the very real risk of serious injury or death. In the case of a solo of El Cap, the latter is the most probable outcome of any mistake made in the ascent. Watching the climbing footage was a bit of a grip in itself; the climber, Alex Honnold literally hanging it all out there on some of the thinnest slabs and finger-crack lines imaginable: even though I don't fear heights, the vicarious insecurity and vertigo gave me the shivers.

Fast rewind to 1981, and Eric Jones, then in his mid-forties, and with a considerable climbing and adventuring history already behind him, made the fourth solo ascent of the North Face of the Eiger, a climb steeped in failure and blood over the previous half-century or so. The Eigerwand and its storied catalogue of human endeavour to climb it, is best read in Heinrich Harrer's "The White Spider", published in 1958, a copy of which I have in first edition, and which is one of my very favourite climbing reads. The North Wall - the Nordwand or Eigerwand, is 5,900 feet of mixed alpine climbing, that claimed the lives of many of its aspiring conquerors, probably the most tragic of which was Toni Kurz, who froze to death, stuck on a rope just metres from the safety of the window of the Eigerwand Station in 1936 at the age of 23.

Notwithstanding the subsequent successful ascents of the Nordwand and advances in climbing technology, soloing the North Face is, and always will be, a very different thing to climbing it in a party. The fact that Eric Jones decided to attempt - and succeed in this - in his forties, is testimony to the man's spirit and raw talent. So whilst I applaud in absolute awe the solo of El Cap by Honnold, as far as I'm concerned, the humble man from North Wales - Ruthin, by birth - takes the absolute bloody biscuit as far as free-climbing is concerned. Hwyl, Mr. Jones!