RRC Archives

Dan Lubber recently posted on FB an old photo from about 5 years ago of an individual free soloing Chainsaw. My question to the climbing community... When is free soloing bold and acceptable and when is it just dangerous, selfish, and wrong? Can there be situations where it is acceptable in one situation but not another?

no

isn't the "Land of Opportunity" the same as having the right to do stuff that is both 'bold and acceptable' while also being 'dangerous, selfish, and wrong'?

i use 'wrong' here the same way everyone else uses 'indefinite detention'

Can it be neither?

How about just "Spraylord"?

Free soloing is cool.

I never understood the whole free solo a sport route thing though... How do you get down??? That's just dumb.

Doing something and topping out with shoes and a chalkbag is cool. Taking a bunch of photos and putting them on FB? Lame.

Dmack wrote:Can it be neither?

this sounds promising, care to elaborate?

used to be 3 rules in freesoloing: don't fall, don't spray, always make sure you can (probably) downclimb. somewhere along the line rule #2 got lost.

yeah, it's just hard for me to draw such a hard line against someone else who is willing to tell you that the boundaries you're accepting are arbitrary, and can prove it.
i think the value is variable. i'd probably take a chance on chainsaw if i ran laps on it every weekend for years as a warmup, wouldn't mean much. Dan Osman's onsight, if i remember correctly, of [edit: The Gun Club 12c] at the NRG, pretty bad ass, imo.

dustonian wrote:used to be 3 rules in freesoloing: don't fall, don't spray, always make sure you can (probably) downclimb. somewhere along the line rule #2 got lost.

You can witness that rule 3 got lost with me as well.