FROM THIS FEATURE STORY,
http://www.outsideonline....s-Attached.html?page=1 Another of Honnold's heroes is Tommy Caldwell, 32, a leading big-wall free climber. Free climbing is different from free soloing in that it involves a rope and protection: Caldwell relies on a partner's belay as he works pitch after pitch until he can string together a continuous ascent of a long route with no "aiding," or resting on gear. There is no climber alive whom Honnold admires more. Yet Caldwell echoes Anker's conservatism. "I've never tried to free-solo anything really grand," he says. "I've fallen completely unexpectedly lots of times—maybe a dozen—on relatively easy terrain, when a hold broke off or the rubber peeled off the sole of my shoe or something. If I'd been soloing, I'd have died."
The numbers support Caldwell's position. The list of athletes who've pushed the limits of free soloing in North America in the past 40 years centers on nine people: Henry Barber, Derek Hersey, John Bachar, Dan Osman, Charlie Fowler, Michael Reardon, Steph Davis, Croft, and Potter. Five of them are dead.
Hersey fell trying to free-solo the Steck-Salathé route in Yosemite in 1993. Osman, who also practiced "rope jumping"—leaping off walls while attached to nylon cords—died in 1998 when one of his ropes broke. A 2006 avalanche in western China killed Fowler, one of the few soloists to embrace high-altitude mountaineering. Reardon was swept off an Irish sea cliff by a rogue wave in 2007 as he free-soloed for a photographer. In 2009, Bachar fell while climbing a route he had free-soloed many times before, on a cliff near his home in Mammoth Lakes, California.