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The rope hissed through the belayer’s safety device, and Howell smashed into the ground, fracturing three vertebrae and several bones in both feet. At the same moment, Howell’s belayer let go of the brake strand of the rope, a careless mistake. Thirty-five feet up, he attempted a tricky move but couldn’t hold on. His newfound obsession, however, nearly came to an abrupt end in 2008, when he was climbing at the university’s indoor rock wall. Howell first went climbing as a 19-year-old freshman at the University of Houston, in 2006, and from the get-go he felt like he was onto something special. But the annals of climbing, like other extreme sports, are littered with stories of risk-takers who convinced themselves that they could reason their way out of catastrophe. He spent hours ahead of each hard climb satisfying what he called his “preflight checklist,” making sure he’d accounted and planned for all the variables that could go wrong.

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Howell saw his free soloing as the product of careful, sober analysis. The number of people in the world soloing that volume at that difficulty can likely be counted on one hand.

One time he free-soloed over a mile of technical terrain in a single day. Many of the routes were in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge and had little margin for error-an overhanging 5.12 could be as steep as the underside of a church dome a vertical 5.12 might have grips the width of a dime’s edge. I followed along as he soloed 19 different 5.12’s, a grade that many people spend their lives trying to climb with a rope on. If he came upon a roped party, he’d toss a candy bar in their direction. When he went out soloing, for example, he kept mini Snickers in his puppy-dog-shaped chalk bag. His death-defying behavior was complemented by a fun-loving temperament. I began following Howell on Instagram, where he went by was an enigmatic character, and I found it difficult to look away from his antics. But I was also unsettled, filled with a kind of macabre awe. I was blown away by the absurdity of the video, which struck me as one part Free Solo, one part Jackass.

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I’d been climbing for five years and was then preparing to take a crack at the 3,000-foot Nose route on El Capitan in Yosemite. I remember seeing the clip when it came out. His frizzy shoulder-length locks and the hat, which he was rarely without, belied the quickly thinning hair atop his head. Howell, then 27, was a sinewy string bean with a permanent dirtbag scruff of a beard. Titled “ Free Soloing with a Hat,” the video enjoyed a viral moment in the climbing corners of the internet when its subject, Austin Howell, shared it on Vimeo in April 2015.

The clip, just 1 minute 56 seconds long, ends with a still frame of the climber looking back at the camera and flipping the bird. All he’s got on is a gray newsboy cap. A twangy guitar lick comes in, followed by the lyrics: You can’t kill me / I will not die / Not now, not ever / No never/ I’m gonna live a long, long time / My soul raves on forever. Aside from eschewing clothes and a rope, the climber is also barefoot. He’s out of his damn mind.”Īs the camera zooms out, it becomes clear that the soloist is hundreds of feet off the deck. He’s soloing, climbing this route, naked, without a rope. “What in the world,” the guy filming says. The footage is shaky, but there’s no doubt what’s in the frame: a man climbing a section of shining white rock.