And returning to Clever Lever, Bachar reached for the jug. “I cut my feet loose and instantly I can tell I’m swinging way too fast and have no way to slow myself down,” he recalls. The momentum of the swing caused Bachar to twist out and away from the climb, until faced out toward the slab. Suddenly, he was no longer attached to the jug and had rocketed off into space. 

The Fall
The ground rushes up at 32 feet per second squared — fast, in other words. Formerly innocuous scenery elements morph into murderous obstacles. You’re not floating, not hovering — you’re on a collision course with the earth, and if you fall far enough, you’ll hear the air whistling past your ears. 

"The fall was less than three seconds," says James Lucas, who took a notoriously long tumble off the North Overhang (5.9) of Intersection Rock, at Joshua Tree. "I could blow smoke up your ass and say that my life flashed before my eyes, but all I know is that the last thing to go through my head was my butt." Slipping off above the route's 5.9 flare crux, Lucas dropped 70 feet to a sloping ledge; as he tried to sit up on the ledge, he rolled, falling an additional 30 feet to the ground.

“I fell off backwards,” says Heinrich. The climb, which Heinrich had done probably 100 times, and soloed 20 or 30, was part of his circuit, a soloing routine he’d incorporated as training for an upcoming trip to Patagonia. “I was thinking I had to be a tough guy,” says Heinrich — hence, he took on the climb first thing in the morning, when the rock and his digits were frosty. 

The memory of the fall still sticks with Bachar as if it was yesterday: “I go flying through the air, I’m way off the ground, the slab is way below me, and instantly I start thinking of broken ankles, broken legs, of going to the hospital — I know I’m completely fucked!” he says. 

The Impact
The ground doesn’t lie, and neither do the tendons and ligaments in your legs, or fine bones in your wrists and hands, or the plates of the skull … or the spine. Heason laid on the ground in a state of shock, believing he’d “just get up and have another go.” Then, as time passed, he realized he’d broken both ankles, doing severe soft-tissue damage to one of them — damage that would take years to heal. “It hurt a bit,” says Heason. “But not as much as I’d have expected broken bones to.” He later completed Narcissus, ropeless and sans toprope inspection. 

Having trained for years as an aerial ski jumper, “I reverted to having ski poles in my hands when I hit the ground. I instantly spotted my landing,” says Heinrich of his fall. Heinrich says that at the time he had a “real sense” of how to manage big falls, a sense that was killed in that accident. “I had logged a ton of airtime [before then]. If that happened to me today, I’d be dead,” he says. Still, this reflex allowed him to get his feet underneath him and roll down a hillside covered in scree and scrub oak, surviving the fall. 

Taking a 20-foot spitter, Bachar miraculously landed feet-first between the basketball-sized talus stones on the slab. Decking in any other position would have, at a minimum, broken his ankles. “I rolled forward down the rest of the slab until finally I hit the bottom. Sitting up, face out, my first thought was, ‘Fuck, I’m OK!’“ says Bachar. “But then I heard this sound behind me.” The initial impact into the talus at the top of the slab had caused a large chunk to dislodge and tumble downhill, toward the dazed Bachar. “Before I knew what I was hearing, this thing hit me in the back — it was like someone hit me with a baseball bat,” he says. Bachar jumped to his feet to get out of the way of additional impacts, staggered a few steps, and then fell face first into the dirt. 

The Aftermath
You’ve fallen and you can’t get up. This isn’t a commercial — the world has evaporated. Every nerve ending screams at you in a cacophony of pain and adrenaline. Now you need to drag-ass to the car, to the road, to the hospital. From there follow painful and invasive (and expensive) medical procedures, not to mention the waves of regret and emotion. And finally, the slow return to climbing as you rehabilitate the mind and body, while paying retribution to your soul. 

“You don’t really want to move back in with your parents,” says Heinrich, who did just that, at age 24. “You realize that you’re fucked up, can’t even hardly work — all because of doing something that’s really stupid and reckless.” Heinrich would spend two weeks in the hospital, enduring three major surgeries and “insane” amounts of physical therapy over the next year. He accrued at least $50,000 in hospital bills, broke both ankles. and fractured the tibial plateau on his left leg. Nevertheless, he’s gone on to become one of America’s best all-around climbers and last year ran in four marathons. 

Lucas’ injuries were more substantial: a seizure (just after impact), fractured skull, broken C-spine and lumbar vertebrae (resulting in fusion of the lower back), broken clavicle, broken ribs, a compound fracture of the elbow (requiring two surgeries), a shattered left ankle (later fused), nerve damage to the right foot, and a blood clot in the lower abdomen (from so much time immobilized in a hospital bed). He spent 81 days, not including rehabilitation, in the hospital, undergoing seven surgeries total. 

“These days I’m so broke I can’t afford batteries for my sundial,” says Lucas. “The hospital invested $1 million-plus in me. At some point I’ll declare personal bankruptcy.” Lucas has since returned to soloing, and to North Overhang, but this time with a rope. A long 381 days after his accident, he followed a friend up the route. “There was nothing inspirational about learning how to walk again,” wrote Lucas in a personal essay. “I relived the pain of the ordeal as I struggled past my previous high point. I expected to find a panacea on the summit, but the answer to my medical bills, the limp, and the haunting dreams have eluded me.” 

In the aftermath of Bachar’s fall, Pat Ament, Bachar’s host at the time, opened the door to the ashen-faced Californian. Bachar stumbled two steps in, and then collapsed on the living room floor. “I’m so out of it, I can only stutter what happened,” he mumbled, prompting Ament to quickly check Bachar and discover a small hole at the base of his spine. Ament immediately drove Bachar to the hospital, where the dazed soloist needed only a prophylactic tetanus shot. He didn’t solo for three months after his accident. “It wasn’t until after a full season at Yosemite and settling in at Joshua Tree that I finally started soloing again,” he says. 

And though Lucas continues to seek out the meaning in his accident, the others fortunate enough to survive have found their own paths. Most continue to solo, while others have hung up their shoes when they felt the time was right. Bachar, with more than two decades of soloing under his belt, looks back on his accident and admits, “You appreciate soloing even more when you have this intimate understanding of the consequences related to this art form.” 

Michael Reardon lives, climbs, and solos in Oak Park, California, near his beloved Malibu Creek Canyon. Matt Samet is Senior Editor at Climbing.