“We’re trying to awaken minds with a bold gesture,” 31-year-old French climber Seb Bouin said of his ropeless climb this week. Personally, I can’t say watching this terrifying ascent up a 600-foot French skyscraper makes me feel “awakened.” But my palms certainly feel sweaty.
Bouin — known for pulling off some of the hardest sport routes in the world — evidently decided he needed to venture “outside his comfort zone,” he said on Instagram this week. So he joined in the riskier endeavors of his fellow countryman Alain Robert, a legendary free soloist called the “French Spider-Man” for his bold, ropeless ascents of mega-tall buildings. (Free solo means climbing without a rope.)
The French duo posted videos and photos this week of its Saturday ascent up Paris’s Total Tower. It was supposedly Bouin’s first free solo climb, and he acknowledged that starting off with a skyscraper sounded like a “crazy idea.” It also doesn’t help that climbing buildings is generally frowned upon by those in charge of public safety. Indeed, the 62-year-old Robert claims he’s been arrested more than 150 times for climbing buildings.
Bouin didn’t immediately respond to a GearJunkie request about how he and Robert arranged the climb. But in the post of this slow-moving video taken by photographer Jan Virt, Bouin seems to sense the outsized reaction the stunt may provoke. He frames the ascent as a way to remind others that “life is precious.”
Free Soloing’s Grip on the Imagination
There’s no doubt that Alex Honnold’s Oscar-winning Free Solo helped put rock climbing into the center of mainstream conversation. Honnold’s ropeless ascent of Yosemite’s El Capitan defies the need for explanation. It’s one guy climbing a sheer, 3,000-foot rock face without protection — we know the stakes.
The feats of climbers like Seb Bouin or Adam Ondra, however, are harder to communicate to a general audience. These crushers can scale routes significantly more difficult than anything Honnold has ever attempted. But if you’re not a climber, you’d be forgiven for not seeing the difference between Bouin’s 5.15c Suprême Jumbo Love, which exists at the upper ceiling of what’s possible, and a much easier route in Red River Gorge.
Free soloing, on the other hand, triggers an instant reaction. This is arguably even truer in an urban setting, where there’s an undeniable power to see people occupy a space that’s usually off-limits to us fragile humans.
It’s the terror of potentially watching someone fall that keeps us watching — and Robert seems to know this. In another Instagram post Wednesday, Robert published a short video of the “frightening moment” he almost fell.
Since he’s wearing a camera on his helmet, every moment is recorded.
“All of the sudden I have SLIPPED LIKE NEVER BEFORE and nearly fell,” Robert wrote. “However having a good mindset and mastering my fear is one of my best asset. At least I could speak with Seb who was few meters above and explain to him what just happened to me. That was surreal.”
Sure is — almost as surreal as watching this high-stakes drama play out on social media.
