Timothy Kang Brings Link-up Practices to Perilous Highballs

Timothy Kang, 24, is in some ways an unusual free soloist: He has spent most of his climbing life as a quintessential gym rat, his days structured around training (he’s now a coach) and competitions (he’s done some World Cups) and hard climbs (he’s sent V14 and 5.14+). But Kang also grew up making annual pilgrimages to Bishop, and after his first sight of the Peabodies, at age 14, he found himself repeatedly “taunted,” he says, by the tallest, proudest lines. His coach—a chaperone on his first few trips—kept him off the hard ones, but once Kang was 17 and able to visit Bishop on his own, he began taking a break from the pursuit of pure difficulty to tick off airy classics like Footprints (V9 X, 50 feet), Evilution Direct (V11, 55 feet), This Side of Paradise (V10, 33 feet), Ambrosia (V11 X, 55 feet), and—gulp—Alex Honnold’s Too Big to Flail (V10 X, 55 feet), which features hard, sustained, and nauseatingly insecure climbing high above a terrible landing.

Yet when Kang topped out Too Big to Flail in December 2020, he thought he was done with danger. “Dude, never again,” he told a friend who’d been taking pictures. “I’m never doing anything like that again.”

“Oh, thank God,” his friend replied.

But then, just a week later, Kang approached that same friend with a new idea.

“Dude, but wouldn’t it be cool to do them all in a day?” he said. 

The idea of doing multiple hard, long, and dangerous climbs in a single 24-hour period is not particularly new. John Bachar was famous for linking up dozens of 5.10-5.12 free solos in Yosemite and Joshua Tree (and for daring others to keep up with him, as John Long nearly fatally attempted to do). Peter Croft upped the intensity ante in 1987 when he soloed both Astroman (5.11c 10 pitches) and the Rostrum (5.11c 8 pitches) in the same day—a feat only Alex Honnold has since matched.

Yet no one, as far as Kang knew, had brought the same approach to Bishop’s proudest boulders. 

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