Name: Before Free Solo (Full Episode) | Edge of the Unknown with Jimmy Chin
Uploaded: 2026-03-20T11:56:17.000Z
Duration: 22 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Slightly more pumped than I would have liked.

Which is one of the classic ways to yourself when you're soling.

When you're on a quest to redefine what's humanly possible, the line between triumph and tragedy is razor thin.

From Mount Everest to Antarctica, I've had the privilege of sharing adventures alongside the world's most daring athletes.

In the pivotal moments when life hangs in the balance, what drives the greatest to keep pushing, to stare down fear.

These are the stories from the edge of the unknown.

To be on the side of a cliff without a rope, totally untethered, you know, freedom feels pretty frickin next level.

Free soloing is the ultimate test of climbing.

And that's the challenge of doing something that hasn't been done before is how do you know that you're ready.

He's climbed the biggest walls on the planet without a rope.

I was there when he free soloed the 3,000 foot El Capitan in Yosemite Valley, California.

This was a climb so futuristic and visionary that not even the top climbers in the world were daring to think about it.

How does someone prepare to do the impossible?

I had been dreaming of free soling El Cap forever.

The psychological challenge felt so vast and if you feel really scared thinking about it then you're probably not prepared enough.

I felt that Morocco would be a perfect practice ground to get one step closer to free soloing El Cap, Morocco.

This was a place where he could test himself both physically and mentally with a massive amount of climbing.

And then he wanted to free solo one of the big walls at the end of the trip.

He knew that the route that he'd chosen would be one of the greatest big wall free solos.

I'm so curious if we can actually make these walls feel smaller, you know?

Yeah, there's baby goats halfway up the first pitch.

Tommy was really the only possible partner for the training that I was hoping to do in Morocco.

We are what it's like to climb with somebody who climbs so fast, so amazing.

Tommy is one of the best climbers in the world.

When I started climbing he was already a hero in the climbing world.

I think Alex and I just felt like if we got together and climbed, we could do stuff that we couldn't do on our own.

And from there it evolved into this very close friendship.

And so knowing that he had this giant objective, my role just became to help him survive.

Essentially, Tommy didn't want Alex to free solo, but

he knew that Alex was going to go do it anyways.

So Tommy decides that the best way that he can support his friend is to train with him.

Doing something that dangerous is really about having full confidence that you will be successful.

Alex wanted to push himself with a huge endurance challenge, A triple link up to climb three of the biggest walls in Tagia with Tommy in one day.

It would be the equivalent of running three back to back marathons at a world record pace.

That means that we'd be doing 21 hour link up.

These big walls are extraordinarily technical.

A rating of difficulty that really only a world class climber can climb.

I don't remember this pitch hardly at all.

My finger slipped, but it was a hard move.

One of the routes we were climbing together.

Thinking about being up there and that high off the ground without a rope, that's a terrifying thought.

It's pretty sick to think that Tommy's about to climb all the way past the shade up there in this first block.

Skin's a little more tender than the last week.

It's much harder to climb sharp limestone in full sunlight.

Your fingers are sweating more, which makes your skin softer, which makes the rock cut your skin more.

We had to climb very delicately, make sure we grabbed these razor sharp holds and pulled on them as little as possible.

And you're also trying to stand on these tiny little edges.

Very precise, small movements with your feet.

The rubber gets really hot and it basically cooks your feet.

It's just hard to cover these guys because basically they're the fastest guys in the world on this terrain.

Pretending you might have worn out the film crew, you might get a day without a film crew, then that'd be awesome.

The sun going away is a welcome reprieve where you're like, oh, thank God we're not getting cooked anymore.

But the hard part in the dark is navigating.

You never quite know if you're going the right direction.

I really want this route to go easily and quickly.

When you're pretty exhausted and it's dark, it's easy to start making some mistakes.