Men's Journal

Bachar on the Gift, at Red Rock, Nevada, in the '80s. Photo credit: John McDonald

By Christian Beckwith

Death can seem to come in waves to the climbing community, and for a month this summer it hit like a tsunami. In May, climbers Jonny Copp, 35, Micah Dash, 32, and videographer Wade Johnson, 24, from Boulder, Colorado, were in southwestern China to try a new route on a soaring granite citadel called Mount Edgar (21,713 feet). When they missed their flight home, a search was launched, and on June 6, Copp’s body was identified amid avalanche rubble. Johnson’s was found nearby on June 8; Dash is still missing. Then less than a month later, John Bachar, 52, the visionary free-soloist whose exploits made him the poster child of Yosemite’s free-climbing revolution, fell to his death while soloing near his home in Mammoth Lakes, California.

Bachar had occupied an outpost of climbing’s insular fiefdom for nearly three decades. A fierce guardian of the sport’s traditionalist roots, he had been introduced to free-soloing (i.e., climbing without ropes) in the early 1970s. At that point Bachar began an unprecedented exploration of its outer limits: He soloed 5.12 when it was still climbing’s hardest grade, developed a systematic training regimen when most climbers simply did pull-ups, and fought, sometimes literally with his fists, to protect climbing’s most exotic characteristic — adventure — from the sacrilege of safety.

Like Bachar, the chiseled and charismatic Copp embraced the purity of the sport. He was a new-school traditionalist who sought adventure in every form of climbing and revered its pioneers. Born in Singapore in 1974 to parents who would soon take him around the world in a pop-up camper, Copp had come to prominence in 2000, when his audacious alpine-style ascents in Pakistan’s Karakoram landed him on the cover of American Alpine Journal. Subsequent first ascents in Patagonia, Alaska, and India (where, with budding alpinist Dash, he blasted a new route in pure alpine style) only increased his standing, and in 2004 he augmented his impressive climbing résumé by co-founding the Boulder-based Adventure Film Festival.

Climbing is a bit like rolling the dice: The more we do it, the greater the chance they’ll come up snake eyes. In both free-soloing and alpinism, the risk of death is amplified. But that’s essential to its allure: Adventure begins where the certainty of survival leaves off. Bachar once wrote of the effort to create his most famous route, the Bachar-Yerian, “Over and over I’d felt my whole life come down to one small move, one crystal — and within those tiny spaces and moments, I’d tried to get a measure of myself.” Adventure was the yardstick by which Bachar, Copp, Dash, and Johnson measured themselves.

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This article originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Men’s Journal.

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