Comment by 001sky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 001sky | Hacker News Reader

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There is alot of permanent and semi-permanant installtion set up on the route. There is alot of outside help. There is alot of "aid" being used to actually climb this route and to resupply it. To me this this is free climbing like gym climbing is "free climbing". The level of "technnical difficulty" is high, but that deosn't seem to be the whole story.

The feat is immensively impressive, but use of the word "free climning" here is starting to become almost meaninglesss when there is that much permant aid/infrastructure and siege tactic being applied to the problem.

If these 2 guys were alone and hauled up their own gear/disposed of waste, and actually climbed the route sequentially...rather than using aid to rest between pitches...something seems to suggest they would have faced a significantly greater obstacle.

So the media hype around a "free climb" here is overblown. On the other hand, its kind of ??? we as the public need to hang our hats on the "category/name" here to appreciate what these guys are doing.

That label seems needed market the climb and their sponsors... or apparently the public would be inclined to take it so seriously (??).

Kinda warped view...but it is what it is.

I'm replying to your repliers in total, not you.

001sky clearly understands what 'free climbing' means. What is being questioned is whether we should lump such different things under the same term. Yes, of course everyone here understands that free is referring to the lack of aid in making vertical progress. But base stations, hauling food up, all that stuff, is just a different thing from a ground up, self sufficient effort. Why not look for a better term for that? When the Huber brothers do an ascent in a couple of hours we don't just call it "free" or "aid" (depending on whether they pulled on gear or not); we distinguish it by calling it a 'speed ascent'. Likewise, in the big mountains we characterize climbs as being 'siege', 'alpine style', and so on.

None of that is meant to put down the climbers. We still have climbs that require siege tactics, and that is fine. Why not look to be not just accurate, but also precise in our language?

Anyway, I agree with 001sky. If someone said they freed a route, I would not envision a base camp along the wall, even if it is accurate in that they used no aid. It's different, not better or worse, than what, say Lynn Hill did when she freed the Nose. A different term is perhaps warranted.

You're being downvoted because you're misunderstanding what "free climbing" means. It is a technical climbing term meaning that the weight of the climber is supported by the climber himself at all times during ascent; safety gear such as ropes are used only to protect against falls. "Solo free climbing" (or "free solo climbing") is climbing without any gear, including safety gear. It is basically suicide on a climb above 25 feet in height.

This climb is historic because it is the first time any person (let alone two) has managed to climb the entire height via free climbing methods, that is, without using ropes to bear some/all of their weight during the ascent.

Eventually, someone will try to free climb El Capitan similar to the manner you described: pitch by pitch, without returning to a base camp, resting along the way. However, such a climb is a long ways off; it took nearly a decade to plan this climb. Planning a climb with shifting camps will likely take another several years just to plot out plausible routes and resting points.

I think you've hit it - this First Free Ascent set a benchmark. Others - maybe '001sky - can improve upon their time.

For example, a much easier, more popular route - The Nose - wast first free climbed by Lynn Hill in 1993 in four days, in 1994 she re-did it in 23 hours, in 2005 Tommy Caldwell and his then wife did it in four days and two days later Caldwell did it by himself in 12 hours. The time required has been falling since with Alex Honnold and Hans Florine, making the current record ascent in 2:23.46 on June 17, 2012.

These guys bagged the First Free ascent of a much harder route. Surely others will attempt to free the Dawn Wall and may do it in less time. It remains to be seen if it's humanly possible to do something this difficult in under a day.

Small note: Alex and Hans did not set the speed record by freeing the Nose. They definitely aided sections.

Only 4 people have successfully free'd the Nose. The 4th happened only last November. So far it happens about once a decade. (http://www.rockandice.com/lates-news/jorg-verhoeven-free-cli...)

First time by that route. The Salathé Wall was freed in '88 and Lynn Hill freed the Nose in '94 and did the Nose free in a day in '95.

This is Caldwell's fourth "First Free Ascent" of a route on El Capitan!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Caldwell#cite_ref-11

Free soloing doesn't mean no gear per se. Technically, it just means free climbing while solo. There are methods for climbing solo with protection. It's complicated, more of an exercise in equipment management than climbing, but doable and a worthwhile emergency skill to have.

Free soloing does mean no rope however, which is the important bit. You're speaking of rope-soloing, which can be done either free or aid. If you don't have rope with you, whether or not you bring protection only matters in the edge-case that you want to french-free various moves.

I guess then we are at the fact that climbing terms mean different things to different climbers. Around my area, rope-soloing is solo top roping, basically a fixed rope with an ascender on the climber. I've got a great device for this that can grip two ropes in the same cam.

It's like how in my parts (west coast canada) we speak of top-roping when the brits would use the term "bottom-roping". We don't make a distinction between having the belay above or below. Free soloing here just means free climbing without a partner. We don't have a term for no-gear soloing, other than idiot. It doesn't come up much.

You might not like it, but free climbing (no scare quotes required) is a defined term. It means climbing without the aid of ropes, except for safety. (Climbing without ropes is usually called free solo.)

Aid climbing means using ropes as aid - you can pull yourself up on ropes (and associated tools).

Quibble about the details as much as you like, it is still the hardest multipitch, bigwall, free climb ever achieved.

Not to mention that the definition becomes more loose when it comes to huge projects like this. One of the claimed free ascents of the Nose involved top roping two of the hardest pitches. Most people consider that a free ascent, even though that wouldn't generally be enough for an FFA of a single-pitch sport climb.

The siege tactic is employed because they are trying something so hard it has never been done before, and even with all that support, years of planning, decades of training, and months on the route, two of the best climbers in the world barely managed it.

If these 2 guys were alone ... they would have faced a significantly greater obstacle

Exactly. They, world-famous world-class climbers, wouldn't have even been able to complete it.

You can look at it like, they are advancing the "state of the art" of climbing. If you try I am sure you can think of parallels in engineering, where something never-before is achieved in the face of absurd difficulty, opening the doors to future engineers.

Maybe in the future, you should look up what a term means before you criticize it. You have no idea what free climbing means...

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