A Quote by Dean Potter

Free soloing is just the most natural way man can climb. It's just using your hands and feet without any use of protection or rope to ascend. — © Dean Potter
Free soloing is just the most natural way man can climb. It's just using your hands and feet without any use of protection or rope to ascend.
Seven years ago, when I started free soloing long, hard routes in Yosemite - climbing without a rope, gear or a partner - I did it because it seemed like the purest, most elegant way to scale big walls. Climbing, especially soloing, felt like a grand adventure, but I never dreamed it could be a profession.
Ascend, my brothers, ascend eagerly. Let your hearts' resolve be to climb. Listen to the voice of the one who says: 'Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of our God' (Isa. 2:3), Who makes our feet to be like the feet of the deer, 'Who sets us on the high places, that we may be triumphant on His road' (Hab. 3:19).
I've done routes where I've climbed 200 feet off the ground and just been, like, 'What am I doing?' I then just climbed back down and went home. Discretion is the better part of valor. Some days are just not your day. That's the big thing with free soloing: when to call it.
The natural ambition of woman is through marriage to climb up, leaning upon a man; but those days are gone. You shall be great without the help of any man, just as you are.
To be clear, I normally climb with a rope and partner. Free-soloing makes up only a small percentage of my total climbing. But when I do solo, I manage the risk through careful preparation. I don't solo anything unless I'm sure I can do it.
If God can use a man without arms and legs to be His hands and feet, then He will certainly use any willing heart!
I tend to pick objectives that I feel are safe because I know that, in the moment, I always go for it. I have some rules for myself, though: Look for the rock faces without a lot of loose rock. Always rope up on glaciers where there is even a slight chance of falling into a crevasse. No pure free soloing. Never climb below hanging glaciers.
One thing I can't do, and I hope that there are other people out there that feel the same way, is climb a rope. Oh my gosh, it's so hard to climb rope! It's all about grip and arms.
Often in normal life I'm just constricted to what I see, maybe, and hear. But when I climb and when I'm out in the wild, other senses come to me and Delicate Arch was a free solo climb, which means I didn't have any protection and often, when I put myself in these situations, it brings out this heightened awareness which I crave so much.
It's normal to feel pain in your hands and feet, if you're using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal - if he's living a normal life. And if it's normal, how can it be bad?
I think the kicks in Wing Chun are enough. It´s much easier to use your hands than to use your feet. Your hand is able to reach your opponent long before your foot. Why take the long way to attack (circle), when there is a much more direct method of attack? If you are using your hands, then your opponent can´t see a kick coming if you have to use it. When you teach Kung Fu, you can fool a lot of people, but not yourself. You can make like a movie and do many complicated movements and kicks, but you only fool yourself as to whether that would work in a real situation of life and death.
I found the purpose of my existence, and also the purpose of my circumstance. There's a purpose for why you're in the fire. If God can use a man without arms and legs to be His hands and feet, then He will certainly use any willing heart!
No one can really pull you up very high - you lose your grip on the rope. But on your own two feet you can climb mountains.
So here in space, obviously, in microgravity, we have to use our hands to get ourselves around, to float around the modules, because our feet, we don't necessarily walk around, we just grab hand holds and move ourselves around, which means that we need our hands free to do just that.
When I went to school, they told me literature was a rope I must use to climb out of the dark well of unknowing. Writers are the knots on the rope.
When feet doesn't want to hold you, you climb with your head. Maybe it isn't the natural order of things, but isn't it better to walk with your head than to think with your feet, as it happens so frequently?
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