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.)

SINCE HIS RECORD-SETTING CLIMB of The Nose a year ago, Dean Potter's life has gotten a good deal busier and more complicated. In April, he turned 30, an event that both alarmed and pleased him. ("It's sort of the end of my youth, I guess, but I'm proud I made it," he says. "It says something about my climbing.") And on June 24, he and Steph Davis, who's also 30, were married in an outdoor ceremony, followed by a "desert rave" near Moab. But what really set the climbing world abuzz was Potter's fantastic season earlier in the year in Patagonia. It had been an exceptional Southern Hemisphere summer, with much better weather than usual, and the climbing Web sites were bursting with reports of new routes and records, including important firsts by O'Neill and Davis, both of whom climbed with other partners. But Potter's climbs, all of them solos, stood above the rest. Taken together, they almost seemed to describe the birth of a new sport.

On January 17, he had free-soloed the Supercanaleta, a couloir on Fitz Roy's west face—4,000 feet of steepening ice followed by 2,000 feet of rock and then 700 feet of mixed rock and ice. It was the first solo of the route, and Potter's time, just six and a half hours, was by far the fastest ever. Five days later, he soloed the notorious Compressor Route on Cerro Torre (so named because the climber who established it, Cesare Maestri, had bolted it with an air-powered drill), only breaking out his rope for one pitch and again establishing a record, of 11 hours. (It took Maestri 80 days.) Finally, on February 5, Potter set his sights on the biggest coup of all, free-soloing a new line up the southwest face of Fitz Roy that would link up with the Californian route, established by Yvon Chouinard in 1968.

The reason no one had completed this route before is obvious: a hanging serac, or giant ice block, about two-thirds of the way up that could break off at any time. "It's random when it comes down, but you're under it for four hours," Potter says. "Then to get around it there's 150 feet of vertical ice about three inches thick—just a smear. I changed into ice boots for that, but I had no ice screws, so I just free-soloed it." Potter dubbed the new route, which he climbed in nine hours and 50 minutes, Californian Roulette.

The elation was short-lived. Potter was about 500 feet below the summit, rappelling down, when a toaster-size rock broke loose above him. "Normally in that situation I would try to swing in close to the cliff face to get out of the way," he says. "But this time, I don't know why, I pushed out, and I think it saved me." Still, the rock caught Potter flush on the knee. He blacked out for a few seconds, then came to, to the sound of his own screams. Eight agonizing hours later he reached the base of the cliff face. From there it was another ten hours of hopping and crawling before he got to base camp.

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