Maybe the best thing about free soloing is the sense of immediacy you feel during challenging moves.  You don’t think about the past or future - at that moment, you understand your environment and your reality is simplified.  You feel real and the world you sense is real as well.  I think that now, due to our technologically manipulated reality of modern life, it is more important than ever to experience the true reality as it existed in our distant past, at least from time to time.  You remove the distractions and abstractions and rules which are our almost constant companions as city dwellers, and take a break.  It is a chance to try to truly understand the elements and forces of the universe.  Rock, air, wind, soil, and water characteristics are subtly accounted for by intuition.  Once you leave the relative safety of the ground and become exposed as you venture along a route or problem, you learn to respect gravity, friction, and tension pragmatically.  You become part of your environment and simply move, motivated by your survival instinct and your goal.  The freedom to attempt feats that the more feeble-minded would call impossible is refreshing.  But more than that, it is the freedom to do any type of route of any difficulty grade you choose - the simplification of your world allows you to be in complete control of your mental and physical reality.  The contrast of this simplicity to the complexity we face in our now futuristic urban society is what’s refreshing.  This change of perspective might benefit many of us.  Rock climbing enables us to focus on and live in the moment, but it also might show us that which is really important.

View from lower Cascade Mountain just outside Banff Alberta.  You are facing Mount Rundle, which has a golf course at its base.  Click the photo to view a short free solo climbing film I shot of myself recently.