OH. MY. GOD. Stop worrying! You and mom are such babies. I’m not going to “kill myself climbing without a rope” because that doesn’t even make sense. I’m a boulderer. You can’t boulder with a rope because then it wouldn’t be bouldering. Roped climbing is for losers: Do I look like I’d hangdog for an hour wearing orange pants and doing jazz hands so I can climb five more feet to the next bolt and then do it again? I know you saw Alex Honnold on 60 Minutes and suddenly you think you know everything about climbing. But, uh, actually? You don’t know anything. What I do is called HIGHBALL BOULDERING, not FREE SOLOING, and it’s completely different.
First of all—if you weren’t so old, you’d already know this—free soloing happens on cliffs; highball bouldering happens on boulders. Do you seriously not know the difference? Let me make it easy for you: The fake rocks at Blackbeard’s Cave at the putt-putt near Ruby Tuesday are boulders. The gym where I learned to climb at Ryan’s birthday party is made of cliffs. If you fall off a cliff free soloing you die, but if you fall highball bouldering you just get super fucked up. It’s not even close to the same thing.
This story is from the Issue 154 edition of Climbing.
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This story is from the Issue 154 edition of Climbing.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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OH. MY. GOD. Stop worrying! You and mom are such babies. I’m not going to “kill myself climbing without a rope” because that doesn’t even make sense. I’m a boulderer. You can’t boulder with a rope because then it wouldn’t be bouldering. Roped climbing is for losers: Do I look like I’d hangdog for an hour wearing orange pants and doing jazz hands so I can climb five more feet to the next bolt and then do it again? I know you saw Alex Honnold on 60 Minutes and suddenly you think you know everything about climbing. But, uh, actually? You don’t know anything. What I do is called HIGHBALL BOULDERING, not FREE SOLOING, and it’s completely different.
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