Destination Guide My Favourite Route: Pete Whittaker - The Vice (E1 5b), Stanage North
There are some climbs that etch themselves into your memory for the raw, humbling lessons they dish out. For me, that climb is The Vice (E1 5b) at Stanage North.
In late 2016 Pete Whittaker made an 'all-free' rope solo ascent of Freerider on El Capitan. The route took him 20 hours and 6 minutes, smashing the previous fastest time of 4 days. Pete flashed the route in 2014, perhaps making it the ideal route for him to try alone. Pete documented his big day and the resulting film is a fascinating insight into what it takes to complete a climb of that magnitude.
Read our interview with Pete about his rope solo here
Comments
Has anyone here got any experience of the silent partner set up? Is it reliable enough that it feels comparable to a human belayer or is it more that you don't plan on falling on it?
that was ridiculously good, more of pete please!
excellent little film
Superb!
Almost two years later, I still find it almost unbelievable that he did this (obviously he did!) Back in the 1990s, two of the strongest guys I ever met got shut down on this route. (I think they made a film about it.) To rope-solo it in under 24 hours seems... beyond the beyond.
His final comments: perhaps it wasn't hard enough... Well, maybe. But to keep it together through so much hard climbing in such different styles, with so much brutal effort, fighting the 'I'm so f*cked, I don't know what I'm doing any longer' feeling...
Something else. This really is something else.
Mick