...there's much food for thought in your post, Peter, not just about me and my motives, but the motives for any solo climbing. For instance, recall there is this thing called solo climbing without any belay system whatsoever! If rope solo with jumar is crazy, then what can one make of a true solo? Peek back at Stefan Schiller pictured on this very thread, sans rope if I read it right, standing there calmly in the middle of the BY, death only a broken knob away.

And yet, you will rightly counter, climbing with a flawed system takes a special kind of self delusion very distinct from the mentality of the no rope solo climber. In one case, the fool has fooled himself about possible consequences; in the other, presumably there is no self delusion as he/she knows sure death is the risk taken. But note the bit of craziness in this position too - we admire clear vision flirting with death but shake our heads at a jujitsu mental machination resulting in much the same risk.

In any case, I indeed had deluded myself, presuming the hefty looking jumar would hold some sort of fall and, what the heck, I wouldn't fall anyhow and the thing was some sort of backup even if not perfect and … you can see the kind of self talk leading to my path. But here again, things are not simple. I think there are shades of my madness in the whole mental game of a first ascent. We all proceed with a bit of self delusion on bare Tuolumne granite, or is it love and hope, when making a hard - we think reversible - move some distance out from the little bolt below looking more paltry by the moment, committing a bit more toward what looks like the next bolt stance or is it too small or slick a depression to stand in and get the drill set and start to tap and ...

I sense we are moving to a new thread topic on solo mentality or maybe another on the first ascent mentality and motive. But staying with solo mentality, perhaps we could hear, Peter, about your self talk in soloing El Cap when the self belay system you used (was it a prussic?) got toward its safety limits, or what Bachar tells himself doing no rope solo at near his climbing limits, to argue against the broken hold beyond all his powers to control, and where is Croft or Gill on the same issue and the other true soloists. Perhaps we will find there too some specks of delusion by which we all proceeded and, I would argue, still proceed on and off the walls because some realities must be denied, at least sometimes.

So I'm not against free soloing, it just seems out of place in The Gunks.

I appreciate all the responses to this, as they are all well thought out and expressed. It's rare on the internet to have a place with differing views remain as civil as this one generally does

I'm not sure I'd go as far as banning the practice, or think scornfully of those who engage in it...

I see every needless death of a soloist as a indictment against the entire soloing community. Shame on all of you.

I'll stand up to you fuckers...Civility out the window when people's lives are in actual danger from words.

Soloists are sick, they need help. They become the circus sideshow of rock climbing in the public's mind. Freaks...

The evolution of an angry man

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