WE OUTSIDE FREEIn addition to covering nearly every famous (or accidently infamous) modern soloist*, Smoot’s inquiry brings us to the world’s oldest known rock climb (the Thamudic Route on Jebel Rum, in Jordan’s Wadi Rum) where the presumed first ascensionists, presumably free soloing, “carved their names into the rock more than two thousand years ago.” He takes us to St. The result is both fascinating and exhaustive. But unlike Hangdog Days, the short memoir sections here function as decoration in a wide-ranging and painstakingly researched investigation into free soloing’s history, psychology, philosophy, morality, and cultural significance. Read this: Will Gadd on Making a Near-Fatal Gear MistakeĪs in his previous book, All and Nothing contains elements of a memoir.These are the questions that Smoot explores in his encyclopedic second book, All and Nothing: Inside Free Soloing, recently released by Mountaineers Books. It gnaws at you.” Just a few years after ostensibly quitting forever, he found himself regularly free soloing once more.īut why? Why wager your life against a piece of rock? Why risk leaving your kids without a parent? Why does “the impulse to climb rocks without a rope” constitute, for so many climbers, “the strongest in their life”? Within a year Smoot “got married, started a career, had a kid.” But then? Well, then he found out that “it’s hard to quit. I realized, with absolute clarity, that if I didn’t quit free soloing, I was going to end up dead at the bottom of a cliff.” I had gotten away with something, barely pulled it off. “The stark reality of what I had just done overwhelmed me. Having no other option, he continued upward-only to have his feet cut yet again. He swung away from the wall but managed to hold on and snipe his feet back on the footholds. And shortly after passing the point of no return, the point at which the moves he’d executed were too hard for him to downclimb, his foot slipped. WE OUTSIDE CRACK“That night I drew up a diagram of the crack in my journal and wrote detailed notes describing each jam, each foothold, each sequence of moves. That same afternoon, bolstered by his experience with Croft, Smoot redpointed a gently overhanging 5.12 crack with ease-so much ease, in fact, that another friend jokingly said, “You could solo it.” If Peter Croft had that much confidence in my ability, I must be pretty good.” If I had fallen, I would have knocked him off the wall. He was out soloing one day in Leavenworth, Washington, when Peter Croft, to Smoot’s astonishment, “started up behind me, climbing directly below me as I pulled through a 5.10 crux. Counterintuitively, however, it was these exact facts-that he was strong, that he was solid, and that other people seemed to know it-that nearly killed him. Back then Smoot was one of America’s strongest climbers he wasn’t uber-elite like Lynn Hill or Todd Skinner, but he was deep in the scene, a regular contributor to magazines like Climbing and Mountain, strong enough to send routes near the top of the grade scale, and solid enough to go tandem soloing with the likes of Peter Croft. Jeff Smoot begins his latest book by describing a moment in the mid-1980s when his life nearly came to an end. WE OUTSIDE FULLGet full access to Outside Learn, our online education hub featuring in-depth fitness, nutrition, and adventure courses and more than 2,000 instructional videos when you sign up for Outside+
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