Climbing at the Speed of Soul (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine December 2002

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Climbing at the Speed of Soul (Cont.)


	Potter reconnoiters at the base of El Cap. Like many climbers, he tries to visualize a big climb before he undertakes it; unlike many, he invariably dreams about it ahead of time. (Andy Anderson)

THE NEXT MORNING, Potter and I scramble up the Death Slabs, the steep but only semi-technical approach to the Northwest Face of Half Dome. Even up close, Half Dome seems almost perfectly featureless, and it takes me a while to make out the tiny, disconnected cracks and ledges that constitute the Regular Route, site of Potter's 1997 breakthrough climb. It had been soloed before, he tells me as we munch on a few figs, but by an old technique called rope soloing that requires laborious self-belays and lots of downclimbing. Potter took 100 feet of rope neatly coiled on his back, and with the exception of one short stretch where it seemed prudent to tie in, that's where the rope remained.

"I was just free-soloing into fog, and then the clouds broke," he recalls. "Suddenly I was firing the Zig-Zags"—a complicated crack section 1,600 feet up that is the crux of the route. "It was a religious experience to be living the dream I'd been thinking about for years." As he came over the top, he ran into a family with a video camera. They taped him as he exulted: "I just soloed Half Dome in four hours and 17 minutes!"

Circling around to the east, we link up with the hiking trail to the top of Half Dome. On the 40-degree slope, long cables function as handrails. Potter ignores them—he wants to see what kind of grip his day-hikers provide on the smooth granite sheets. A couple of white-knuckled tourists, fearfully working their way up the cables, stare in amazement as he saunters past.

On top, Potter shows me the Diving Board, an eight-foot-long tongue of granite that juts out over the top of the absolutely vertical face. Wriggling out on my belly, I drink in the abyss. When I look back, Potter is leaning over me with my camera, snapping a picture from above, his feet just a few inches from the edge. Later, Potter climbs about 30 feet down the face and spends 20 minutes working on a bouldering problem near the top of the Regular Route. I study his approach. He doesn't try any radical moves, and when he gets to a spot where he can't go on, he methodically reverses his hand and foot placements and backs down. It's solid, careful, textbook stuff, but still, he's in hiking boots with no rope or protection and 2,000 feet of air beneath him.

Later I ask him if he feels any anxiety from the height.

"I do feel it," he insists. "In fact, I feel it way more than if I'd started up the face from the bottom."

Does he ever think about what it would be like to fall?

"I know what it's like," Potter says, mentioning an incident below Yosemite's Royal Arches in which he tried to "run across" a 60-degree slab using no hands. "I took a 60-footer, all the way to the ground. I can tell you that you're fully aware the whole time."

If you ask other climbers what impresses them most about Potter, they're likely to mention his 2000 free solo of Astroman, a 1,200-vertical-foot route on the east face of Yosemite's Washington Column. Potter's ascent was not a first—Peter Croft free-soloed it more than ten years ago—but it's the only repeat to date. No rope, no gear. In the numerous overhanging sections, just a few fingertips are hooked into a tiny crack. "When I think about it, my hands sweat," rock climber and mountaineer Conrad Anker says of the route. "You get an amazing sense of being alive and in control if you do something like that, but if you make a single mistake, that's it—you're out like a light."

Potter looks out over the Valley, its white granite going yellow in the late afternoon sun. "That kind of climbing isn't something I'm trying to spread to other people," he admits. "I just want them to understand that it's absolutely not for adrenaline-junkie reasons that I do it. It brings me silence and peace, and I come closer to the pure me. What I call the Ôdeath consequence' removes all the other forces, the lesser motivations, the ambitions and the competitive feelings. They fall away and then there's just that primary motivation, which is staying alive. It's so pure."

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