He said he was driven to attempt such jaw-dropping feats by a desire to overcome a childhood fear of falling to his death.
“When I was a little boy, my first memory was a flying dream. In my dream, I flew — and I also fell,” he said in a video interview with Outside
published online last year. “I always wondered as I got older if it was some premonition of falling to my death.”
Rather than being cowed by the dream, he turned it into his motivation.
“I started free-soloing harder and harder routes, kind of proving to myself that I could take control of this, pretty much the biggest fear I had — falling to my death,” he said.