Alex Honnold

You go for a ways and you put in some gear, you clip your rope into it, and then you're protected and then...

for whatever distance you're going, you're essentially free soloing to that point.

There's always risk involved in climbing because even if you have a rope on, depending how far you're going above your last piece of gear and what the terrain is like and whether or not the rock is good and all these other factors, you're more or less safe.

And so I think people look at free soloing as this binary.

If you don't have a rope, that's dangerous.

And you're kind of like, well...

Anytime you're climbing, there are dangers or there could be, and you're constantly evaluating those and trying to mitigate them.

So I think that's the big misperception because easy free soloing is probably like if I'm somebody, you know, who's like an expert rock climber or whatever, I've been climbing 30 years.

If I'm on an easy free solo, that's almost certainly safer than a very hard, certain types of hard climbing with a rope on.

You know, and most of my scariest experiences as a climber actually have been with a rope on because with a rope, you're much more willing to push yourself into unknown terrain because you're kind of like, surely there'll be something good just around the corner.

And so you keep going around the corner and you keep not getting good gear and you're like, holy shit, it's getting scarier and scarier.

Are we allowed to curse?

Yeah.

Yeah, perfect.

Yeah.

But so a lot of my scariest experiences have been with a rope on because you're kind of like, I'm sure it'll get better.

I'm sure it'll get better.

And it keeps getting worse and worse.

And then pretty soon you're in some position where you're definitely going to die if you fall.

But you never would have climbed into that position if you didn't have a rope on because you're just so much more conservative when you're ropeless.