Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain, climbing a mountain. via [more inside]
posted by lazaruslong on Aug 5, 2009 - 27 comments

Столбы (Stolby) Free soloing I climb. I've sky dived. But watching videos of people free soloing gives me vertigo. In the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, however, there is a community for whom this is their bread and butter. And now, cats.
posted by vernondalhart on Sep 3, 2007 - 27 comments

I am going to be a storm-a flame
I need to fight whole armies alone;
I have ten hearts; I have a hundred arms;
I feel too strong to war with mortals-
BRING ME GIANTS!

Lynn Hill's free climb of 'The Nose' route on El Capitan (GoogleVid 19:40). "What stunned the climbing world (although if anyone could do it, Hill could) was her success in freeing The Nose in 1993 over the course of four days, finishing a project no one else had managed in 30 years. To "free" a route you must climb only the rock, and only with your hands and feet. Although Hill could rest at belay stations and had a climbing partner to catch her when she fell, she led every pitch and managed to climb sections that previously had been ascended only with "aid"--that is, by hanging and climbing on equipment placed in the rock. She went back in '94 and did the same route, free, in 23 hours."[from her bio] Always wanted to try climbing? Have Lynn teach you.[image gallery][terminology]
posted by sluglicker on Jul 28, 2007 - 21 comments

"What has our world come to if we cannot join nature by climbing one of nature's most beautiful features?" asks Dean Potter after he free-climbs Utah's Delicate Arch and pisses off the Park Service. Again.
posted by mr_crash_davis on May 9, 2006 - 87 comments

Short film of climber Dan Osman scaling Lover's Leap in California without ropes, racing over 400 vertical feet in just under four & a half minutes. Link goes to direct wmv download. Having never heard of Osman before, I was shocked to find out that his daredevil ways led to an early death when a rope snapped while Osman was performing a modfied form of bungie jumping in Yosemite back in 1999.
posted by jonson on Nov 23, 2005 - 79 comments