Now that all the world's highest mountains have been climbed and the greatest rock faces conquered, the quest for adrenaline-fuelled adventure has taken a new direction, says John G O'Dwyer.
What you do is simple. You find a sheer cliff, maybe 50 metres high and climb all the way to the top. And you don't bother with ropes or other safety equipment. If you fall off early on, you have a sporting chance of spending the remainder of your life in a wheelchair. If you come off near the top you're doomed.
The reasons to avoid such an activity seem irrefutable, yet the sport of free solo climbing is attracting a growing number of participants. One reason, I suppose, is that we live in an increasingly anodyne world where every effort is made to eliminate even the slightest risk from our lives. Many children are no longer allowed walk to school, run in a playground, climb trees or play cops and robbers. Adults can't carry shampoo on to an aircraft or buy more than two packets of paracetamol. And last year, when a runaway Scottish soccer fan patted a goalkeeper on the back, stretchers and emergency personnel were on the scene in seconds.
Indeed if Christopher Columbus lived today he could hardly have discovered America. An apparatchik would surely have appeared on the quayside as he was about to sail and listed at least 29 reasons why the Santa Maria could not be licensed to carry transatlantic human cargo. Health and safety inspections may have made our lives safer and more comfortable, but they have also made them less challenging and more boring.
Fortunately, there are still some free-spirited people about who resolutely refuse to accept the constraints that safety experts impose on the rest of us. Rock-climber Michael Reardon was one such person. American born, but of Irish ancestry, he lived from an early age the expansive life common to those who eventually broaden the boundaries of human achievement. In the 1980s, he was a member of a heavy metal band and later worked as a writer and film producer. He was best known, however, for belonging to an elite group of top-level climbers - known as the Outlaws - whose members insisted on making ascents of cliff faces while unencumbered by safety ropes. For some people this is climbing in its purest and most stylish form. To the rest of us it appears foolhardy in the extreme.
But then we should remember the age-old truism that those who dare to push back the frontiers of the possible are invariably considered foolhardy by their contemporaries. Public opprobrium was heaped on the first climbers to reach the summit of the Matterhorn. It also fell upon those did battle with the North Face of the Eiger in the 1930s. And in more recent years it has come upon women - but not on men - who have continued with cutting-edge climbing after the birth of their children.
Nevertheless, without people prepared to take risks and push themselves beyond the comfort zone, the world's greatest mountains would remain unclimbed, European explorers could hardly have reached America and the lunar dust would remain footprint-free. A restless search for advancement is a key element of the human condition. If a challenge exists, then sooner or later somebody, possessing raw courage beyond what the vast majority of us can comprehend, will want to take it on.
Reardon was such a person. On his visits to Ireland hit the local climbing scene like a tornado. Spurning long-held conventions on safety, he soloed many of our hardest climbs. Local climbers watched in astonishment as the blond "Californian wonder boy" glided unprotected up cliffs that had previously been attempted by our very best climbers using ropes and modern safety equipment.
Yesterday it was exactly six months since he was swept out to sea after a climb on Valentia, Island, Co Kerry. Not surprisingly, many people immediately concluded that the world's best-known solo climber had finally over-reached himself and that his disappearance resulted from a climbing error. The reality was more mundane, but no less tragic. A rogue wave knocked Reardon from a rock during a photo shoot following yet another successful ascent.
Despite his daredevil reputation, Reardon was never reckless in his approach to climbing. Those who watched him in Ireland invariably commented on his extremely cautious and calculating methods and on the fact that he scrupulously avoided taking foolhardy or unnecessary risks. In a business where one slip almost invariably proves fatal, it just isn't possible to be otherwise.
Michael Reardon is presumed dead. He will, however, be long remembered for putting adrenaline and high-profile glamour back into rock-climbing. With his simple, flowing technique, he placed challenges that would have been considered outlandish even 10 years ago firmly within the frontiers of the possible for future generations of climbers.