ELDORADO SPRINGS — The vertical
hardened sandstone walls engulf your drive into the mouth of
Eldorado Canyon State Park. Cut by water's sharp erosion over
eons, their staggering diagonal layers of sediment wrench your
head, involuntarily, from the rushing South Boulder Creek to
the blue sky, more than 1,000 feet above.
You pay your $6 fee and park in the lower lot, where Mic
Fairchild has agreed to meet you. Cursing yourself for
arriving late, you step out onto the gravel and see a car.
Then you look up.
Standing atop a
200-foot rock formation near the creek and wearing a bright
yellow T-shirt, a lone climber gives you a long look. No
helmet. No ropes. Must be him.
At 49, Fairchild has climbed alone fairly regularly for 20
years.
He has agreed to meet you in this national climbing mecca
about eight miles southwest of Boulder to talk about what
drives people like him to climb alone and without protection.
He is an appropriate storyteller in part because, six
years ago, he made the first free-solo ascent of an extremely
treacherous climb, way up the cliffs above him, which
recently almost killed a 22-year-old CU student.
On May 23, Brandon Fritts fell 60 feet from "Smoke and
Mirrors," a climb with a 5.10a difficulty rating near the top
of the canyon's 1,200-foot Redgarden Wall. Wearing only the
clothes on his back, his climbing shoes and a chalk bag,
Fritts could have fallen more than 500 feet before hitting the
first talus. But a ledge stopped his dive into almost certain
death.
Fritts remained in serious condition this week at Craig
Hospital. He and his family declined requests for interviews.
To get an idea for just how hard a 5.10a climb is, consider
that most routes on Boulder's First Flatiron, which people
sometimes solo in sneakers, are rated 5.2. That means there
are at least two hand holds and two foot holds for each move.
In addition, the First Flatiron is sloped, far from vertical.
A 5.10a climb is vertical, and is best climbed by experts
using ropes, as there are no discernible hand or foot holds.
Fritts' accident has sparked a question that sometimes
emerges when someone falls short of pulling off a dangerous
stunt. People inside and outside Boulder's vast climbing
community say they want to know: What is it about free solo
climbing — that is, climbing alone without any form of
protection — that makes it worth the risk of falling without
much hope for survival?
Fairchild has already given you his take on the phone: "In
today's society, hardly anything is really in your hands to do
as you please," he said. "If you're up in the crag it's all
you, and that's a good place because most of the rest of
society requires that you co-opt to something."
From the top of the 200-foot rock formation, Fairchild's
right arm sends you a long, arcing wave, then turns its
attention to the canyon wall. In minutes, the man is out of
view.
These enormous walls are almost breathing.
Since the 1950s when people climbed alone because the sport
was just gaining hold in America, climbers have flocked to
Eldorado Canyon in exponentially increasing numbers.
Currently, the park sees about 122,000 climber visits each
year.
Park ranger Steve Muehlhauser says few of them are
free-soloists. In fact, he says, Fairchild is the only climber
he knows who free-solos there on a regular basis. He knows
there are others who free solo in Eldorado from time to time —
like Fritts, a CU senior from Columbus, Ohio (elevation 800
feet) — but none so frequently or for so long as Fairchild.
As the park's ranger in charge of managing climbing and
climbing safety, Muehlhauser says he would not recommend that
anyone free-solo. He says he hopes climbers use designated
routes, proper equipment including a helmet, and have the
proper training and conditioning.
That includes Fairchild, he says.
However, he concedes, just having the right equipment
doesn't make climbing safe. Someone like Fairchild, he says,
is often safer than a climber with plenty of gear and not
enough know-how.
You walk across the bridge, over South Boulder Creek, to
the Wind Tower area, and wait for Fairchild. Within minutes,
he pops out from behind a rock and climbs swiftly,
unencumbered, up to an area called The Bulge, hundreds of feet
above. Fifteen minutes later, he reappears walking toward you,
down the trail.
Smiling under a graying mustache, he says he's pumped from
"the flow" of the climb, ready for more. He rummages through
his backpack and hands over a couple of faded beige handbooks
written 20 and 30 years ago: "Advanced Rockcraft," by Royal
Robbins, and "Rocky Heights: A Guide to Boulder Free Climbs,"
by Jim Erickson.
Paraphrasing from a passage he likes in Erickson's book, he
says, "Soloing is the least contrived and the most natural
form of climbing one can imagine."
Fairchild calls himself "a philosophical apprentice more
than anything" of the great free-solo climbers who came before
him. He says he believes in what people like Erickson wrote in
the 1970s, about how climbing is a matter of relative
achievement. Since free-soloing is relatively harder than
climbing with protection, he says, it's a more ideal form of
the sport.
Together, you walk back across the bridge to the Bastille,
a world-famous, 300-foot cliff on the south wall of the
canyon. As Fairchild scrambles up to another solo climb, the
"West Arete," you sit on the rock wall along the road and read
sections he has marked with scrap paper and his business card
(which identifies him as a mountain guide, instructor and
photographer).
"In pure rock climbing," writes Robbins, "free-soloing is
attractive not for its safety but for the joy of moving
competently and unfettered with only the belay of one's mind
and body working smoothly to produce an art — to be high above
the ground yet be in complete control, but know that such
control comes only from mastery of the rock and of oneself."
Indeed, Fairchild and Fritts, the young man who fell from
"Smoke and Mirrors" last month, are among a niche of climbers
that seem accepted, and almost revered, by the rest of the
climbing community. Robbins became famous among rock climbers
because he was able to scale the most difficult routes and
then write well about them. His 1968 free solo ascent of El
Capitan in Yosemite National Park did not hurt his reputation.
Bob Culp, a Boulder-based mountain guide, started climbing
in the area in 1959, before the sport had gained much
popularity. In time, he found a growing community of people to
climb with. But he says he has always enjoyed going it alone.
"Everything you experience in climbing is really
exaggerated when you're solo climbing," says Culp, 66. "Your
senses are heightened. The danger is much greater. When you're
solo climbing, you have a great sense of freedom of movement.
It's kind of climbing stripped of everything but the
climbing."
Derek Hersey may have personified that spirit best. The
Manchester, England, native made Eldorado Canyon his home in
the 1980s and quickly became known as the friendly legend who
could climb any pitch, completely unprotected.
He would often comment to his climbing friends, "Well, I'm
at the office today," as he took death-defying laps up and
down the canyon's hardest routes.
"There's nothing that makes me feel so alive," he told a
New York Times reporter in 1991. "You're thinking — but not in
words. You're thinking in movement, in rhythm."
Hersey died in a fall two years later at the age of 36,
while soloing in Yosemite National Park after a sudden rain.
He is the only confirmed death of a free soloist on the record
books at Yosemite. Many have said they weren't surprised that
the high-profile climber met his end that way. But most stop
short of criticizing him for throwing himself at his passion
in life.
More recently, in October 2002, Scott Hamilton, an
experienced climber from Boulder, fell to his death while
free-soloing on The Dome, a formation high in Boulder Canyon.
Hamilton, 49, taught kids how to climb at the East Boulder
Recreation Center.
"Hamilton's accident begs the question: When is
free-soloing prudent?" wrote Jed Williamson, editor of the
annual book Accidents in North American Mountaineering. "There
will always be a handful of elite climbers who push the
envelope, either on-sighting hard routes or soloing difficult
climbs they have done many times, ones that the majority of us
could never get up even with a rope. While those climbers are
inspirational, we should not view them as role models to
emulate and have no business climbing without a rope, even on
easy climbs."
Lloyd Athearn, deputy director of the American Alpine Club
in Golden, says that in life, there is a continuum of risk,
and free-solo climbing is part of that. For some with the
right combination of skill and common sense, he says,
free-soloing can be much safer than, say, driving in a car.
And wouldn't you rather spend your time clinging to a rock
face than sitting in traffic? Just think of John Muir, an
environmental leader who spent lots of time by himself among
the rocks in the western United States.
"I can't help but wonder if those solo adventures Muir had
really bonded his contact with the environment and made him
the person that he was," Athearn says.
"There is something really special about being by yourself
and moving at your own speed," he says. "You're much more in
tune with the environment around you. People focus so much on
the risk and danger end of it and they fail to realize there
is a mental and spiritual opening up when you are totally
relying on your own instincts and abilities, and I think that
is why people choose to climb on their own."
Sometimes, even climbers who prefer ropes choose to forego
them, when other considerations enter their environments.
Take, for example, when the weather turns bad for a climbing
party. Suddenly a higher premium is placed on speed, and
plodding the same slow course over easy or even intermediate
terrain becomes less safe if it leaves the party exposed to
lightning.
Consider, also, those who take bouldering — the sport of
climbing close to the ground without ropes — to a higher
level. Highballing, as it's called, is the gray area where a
bouldering challenge gets so high off the ground that it
becomes more perilous and enters the realm of a free solo. A
fall there could result in at least a serious injury, or maybe
even death.
When seen in this broader light, free-solo climbing
involves a much more significant segment of the climbing
community.
"My guess is that most climbers at some point in their
lives have free-soloed," says Steve Matous, executive director
at the Boulder-based Access Fund, a climbing rights advocacy
group. "It's not as common as you get older, but it's very
common when you're younger and newer to the sport."
Fairchild returns from his climb on the West Arete in
Eldorado Canyon. You give him back his books.
"Solo climbing is a mind game where you have to be fit or
you don't last long," he says.
As you walk back to your cars, he gives you some notes full
of thoughts on free-soloing that he says he scribbled down
that morning, so as to express his thoughts as clearly as
possible. As you part ways, he emphasizes that he isn't
critical of Fritts, the 22-year-old who fell off "Smoke and
Mirrors."
And you can see where he's coming from. After all, a
central ethic to climbing is the idea of self-reliance. Fritts
risked it all, and he almost paid the dearest price.
You part ways, and flip through Fairchild's notes.
"Solo climbing teaches the sport's purity," he writes. "You
have great control over the situation, but you need the wisdom
and control to recognize danger and the ability to retreat if
necessary, rather than risk too much."
As you drive out of the canyon, through Eldorado Springs,
and into Boulder County's open fields, you gaze south, toward
Englewood, where Fritts is in rehab at Craig Hospital.
You turn north on Colo. 93 and, driving through the open
space back to Boulder, ponder the question that brought you to
Eldorado Canyon: What is it about free-solo climbing that
makes it worth the risk of falling without much hope for
survival?
The open fields give way to concrete sidewalks, glassy
storefronts, traffic and stop lights, and you turn those words
in your mind.
Free.
Solo.
Contact Camera Staff Writer Chris Barge at (303)
473-1389 or bargec@dailycamera.com.
)
