Climbing at the Speed of Soul

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Outside Magazine December 2002

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Climbing at the Speed of Soul
With his supreme skills on rock, hypercompetitive intensity, and new-age bag of tricks, Dean Potter scrambles up big walls faster than any man alive. So what's the trajectory of all this velocity?

By Rob Buchanan


	View exclusive online photos from Dean Potter's record-smashing sprint up Half Dome and El Capitan here

"THREE, TWO, ONE, GO!"

Dean Potter punches a button on a plastic wristwatch looped around his climbing harness. His partner, Tim O'Neill, leaps at the rock before him, jamming freshly taped fingers into a slender crack. Above them soars the great granite parabola of the most famous big-wall route in Yosemite Valley—or, for that matter, the world: The Nose of El Capitan. At just under 3,000 vertical feet, with 36 pitches, The Nose requires three harrowing pendulum swings and the negotiation of a hair-raising crux section known as the Great Roof—an overhanging shelf 2,000 feet off the deck, with a crack at the back so narrow that neither the towering Potter nor the diminutive O'Neill can wedge his fingers into it.

Potter often climbs without benefit of ropes or protection, but on this late fall day in 2001, the goal is speed, so the two are carrying hardware. Still, by any sane standard they're ludicrously under-equipped: no packs, no shirts, no food, no water, a few carabiners and a single 200-foot length of nine-millimeter rope between them, plus a handful of spring-loaded camming devices to be placed in cracks for protection. Even Potter's climbing harness is an exercise in minimalism: a homemade thing fashioned from 11/16-inch webbing and stitched together with dental floss.



	Dean Potter at the base of Yosemite's El Capitan, June 17, 2002 (Andy Anderson)

Potter, 30, doesn't wait for his 33-year-old partner to reach the safety of the belay anchor (a permanent bolt) at the top of the initial pitch, but instead starts climbing as soon as O'Neill has placed the first piece of protection—a risky but hyperfast technique known as simul-climbing. Five minutes later, the two are already 200 feet up, and my neck is sore just from watching them. As I and a couple of other spectators back away from The Nose to get a better view in the meadow below El Capitan, we hear it—a horrible scrabbling of hands and feet on rock, followed by a desperate yell: "Falling!" Looking up, we see O'Neill dropping through space. Suddenly—mercifully—he jerks to a stop after plunging some 25 feet.

There's a moment of silence, and then Potter, who has arrested his partner's fall from his position 70 feet below, is yelling, the bass boom of his voice echoing off the great sounding board of El Cap. "Go!" he yells. "Get on it! Go! Go! Go!"

The intensity is startling. Potter is normally a pretty mellow guy, slow-talking and sometimes painfully shy. One person who knows him—John Wason, alpine team promotions manager at Patagonia, the California-based clothing company that's employed the six-foot-five Potter as a "climbing ambassador" for the past five years—calls him "a gentle giant." In Patagonia, the place, he has a different nickname: Tarzan. Potter says that's because of the monosyllabic way he speaks Spanish when he's on an expedition in Argentina. "You know," he says sheepishly, " 'Me no hablo.' " Maybe, but the name seems to capture a lot of Potter's other qualities, too. With his wide-set brown eyes, prominent, slightly battered-looking nose, tumbling mane, and barrel chest, he could be Johnny Weissmuller come back to life: a brooding denizen of the wild who is occasionally roused to fantastic riffs of action.

Whether propelled by Potter's war cry or his own desire to get back to solid ground, O'Neill, a part-time carpenter from Boulder, Colorado, batmans his way upward, simultaneously pulling himself hand over hand and "walking" up the cliff. A minute later, he has safely clipped into the bolt at the top of the second pitch.

"Anchor," he yells.

"OK, that's the hard part," Potter yells back. "Now go, go, go!"

In El Cap Meadow, the little knot of big-wall groupies grows to a dozen, then two dozen, all of us trading peeks at the climbers through a spotting scope. One trim, 66-year-old observer turns out to be Tom Frost, a Yosemite legend who, along with Royal Robbins and two other partners, pulled off the second ascent of The Nose back in 1960, in a then-mind-blowing time of six days.

"We never talked about how fast people might go someday, just that our record would be broken," Frost says. "But this..." He shakes his head. "You're watching two world-class athletes."

Tiny, distant figures now, Potter and O'Neill swarm up the face. Sometimes they almost seem to be running, gaining speed with each step, springing past obstacles that every rock climber, even those who've never been to Yosemite, knows by heart: the Stoveleg Cracks, Boot Flake and the majestic King Swing pendulum, the Great Roof and the Upper Dihedrals. A little before noon they reach the final headwall, rhythmically clipping their aiders—nylon foot loops—up the last string of bolts placed by Warren Harding on his laborious 45-day first ascent, completed in 1958. A minute later they disappear over the top.

"Three hours and 24 minutes," Frost says, glancing at his watch. "Incredible."

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Contributing editor Rob Buchanan wrote about Antarctica in November 2001.

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