Climbing at the Speed of Soul (Cont.)

Outside Magazine December 2002

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	Potter on the 33rd Pitch of Freerider on El Captain. In September 2002, Potter knocked off this route after climbing Half Dome, completing an historic first: free-climbing both of these famously difficult walls in less than 24 hours. (Jimmy Chin)

AN HOUR LATER, having rappelled off the back side of El Cap and made the two-mile hike down to the Valley floor, Potter and O'Neill are cracking cold Fat Weasels in the parking lot at Manure Piles, a novice climbing crag. Frost runs around snapping pictures like an excited teenager, while goggle-eyed weekend hackers linger on the periphery, realizing they've witnessed history.

"That fall was the turning point," says Potter, grinning. "We were climbing on half a rope and there were only two pieces of protection between us. When Timmy took his whipper and everything held, it gave us superconfidence that our bare-bones system worked. And then the adrenaline rush shot us up even faster."

But adrenaline alone can't quite explain the record-shattering performance of Potter and O'Neill. What does, other climbers say, is Potter's extraordinary will.

"We were 20 hours into it, getting down to the last reserves," says 30-year-old Russel Mitrovich, another speed specialist, of a 1998 climb he made with Potter on an El Cap route called Mescalito. "Dean took off his shirt and screamed, and we went to the top in an hour and a half. You just don't see that too often, someone summoning that kind of energy at that point in a climb."

Though Potter and his various partners hold more than a dozen Yosemite speed-climbing records, what has really rocketed him into the climbing stratosphere is his unprecedented career as a soloist, where willpower is a prime commodity. He burst on the scene in 1997 with a mostly ropeless solo of the Regular Route on the Northwest Face of Half Dome. His time of four hours and 17 minutes sliced an amazing 16 hours off the previous fastest solo.

Since then, what he calls his "projects"—whether solos, speed climbs, free climbs, or free solos (extremely dangerous climbs done without ropes or any sort of protection)—have established him as the leading climber in Yosemite. Last winter in Patagonia, he took another giant step forward, pulling off three unbelievably fast solos, two of them entirely ropeless, in one of the world's most difficult ranges: two on 11,070-foot Fitz Roy, the region's highest peak, and a third on nearby Cerro Torre, a Matterhorn-like 9,800-foot fang.

The most remarkable thing about Potter, though, is that behind his formidable drive are two apparently contradictory impulses: an intense competitiveness, which he can sometimes scarcely control, and an innate soulfulness that allows him to find serenity in the middle of the most extreme circumstances.

Take, for example, the climb I witnessed on The Nose. Two weeks earlier, Potter and O'Neill had broken the mythical four-hour mark, cutting 23 minutes from the old record of 4:22, established by Hans Florine and Peter Croft in 1992. Nine days after Potter and O'Neill did their thing, Florine, a 38-year-old San Franciscan, recruited a new partner, Jim Herson, 41, and set out to recapture the record. That they did, shaving two minutes and eight seconds off Potter and O'Neill's time. Potter reacted quickly—he and O'Neill loaded up to break the mark again.

"It's not about getting the record back," Potter insisted the night before his second climb. "It's just that our last effort left a lot of room for improvement."

Well, maybe. But it's telling that the best-known story about Potter concerns his bitter, almost obsessive rivalry with Florine. In July 1999, Potter was climbing in Estes Park, Colorado, when friends told him of an announcement on Florine's Web site, speedclimb.com: Two days later, under a full moon, Florine would attempt an historic first—back-to-back solo ascents of Yosemite's two greatest big-wall routes, The Nose and the Northwest Face of Half Dome, in less than 24 hours. Potter, who says the idea for the double was originally his, hurriedly booked a flight to Fresno for the next morning, grabbed a cab for the 85-mile drive to Yosemite, and jumped on The Nose that same afternoon. Twenty-three hours and 40 minutes later, he'd completed the feat. Florine did it himself the next day, cutting two hours off Potter's time, but his thunder had been stolen.

"I admit that the idea to do El Cap and Half Dome in a day was Dean's," Florine says. "It takes a big gulp to even think of doing something like that. But you can't own an idea."

"I did feel a lot of negative energy towards Hans, and I guess that's what made me fly in and do it that day," Potter says of the El CapÐHalf Dome climb. "But by the end of it I was in a trance—just focusing. I forgot all about Hans."

Potter says the same thing happened on the Nose climb with O'Neill: High above the Great Roof, charging up the arrow-straight Upper Dihedrals, he reached "the place where everything goes quiet, the noise stops, and it's just you and the rock."

Such talk can sound suspiciously New Agey, but Potter is sincere. A natural endurance athlete, he spends a lot of time meditating, doing yoga, and simply focusing on breathing. He puts enormous stock in his intuition. Something as simple as seeing a raven—his "totem animal," he calls it, having painted an image of the bird on his climbing helmet—or an unexpected breeze can persuade him to change his plans. Like many climbers, Potter tries to visualize a big climb before he undertakes it; unlike many, he invariably dreams about it ahead of time.

This almost religious intensity helps explain Potter's appeal to his fellow climbers. "What differentiates Dean, apart from his ability, is that what he's doing comes from within," says John Bouchard, 50, a climber and gear manufacturer who befriended Potter 12 years ago in North Conway, New Hampshire. "He's got no external motivations, and that's unusual."

"We're hitting ceilings in this sport, and these solos and speed climbs are the last straws guys can grab at," says 45-year-old Ron Kauk, a resident of El Portal, just outside Yosemite, and a big-wall standout in the eighties and nineties. "The thing about Dean is that he has an earthiness, that connection to nature, and people are attracted to it."

This past September, Potter pulled off his most impressive "project" to date: an unprecedented linkup in which he free-climbed—that is, used ropes and protection only as backup in case he fell, but otherwise pulled himself up the rock without artificial aid—routes on both Half Dome and El Capitan in a combined time of 23 hours and 23 minutes. El Capitan had been freed in less than a day only twice before, once by Lynn Hill, on The Nose in 1992, and last May by Tommy Caldwell, on the Salathé Wall. Potter became the third person to accomplish the feat solo, with a heavy-duty twist: He "warmed up" on the 2,000-vertical-foot face of Half Dome.

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