Selfish and Stupid

The day before my accident I free soloed North Face Route into Agag’s Groove on Buachaille Etive Mor in Glen Coe, a classic link up. To be clear, these climbs are trivial in difficulty compared to the solos that Honnold undertakes. Still, everything here is relative (except for the fact that falling would have meant instant death). And given my abilities back then, those routes were about as difficult for me as climbing a ladder. So I backed myself to be able to solo them. Correctly, as it turned out.

But it was still a stupid thing to do. I had never been on those routes before, and so I didn’t know their condition. If rocks break, you fall, even if you’ve personally done nothing wrong – as I was going to learn the hard way, less than 24 hours later. And when you climb solo, you climb fast (90% reduction in faff) – meaning it’s easy to go off route, ending up on much more difficult terrain than you had anticipated, exponentially increasing the chances of disaster.

I knew all this, and I did it anyway. Why? Because on a beautiful day in June, in glorious Scotland, the prospect of not climbing felt something like unacceptable.