Skyscraperman by Dan Goodwin: ★

With Bare Hands by Alain Robert: ★★★★

Somehow, soloing skycrapers has never really caught on. It’s dangerous, illegal, and to most climbers, not very interesting. Such vertical sprawls are monotonous, lacking the beauty or intrigue of the world’s towering natural crags. But in the last year, two men have released books describing how—each for his own reasons—they attempted to conquer these behemoths of glass and steel.

“The best-kept secret in America’s fire service,” Dan Goodwin asserts, “is that firefighters cannot extinguish a fire in a high-rise.” Goodwin uncovered that secret in 1980, when a fire at the MGM Grand killed 84 people. He decided to start climbing skyscrapers to call attention to the fire service’s incompetence and quickly discovered the size of the hornet’s nest he’d poked. I wish I could say that Goodwin’s efforts called lawmakers’ attention to skyscraper safety, but unfortunately he doesn’t come off as a concerned citizen trying to help. He comes off as a guy who’d slap you in the face to demonstrate the importance of not getting slapped. Goodwin proposes techniques that are both patently absurd and physically impossible and his stories, though impressive, are saturated by his dripping ego. If you’re looking for a quasi-entertaining one-day read, try it. If you’re looking for inspiration, look elsewhere.

Alain Robert’s book, for example, is a good place to start. He writes eloquently for a person to whom English does not come naturally, relating stories of his own climbing, motivated not by delusions of social rebellion but by a love of climbing. Not only is Robert honest about his reasons, but all of his climbing is done with his own hands and feet, not the elaborate rig of suction cups and hooks that held Goodwin up. This is book for climbers, not the doe-eyed public. Robert writes modestly and lightly about his massive free ascents, punctuating his accounts with jokes and anecdotes. He’s not an entirely heroic character—he solos in front of his kids and he’s hurt himself in some incredibly stupid ways—but he’s refused to give up despite some horrific falls and for that he must be admired. The book is candid and interesting, and a good read for anyone looking to branch out in the world of climbing literature.

www.posingproductions.com, £19.99
www.bouldering.com, $29.95
★★★★

The Prophet should get six stars, but unfortunately it shares disc space with several deeply uninspiring shorts. Various climbers are interested in various routes. They hike to the base. Indy rock music plays. The route is sent. It’s a boring mold with none of the emotion that we expect from the climbing canon or this film’s title.

The Prophet, on the other hand, is the most riveting 45 minutes of footage I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of footage. Alastair Lee’s filmmaking seems almost molded around Leo Houlding’s thoughts; the happiness and crushing disappointment and absolute blinding fear that Leo works through are mirrored perfectly. My palms were practically streaming with sweat, I was biting my lip, and I nearly had a heart attack watching Houlding throw himself into “The Devil’s Dyno” 1500 feet off the deck.

But just as with The Asgard Project, Lee and Houlding’s last creation, there’s more to Prophet than just adrenaline. Houlding’s deadpan British wit and stoic endurance get just as much screen time as his muscles, as does the sheer strength of will required to work one project for nine years. I’ve never worked that hard at anything, but I know what Leo’s talking about when he explains it. “If it was easy,” he muses, looking into the distance, “it wouldn’t be so hard.”

Prophet makes up for the other films’ problems; I’d watch the DVD anyway. But save Prophet for last. It’s worth the wait.

One hour, fifty-six minutes. And a few seconds. For most of us, that’s enough time to watch a movie or go grocery shopping, but for the 32-year-old Swiss climber Ueli Steck, that’s enough to get up the classic Schmidt Route (1100m, TD/ED) on the north face of the Matterhorn. That’s around 1800 vertical feet per hour. Steck set this record on January 13th of this year, polishing off his three-year goal to speed solo the three biggest north faces of the Alps, starting with the north face of the Eiger via the 1800-meter Heckmair Route in two hours and forty-seven minutes on February 13th of last year and the north face of the Grandes Jorasses via the Colton-Macintyre Route, 1100 meters of technical ice and mixed climbing, in two hours and twenty-one minutes.

Steck’s career goes far beyond his recent enthusiasm for alpine speed soloing. In a previous issue of Rock and Ice (The Lone Warrior, #156), Martin Guttman interviews Steck about “one of the most impressive alpine resumes of his generation.” Steck has tucked under his belt a new route on the north face of Gasherbrum II East (25,499 feet), a solo of the Young Spiders (5.11d A2 WI6 M7) on the Eiger North Face, and a 25-hour record soloing the Bonatti Route on the Matterhorn. In 2006, he soloed new routes on the north face of Cholatse (21,129 feet) and the east face of Tawoche (21,341 feet). When he and Sean Easton established a heinously difficult new route on the east face of Mount Dickey (A1 M7+ WI6 X), Easton referred to him as “the most talented alpine climber I have yet tied into a rope with.” Despite his impressive partnered climbs, Steck prefers to solo, carrying a rope only in case he needs to bail off. In response to a question about his affinity for soloing, Steck says that “climbing with such a large group is not quite real climbing.”

Steck, originally a carpenter, is now a full-time climber with, as he puts it, “always some paperwork to take care of.” In an interview with Planet Mountain, he says that he wants to change directions a bit. Satisfied with his European conquests, he mentions the Himalaya, where “with this background I feel a new dimension is possible. We’ll see.”

If you’ve got a couple hours to spare, The Sharp End will deliver more adrenaline than military-grade epinephrine and you don’t even have to get off the couch. The film, which premiered September 10th of last year, is a heart-stopping compilation of athletes pushing the bleeding edge of what climbing can be, from 20-yard runouts on sketchy trad to Dean Potter’s new personal experiment, BASE soloing. Expect 45-foot highballs in the Buttermilks, alpine pioneers sinking ice tools into hoary glaze thinner than your fingernail, and a whole lot of enormous, screaming, gear-popping whippers.

The Sharp End won the title of Best Adventure Film at the X-Dance Action Sports Film Festival in Salt Lake City, Utah. X-Dance, a week-long exhibition of the world’s hottest new action sport films set to coincide with Sundance Film Festival, has been chiefly dominated by more mainstream, high-speed, adrenaline-crazed sports like snowboarding, surfing, and dirt biking, but this year was different. The film had “just enough adrenaline to resonate” in the world of heavy metal soundtracks, said Nick Rosen of Sender Films. “I was glad to see that climbing was making a mark in the action sports world.” 

In the eight years since the festival’s inauguration, X-Dance has brought together the best producers, filmmakers and athletes in the business for film screenings, open forums, and a closing party/awards ceremony that has grown to legendary status. Last year the judges added the Adventure Film category to acknowledge the increasing overlap between action and adventure, and that a film didn’t need non-stop action to be worth recognizing. Sender’s last film King Lines was entered into the category in 2008, but was beaten out by a big-mountain snowboarding flick, Let It Ride.

Sender Films is the company that brought you classics like Return 2 Sender and Front Range Freaks (featuring Biscuit the climbing dog) as well as the more recent First Ascents and Chris Sharma’s tour-de-force King Lines. Peter Mortimer started the company with the film Scary Faces in 2001, cranking out two more films until 2006, when Rosen joined the company to work on First Ascents. Rosen, who at the time was a print journalist and consultant on Latin American politics in New York City, decided to stay on in Boulder, and worked his way up to producer on King Lines and co-creator on the most recent release, The Sharp End. “Technically I’m fifty percent creator,” says Rosen, “but Peter’s still the man around here.”

What’s in the future for Sender? The Sharp End’s tour with Reel Rock is finished now, but Reel Rock ’09 is already gearing up. Rosen tells us that Sender will not be submitting another full-length film, instead opting to supplement the entry from Josh Lowell. Lowell, who started the Dosage series out of his home office, contributed parts to The Sharp End for the ’08 tour and Sender plans to return the favor for ’09. Rosen told Rock and Ice that the company has had a Yosemite film on the back burner for the past few years, but hints at a much bigger, multi-part project with huge international sponsors. We’ll keep you posted.

Throughout the 1970s, Tobin Sorenson etched his hairy, pioneering leads on Yosemite big walls and European alpine routes alike, perhaps the era’s best all-around climber. His death on Mount Alberta in 1980 is a haunting facet of the North Face’s history. When Sorenson’s body was found at the base, the only clues as to what had happened were a rope and a few pitons, still clipped together. Traces of yellow rock were stuck to the pitons, leading to the belief that he fell from a particularly rotten band of yellow shale 2,000 feet up the face. Rescuers speculated that he fell about 30 feet before his anchor pins pulled. Mark Wilford, who later attempted the same solo, described the rock through that section as “a putrid yellow shale which had no visible adherence to anything.”

In the words of John Long, whose hilarious tales of his fellow Stonemasters have become part of the fabric of climbing literature, Tobin climbed “not with grace, but with gumption and fire.” Sorenson established dozens of routes in California such as The Edge (5.11a R) at Tahquitz in 1975.

In California, Sorenson’s ferocious climbing attitude was perhaps best characterized by his performance on the Green Arch (5.11b/c), a sweeping curve up the southern shoulder of Tahquitz. Sorenson’s tunnel vision and juggernaut attitude toward route finding left him stranded on dead-end sucker holds 25 feet above a hastily bashed piton. Long described him screaming, “Watch me! I’m gonna jump!” just before he fell, popping the uppermost piton and plummeting 80 feet in what Long wrote was “the grandest fall I’ve ever seen a climber take and walk away from.” Sorenson moaned as he was lowered to the ground and lay still for a minute before slowly getting to his feet. “I’ll get it next time,” he muttered. 

While Sorenson is probably best known in the United States for such So Cal escapades, his record in the Alps is in fact more impressive. Tobin, a devout Christian, showed up in 1977 on a break from smuggling Bibles into the Communist state of Bulgaria, where practicing Christianity was illegal. Not having climbed at all that year but excited nonetheless, he made the first ascent of what was subsequently called the hardest ice route in the Alps, 2,300-foot Dru Couloir Direct with Rick Accomazzo, climbing straight up the ice flow that other parties had aided around. Much of the route’s ice has since fallen off, giving it today’s grade of AI 6+/M8. He followed with an ascent of the Gousseault Route (ED3) on the Grandes Jorasses, a route that went unrepeated for 23 years, and the third ascent of the Eiger Direct (ED2). To polish off the season, he soloed the North Face of the Matterhorn (ED1) in eight and a half hours.

In 1979, Sorenson and John Allen set about freeing local projects at the Frog Buttress near Brisbane, Australia, including Tantrum (5.12b), Green Plastic Comb (5.10c/d), Barbed Wire Canoe (5.12b), and The Guns of Navaronne (5.11c). In Andrew Martin’s Cheap and Nasty Guide to Frog Buttress, the description for Tantrum, accompanied by a tiny skull-and-crossbones icon, reads, “This line is thin, desperate, sharp and poorly protected ... what could possibly go wrong?”

Despite his savage climbing style, Sorenson was remembered by all for his easygoing attitude and sincere smile. Ronald H. Sacks describes him in the American Alpine Journal as “invariably cheerful ... selfless and giving.” In an interview with Joe Friend in 1979, Sorenson described the mountains to the Australian climbing rag Thrutch as “a small taste of what the majesty and glory of God is.” He did not use his beliefs as a source of false pride, though, nor press them on to others. He had an open sense of humor and, at his lectures, would break the ice by tripping while approaching the microphone, claiming that he was clumsy on horizontal ground.

In his 25 years, Sorenson often climbed on the edge, somehow remaining unscathed. Dean Fidelman, a close friend of Sorenson’s, calls him “the worst climber you’ve ever seen. He had horrible technique but the biggest balls. He was just as likely to fall as he was to send. He was the best leader there ever was, though. I got dragged up some of the hardest climbs in the world by him. I trusted in him as much as he trusted in whatever kept him going.” 

In the interview with Thrutch, Sorenson described why he soloed. 

“I like it,” he said. “In climbing there is something I call the grey area. Soloing allows me to step into that area. I would define the grey area as where the outcome of success is less certain, where there is no room for mistakes and it is always a daring place. When you step back into the ‘white,’ it is a tremendous place to be.” 

Sorenson’s eulogies have been numerous and heartfelt, but John Long’s The Green Arch may be the most evocative. “His death was a tragedy, of course,” Long writes. “Yet I sometimes wonder if God Himself could no longer bear the strain of watching Tobin wobbling and lunging way out there on the sharp end of the rope, and finally just drew him into the fold.”

When I was 17, I ran my car off the road. I didn’t just miss a corner and trundle into a ditch. I plowed the car through a thigh-sized tree before it came to rest, both back wheels off the ground, on a rock big enough to comprise some very artistic landscaping. I got a quote for six grand in repairs on a $2700 car, so I got a friend to pull it out and sell the parts he could salvage, while I paid off the remaining $750 I owed my parents. I tell people about the balding tires and the broken sprinkler that wet the road, but the truth is that I was going 60 on a narrow dirt road in a ten-year-old station wagon. Accidents happen, and that one was irrefutably my fault. I drive a bit slower now.

And so we enter the world of climbing, where accidents are frequent and often just as serious. Rock and Ice Magazine runs an Accident Report in every issue. The American Alpine Club publishes the alarmingly hefty Accidents in North American Mountaineering every year. And we always want to know what happened. 

In February, a man in Ouray, Colorado rappelled off the end of his rope, apparently because he mistook the 15-foot end mark for the middle mark. He fell 30 feet, breaking his ankle and wrist in the fall. I read several forums and blogs online that covered the accident, where I was shocked to find that the overwhelming majority of opinion was a brutal assault of any rope manufacturer that puts end marks on its ropes.

So now it’s the manufacturer’s fault? Hypothetically, a guy who’s only owned ropes with middle marks buys one with not one but three marks on it. His mind seizes up. “If this mark is the middle,” he thinks, “then these other two must also be the middle. Hmm.” Not only are end marks marked differently, but (this is the baffling part) they’re at the end. I cannot conceive a situation where someone would set up a rappel and not notice that one side of the rope is 12 times longer than the other. Even on a 45-foot rappel like this one, the short end of the rope is sitting right there, 15 feet down. The kind of person that can thread the end of the rope through the anchor, pull three arm’s lengths, find a mark, and think “Was that a hundred feet already? Golly, I must be really strong.” needs some help rappelling.

The biggest problem is that this accident is always preventable. Tie a damn knot in the end and you can’t rappel off. We don’t often tie knots for short rappels, but that’s like saying that it’s OK not to put on your seatbelt for short drives. If you go through the windshield, it’s still your fault. Some counter that knots get stuck. Yes, sharp rock, low angles, bushes and wind make getting the rope stuck a real possibility. If that’s a concern, use the saddlebag system to keep the rope close. A lot of people aren’t going to bother for a short rappel, but that doesn’t make it safe.

The unfortunate truth is that people make stupid mistakes. The stupider ones blame someone else. A woman sues an amusement park for making their ride too scary. A man files suit over burns caused by “unreasonably dangerous” onion rings. Is this what we want the climbing community to be? Do we want to see climbing access taken away because some idiot sues the park service when he falls? Do we want to see hardware manufacturers shut down by moronic litigation over improperly threaded belay devices? Do we want to see the price of a climbing rope double because some jackass tied in wrong and sued the company that made it? Gear manufacturers already must take precautions to destroy the gear they throw away so dumpster-divers don’t hurt themselves. How far are we going to let it go?

We can’t eliminate all the risk of climbing. If that were the goal, we’d quit climbing. We play a game of risk, alleviated by the equipment we use and—more importantly—our ability to use it right. When shit happens (as it tends to), we need to take responsibility for personal mistakes. Climbing leaves little room for error, and equipment failure cannot be tolerated. Personal failure is entirely different. Every climber who buys and uses gear shoulders the responsibility of knowing how to use it right and use it safely. No one likes to hear about climbers getting hurt, but the bottom line is this: that end mark didn’t break your ankle. You did.