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The Woman Creating the World’s Largest National Parks (And No, They’re Not in the U.S.)

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this month, Kris Tompkins and Michelle Bachelet, the president of Chile, signed an .

The one聽million pledged by Tompkins alone will amount to the largest single private-to-public donation of land in human history; combined with the ten million acres pledged by the Chilean government, the total will amount to three times the combined size of Yellowstone and Yosemite鈥攊n stunning country, I might add, having been there last year. These are some of the most breathtaking snow-capped mountain ranges and virgin river valleys and glacial fjords and wind-swept grasslands on the planet.聽

The agreement does not by itself protect any land or create new . It lays out final steps and official protocols for the completion of a journey that Kris Tompkins, former CEO of Patagonia, began a quarter-century ago with her late husband, Doug Tompkins, founder of the North Face and Esprit. The Tompkinses dedicated their lives to restoring damaged wildland on their properties in Patagonia, building first-rate national-park infrastructure, and convincing the Argentine and Chilean governments to accept these lands as gifts in exchange for the contribution of still more land and guarantees that all of it would forever be protected.

To imagine what such an announcement might feel like on American soil, contemplate hearing that President Trump and the Republican-controlled congress are gravely concerned about epic overcrowding in our existing national parks, worried sick about all those little animals and plants at risk of extinction, and unable to countenance a world in which poor and middle-class Americans can no longer renew their spirits in public wilderness.

If that little thought exercise hasn鈥檛 already exhausted your capacity for outlandish fantasy, imagine that, as a remedy, Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell have declared plans to create six absolutely massive new national parks in the lower 48 states, with funds already earmarked for the purchase and restoration to wilderness of the entire Appalachian mountain chain in the states of North and South Carolina, the entire Maine coast from the waterline to 20 miles inland, California鈥檚 entire coastal mountain range from San Francisco to the Oregon border, and a vast swath of prairie slated to become America鈥檚 Serengeti, with million-animal bison herds stalked by grizzlies and wolves.

The Trump administration has聽calculated that 鈥淎merica鈥檚 best idea鈥澛爄sn鈥檛 worth as much as the timber and mineral rights they can auction off before the next election.

Of course, nothing could be further from reality. The and aiming to as fast as they can. It would also be easy to shrug your shoulders at the Chilean agreement and move on. Nobody鈥檚 heading there for Memorial Day weekend with the kids, after all. But,聽everyone who loves wilderness鈥攁nd especially everyone whose dreams include white-water rivers and sea-kayak camping and mountain ranges so remote that many of their peaks have never been summited鈥攐ught to jump for joy.

Even if you know it鈥檒l be a stretch to make it down there, it鈥檚 still great to know that, for the price of an airline ticket and a 4×4 rental, you could someday drive the down the spine of Patagonia, through river gorges more pristine and rugged than you ever imagined could be left in this world. In fact, the way I see it, we all have an obligation to save our pennies and try. The Trump administration and the GOP-controlled legislature have calculated that 鈥淎merica鈥檚 best idea,鈥� as Wallace Stegner famously called national parks, isn鈥檛 worth half so much as the timber and mineral rights they can auction off before the next election.聽

The Chilean government, by supporting the Tompkinses audacious dream, have bet on the opposite proposition, the notion that enough people all over the world dream of seeing the truly wild earth that merely saving it, and making Chile into the greatest ecotourism destination聽on the planet, can be a value proposition.

Let鈥檚 prove Chile right.

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Obituary: Royal Robbins (1935鈥�2017)

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Rock climbing is a game of rules. It has no meaning without arbitrary limits on the use of gear鈥攄rilling bolts, not drilling bolts, hanging ropes from above鈥攁nd shared agreement about what constitutes a great achievement. Nobody in the history of North American rock climbing did more to define those rules, and the culture of climbing today, than Royal Robbins, who died Tuesday, March 14, at the age of 82. Put another way, every man and woman who currently climbs outdoors, regardless of whether or not they鈥檝e heard of the guy, lives in a world that Royal Robbins created.

Robbins was born in 1935 and grew up working-class poor in trailer parks around Southern California. He learned to climb in the early 1950s at a granite crag called Tahquitz, outside Los Angeles, and immediately established a pattern of audacious bravery. First, at the age of 17, Robbins tackled the then-infamous Open Book, the first multipitch 5.9-rated climb in the United States, which had been climbed for the first time only one year before with the use of so-called direct aid, meaning those original climbers hammered gear into the cliff鈥�2×4 lumber, as it happened鈥攖hen attached stirrups to that lumber and stepped into the stirrups to make upward progress.

鈥淪o Royal goes up there with a white yachting rope and cheap-ass tennis shoes and leads the whole thing free, meaning he鈥檚 got a rope tied around his waist, but he鈥檚 pulling on the rock to make upward progress, not on gear,鈥� says John Long, a leading Yosemite climber of the generation after Robbins. 鈥淎nd he鈥檚 got no protection except the few chunks of wood that the older guys left behind鈥攏o way that stuff was going to hold a fall鈥攕o Robbins basically free-solos the first multipitch 5.9 in the United States. People today have no way of appreciating how extreme that is.鈥�

Robbins did the same thing in Yosemite for the second ascent of the great Steck-Salath茅 route, the most significant rock climb in North America at the time, on Sentinel Rock. Instead of the five-and-a-half days taken by Allen Steck and John Salath茅, Robbins took two days. 鈥淚f you were to give today鈥檚 gym-climbing national champion the garbage pitons Robbins was using, a hammer, and a cheap rope and tennies, and tell them to go have a crack at that, I guarantee they鈥檇 come back with horror stories,鈥� says Long, who knew Robbins well.

(Wikimedia Commons)

Robbins soon became a regular at Camp Four, the Yosemite rock climbers鈥� campground, and his climbing career over the next 20 years reads like a litany of all the most important ascents of the so-called golden age of climbing. He did the first ascent of the Northwest Face of Half Dome in 1956 and watched in horror as Warren Harding did the first ascent of El Capitan, spending 18 months laying siege to the wall with fixed ropes and 125 metal bolts drilled into the cliff. Harding finally finished the job with a 47-day push in 1958, after which Robbins did the second ascent in just seven days. It was an ascent so impressive, and so glaring in its contrast to Harding鈥檚, that it served as a manifesto for the future of Yosemite rock climbing鈥攄eclaring, in essence, that boldness and commitment and speed would forever count for more than engineering and logistics.

Robbins turned that manifesto into a masterpiece of his own three years later, when he, Chuck Pratt, and Tom Frost established the second-ever route on El Capitan, the Salath茅 Wall, arguably the greatest pure rock climb on earth, then and now. 鈥淚t was perfectly clear to us that given sufficient time, fixed ropes, bolts, and determination,鈥� , 鈥渁ny section of any rock wall could be climbed.鈥� To remove this element of certainty, 鈥渨hich tends to diminish our joy in climbing,鈥� as he put it, Robbins and his teammates dropped their fixed ropes after day three, and then, on a rock face vastly more intimidating than anything ever attempted in that fashion, spent six more days pioneering a pathway up through an overhanging headwall toward the summit鈥攚ith absolutely zero hope of locating a single extra cup of water, much less of rescue. 鈥淚t is just so wildly steep up there,鈥� says Alex Honnold, 鈥淭o be nailing pitons in there, for the second-ever route on El Cap鈥 mean, they were basically questing up a virgin wall.鈥�

鈥淚 think he was aware that he was bigger than life, and he knew that he had a responsibility to share that with people.鈥�

The competition between Robbins and Harding turned bitter for a while in the late 1960s, when Harding established the Dawn Wall route by drilling many hundreds of permanent metal bolts into the cliff. Robbins鈥攍ike a self-appointed minister of righteousness鈥攑romptly repeated Harding鈥檚 Dawn Wall route with a hammer and cold chisel, chopping Harding鈥檚 bolts along the way as if to erase an abomination in the eyes of the mountain gods. That episode has gone down in climbing history as an ugly one, but it represents the essence of Robbins鈥檚 contribution to climbing today鈥攁n insistence that rules and ethics matter. In practical terms, that means always using whatever gear will cause the least possible damage to the rock. It means respecting the first ascent of a given climb as a work of art, such that later climbers never change the essential nature of the route by, say, adding new permanent safety hardware. Lastly, it means celebrating the constant push toward bolder and braver ways of climbing.

Robbins later became a world-class whitewater kayaker, joining The North Face founder Doug Tompkins and Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard on first descents of many of the great rivers of the Sierra Nevada. Reg Lake, who was part of that crew, recalls carrying their kayaks up to 8,000 feet on the eastern side of the Sierra, and then spending nearly a week running the headwaters of the San Joaquin鈥攖hrough Class V rapids in boats heavily loaded with camping gear. 鈥淭hings got quiet out there,鈥� Lake says. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 really when Royal鈥檚 insights and philosophies would come out鈥攁lmost like Zen quotes. I think he was aware that he was bigger than life, and he knew that he had a responsibility to share that with people.鈥�

For elite climbers like Long, however, the core of Robbins鈥� legacy is pure guts. 鈥淭he guy was just always trying to up the boldness quotient,鈥� Long says. 鈥淗e brought raw courage and preternatural talent and drive, and there鈥檚 no way to match that experience now.鈥�

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Up on the Big Stone

Sun, 01 Oct 2000 00:00:00 +0000

THERE WAS A TIME鈥攖wo full years, in fact鈥攚hen climbing the 3,000-foot sheer granite monolith called El Capitan meant literally everything to me. I was in my early twenties and had somehow gotten it through my head that El Capitan lay as a kind of obstacle to the rest of my life, that I couldn’t get on with becoming whoever I was supposed to become until I had thrashed my way up the thing. My parents and my friends all knew this, and they regularly told me that they wouldn’t like me any less one way or another鈥攈oping, I suppose, to defuse my potentially fatal obsession. They pointed out that, statistically speaking, 100 percent of humanity led lives in no way dependent upon their having climbed or not climbed El Capitan (or anything else, for that matter), and surely, they said, I could find less hazardous ways of proving myself. None of this meant a thing. My internal apparatus of desire and ambition had simply built itself around this single object; I knew without a shred of a doubt that if I failed to climb El Capitan, I would live my entire life in an intractable fog of doubt and self-loathing.

I got myself into this predicament by accepting wholeheartedly, at about the age of 19, what might be called the Path of the Yosemite Climber. Somewhat out of vogue now, in this era of bolt-clipping gym climbers, and never more than a tacit understanding among Valley regulars, the path is simply a sequence of rock climbs. It begins with practice routes like After Seven and the Nutcracker Suite and proceeds through several years’ worth of progressively harder ascents, from the Royal Arches to the Higher Cathedral Spire, from the Nabisco Wall to the Chouinard-Herbert Route on Sentinel Rock. “Do these five 5.9 climbs in good style,” the story goes, “and you can then begin to consider trying that one 5.10. Put the following ten 5.10s behind you, without falls, and you might deign to call yourself a 5.10 climber.” Less a matter of perfecting your gymnastics鈥攁s is the case in sport and gym climbing鈥攖his is a carefully calibrated means of acquiring authentic experience. For anyone who wants a path to self-knowledge, or adventure, or enlightenment, or whatever it is that we want such paths for, this still makes a brilliant one, complete with seasonal movements from the short, winter training climbs of Joshua Tree, to Yosemite Valley in the spring, up to Tuolumne Meadows for the hot months of summer, and then back to the Valley for the autumnal big-wall season.

You start out by following other climbers, learning to remove protective gear from the rock, and then you take your first lead on something short and easy, allowing plenty of time to fiddle with the equipment. The leads get harder and longer, and months and whole summers pass in the comfort of this meaningful march forward. Along the way, you probably try a few of the short climbs at the base of El Cap itself, routes like Moby Dick and Sacherer-Cracker, and you feel the stone’s absurd stature, its staggering, elemental size鈥攁s if you’ve put your hands on the side of a planet. Three years in and you’re ticking off the long, single-day routes, thrashing your way up the finger and fist cracks, squeeze-chimneys and slabs of the Valley’s pure granite walls, tasting the remarkable pleasure of running fast over stone all day. Finishing late in the afternoon, you thrill to another of the Valley’s peculiar joys: the long, long walk down, stumbling through the trees in the warm night, laughing with the climber’s utterly unique brand of elation, a mysterious and giddy delight at things meaningful simply because they are possible.

Living in Camp 4, Yosemite’s wonderful, tawdry, overcrowded, and deeply loved old climbers’ campground, meant, when I was there in the early 1990s, and still means, late nights with a global rainbow coalition of dirty, smiling aspirants鈥攓uesadillas and beers with climbers Japanese, Polish, Venezuelan, all delighted to be there. In the warmth of your bag, you fall asleep with a view of the stars through the treetops, the smell of Top Ramen and campfire smoke mingling with the cedars’ perfume. You wake up to the hiss of butane stoves and the clink of climbing gear as someone readies for a long climb. Rest days pass swimming in the crystal-clear pools of the Merced River, sunning on midstream boulders, watching trout flicker here and there. Maybe an ice cream at Degnan’s Deli and a long nap in the tall, wind-whispering grasses of El Cap Meadow, sleeping with the peace of physical well-being. Over time, as you lie there day after day looking up, picking out tiny climbers lost in their dreams, you begin to realize where all this is going. An elaborate oral history has crept into your thoughts through the osmosis of parking-lot conversations, all about the Valley’s own pantheon of gods and demigods, great achievements, disasters, and debates: how in 1954 Warren Harding got mobbed by biting ants on the first ascent of the East Buttress of Middle Cathedral Rock, that one-day route you just loved so thoroughly, and how Royal Robbins completed the first ascent of Half Dome in 1957, when he was only 21 years old. Harding’s 18-month siege on El Cap, lasting from July 1957 clear through to November 1958, seems a testimony to the wall’s unimaginable vastness, and you pass hours picking out the climb’s famous features: Sickle Ledge, the Stoveleg Cracks, Dolt Tower, Boot Flake, the Great Roof. Robbins’s nine-and-a-half day first ascent of El Cap’s next route, the Salath茅, with Tom Frost and Chuck Pratt in 1961, seems an act of wizardry, and his North America Wall done three years later, with Frost, Pratt, and Yvon Chouinard, seems pure genius.

Even the old ethical arguments loom like scriptural disputes between apostles: To bolt or not to bolt? How shall we, as a people, define what we call right and wrong? The faces from the photographs become likewise etched into your mind. From Yosemite’s golden age, in the 1950s, it’s mostly Harding, the swarthy, Byronic wisecracker, and Robbins, the bespectacled fanatic. Also funny T. M. Herbert; Yvon Chouinard, gear-master and philosopher; sprightly Tom Frost; and stocky, implacable Chuck Pratt. From the weirder, wilder 1970s, it’s all about Jim Bridwell, the man who established Pacific Ocean Wall in the blank sweeps to the left of the black diorite of North America Wall and then set an altogether new standard for boldness and commitment with his still-terrifying Sea of Dreams, harder than anything the pioneers had attempted. Perhaps, if you were paying attention as hard as I was, you knew that even in the 1980s hard new routes were going up all over El Cap, and you tried to catch sight of Rick Lovelace or John Middendorf in the cafeteria and wondered what insane aid wall they’d just come off.

All of this past argues for the primacy of the wall you know you’ve got to climb next: El Capitan. Remember that this is only one version of a path that many climbers would say doesn’t exist, and that there are taller cliffs in the world, such as those on the Trango Towers of the Karakoram, and others on Baffin Island, all with far more fearsome weather and rockfall. No wall on earth, however, drops quite so sheer and smooth in such a perfect vertical sweep of solid granite as does El Capitan, from a flat top to a 90-degree plummet into the soil, or in such a sunny clime so close to a road and a bar and a very big audience.

The effect of that stone’s scale and singularity is so great that groups of tourists routinely gather in the meadow below simply to stare at the thing, using binoculars and high-powered telescopes to pick out climbers as if searching the skies for lost astronauts. Indeed, the first recorded non-Indian sighting of the wall comes from a U.S. Cavalry doctor who rode into the Valley in 1851, got one look at El Capitan, and fell behind his regiment to sit staring upward in awe, his heart pounding and his eyes filling with tears. When another soldier called back to the doctor, worried there might be scalping Indians in the trees, the doctor replied, “If my hair is now required, I can depart in peace, for I have here seen the power and glory of a Supreme Being.”

IN MY FOURTH SUMMER of climbing, I tried and failed three times to climb El Capitan. The first time, with my friend Reuben Margolin on Warren Harding’s Nose route, I was overcome by terror while still relatively close to the ground. The wall seemed impossibly vast, towering overhead with winds running almost constantly along the face; birds rose and fell in dramatic commentaries on gravity; hour upon hour of crushing physical labor seemed to bring the summit not an inch closer even as the ground got frighteningly farther away. Then, only halfway through the classic first day’s work, I traversed onto a part of the wall on which the exposure鈥攖he vertical drop below, the sheer volume of wall and space swimming all around鈥攑reyed upon the stability of my mind. My thoughts began to swirl uncontrollably and I felt a terrible, inchoate urgency, as if something absolutely had to be done, and very, very soon. So I did something. I went down.

The second failure, with my college climbing partner Jonathan Kaplan, came on the third day of my next attempt, when I dropped a bag containing rain gear and warm clothing and refused to go any farther鈥攆orcing us to complete nearly 2,000 feet of rappels. The third failure was much like the first. My partner that time, Russ McBride, was so unafraid at belays that even as we dangled in the Stoveleg Cracks, hundreds of feet up, he kept right on reading Over One Hundred Ways to Buy Real Estate for Little or No Money Down. I was, however, utterly and desperately terrified once again. I actually wept with fear, babbling incoherently about how I loved my mother and wanted to live to get married and have babies of my own someday.

The following summer, I enlisted Reuben and Jonathan on my fourth attempt. The idea was to have the strength of both men, and also to resolve the debt I felt I owed them. We spent five and a half days climbing the Salath茅 Wall, and it was unquestionably the single greatest adventure of my life鈥攕leeping on small ledges high in space, dangling on ropes from overhanging headwalls, and passing day after day inside the security of total purpose. The quotidian world was always visible below, with RVs and buses and cars and crowds of tourists in their lawn chairs in the meadow, but it was so distant, as if we were proper fools on the hill. The fear was still there, a perpetual background hum of abject horror, but at least I knew where I was coming from, where I was going, and what I was supposed to do with myself.

A hard-hat construction worker once told me that a day of big-wall climbing is harder than any day on any job site. The climbing itself, the endless coiling of ropes and switching of equipment, the hours and hours of awkward body positions, of hauling hundred-pound supply loads and ascending ropes, of exposure to the elements and the yawning space below鈥攊t all wears you down relentlessly. (Todd Skinner has said that you get so high up on El Cap that when you look down it takes five minutes to see the ground.) A love for the sport, therefore, is a love of extreme physical discomfort and a hunger for tasks so stupidly difficult they can obliterate your self鈥攖he ostensible point of the whole enterprise.

So, having worked hard from dawn until dusk for nearly a week, having been literally shit upon by climbers high above us, cleansed by a warm summer rain, and buzzed by peregrine falcons, we neared the summit badly sunburnt, many pounds skinnier, and covered in filth and scabs and open wounds; also profoundly exhausted and very, very happy in the way of tired and healthy young animals.

Then I discovered that there were depths of obsession with this wall that made my own look like a passing summer fancy. Far off to one side of the great cliff, we were arranging the short rappels back to the ground via the standard East Ledges descent route. Old, frayed ropes hung from bolts in the rock at our feet clear to the Valley floor several hundred feet below us鈥攆ixed lines used by Yosemite Search and Rescue to quickly access the rim of El Capitan. Where the ropes had worn dangerously thin, they had simply been cut through and tied in knots. Having survived nearly a week in a purely vertical world, with the threat of death by falling ever present, we had no intention of trusting our lives to such ephemera. So I spent several minutes rigging a heavily redundant anchor while Jonathan coiled and tossed our ropes off the edge, establishing our own rappel line. Reuben, meanwhile, readied our two enormous haul bags鈥攖he plasticized duffels in which we’d carried our 200 pounds of food, water, clothing, and bivouac gear. We were just about to descend when we heard footsteps.

Three men appeared, breathing hard and moving fast. One I had seen before in Tuolumne Meadows; he was a rock-climbing instructor who had the wiry, efficient build of a cowhand and who often wore a broad-brimmed Stetson while guiding clients up the cliffs. The second was rounder of body, with a gentle face and friendly smile. The third man, tall and lanky, politely asked if we would mind them rappelling ahead of us. “We’ve just been moving for kind of a long time, and if we stop now, we’re going to fall asleep,” he explained apologetically.

“But don’t worry,” he added with a grin, “we’ll be real fast.”

I watched in astonishment as the climbing instructor descended the fixed lines. When he reached a knot in the rope, he simply held on to the rope with one hand, unclipped his rappel device with the other, reattached the rappel device below the knot, and continued on his way鈥攈is entire life held, for a moment, in the palm of his hand. Reuben, Jonathan, and I exchanged amazed glances: Who were these guys?

“What you boys been on?” the tall climber asked. He had bright, flinty eyes and an air of silent confidence鈥攐ne of those men whose alpha status seems to emanate from their pores, their rank in any group somehow implicit, beyond question.

“Salath茅,” I said, perhaps a little proudly.

“Oh, that’s awesome,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to do that route. Your first El Cap route?”

I allowed that it was.

“Right on. You guys must be feeling great. How long were you up there?”

“Five days,” I told him, although in truth it had been closer to six.

“Right on,” he said. “Congratulations. I’ve got to do the Salath茅 someday. Is it just great?”

“It’s amazing,” I told him, only barely catching the cue, the way his intonation of “Salath茅” implied that he had done many, many other El Cap routes. “It was my fourth try, though,” I confessed.

“Doesn’t even matter,” the man assured me. “Everybody bails a few times. What matters is you made it. You ticked it.”

“I guess so.” I smiled. I guessed I’d ticked it. That sounded good. “What’d you guys just do?” I asked.

“Mescalito,” the man replied.

If the Salath茅 was one of the three great pioneering routes up El Capitan, Mescalito belonged in my mind to the same family as Pacific Ocean Wall and Sea of Dreams, climbs so committing they could apparently do dangerous and unsettling things to your mind. Much harder and steeper than the Salath茅, Mescalito seemed far beyond a Rubicon I would never cross. I hadn’t even made it back to the car yet, and my mental conversation could no longer revolve around simply having climbed El Cap. Already, I had passed into the realm of Which Route?

But then I noticed something, and asked: “Where’s your haul bag?”

“We didn’t really bring one,” he replied. “Just that thing.” He pointed to a sack about a third the size of ours.

“How long were you up there?”

“Twenty-eight hours,” he replied. “One guy climbing the whole time.”

Twenty-eight hours.

They had done a route radically harder than ours in a fifth of the time.

“When did you start?” I asked.

“Yesterday at about five.”

“You did it at night?”

“Yeah. You want to time it so you’re finishing up with some daylight.”

I don’t remember much more about that exchange, probably because I was so impressed that I more or less stopped speaking. By the next afternoon, however, and by means I have forgotten, I discovered that the man’s name was Steve Gerberding, and that he had climbed El Capitan 52 times over the last dozen years; 52 times on what counts as the climb of a lifetime for a lot of people, a climb so physically demanding as to leave most worn out for weeks. This absolutely fascinated me. I had finally got past the thing that was supposed to be the obstacle between me and the rest of my life, and now it appeared that the rest of a life could be devoted to the obstacle itself.

I CLIMBED THE WALL one more time that summer鈥攙ia the Nose, with a New Zealander named Peter Woolford whom I’d met in Berkeley’s Marmot Mountain Works. I was then Marmot’s climbing-shoe repairman, and Woolford was on the classic New Zealander’s globe-trotting walkabout. But after flying all that way from Christchurch, driving out to Yosemite, and starting up El Cap, Woolford’s partner had somehow managed to drop his harness in midroute. Following their hasty retreat, Woolford had to drive his partner鈥攚ho was out of vacation days鈥攂ack to the airport. Moping around the Bay Area afterwards, Woolford stopped into our store. One day later, we were off for what would become a month in the mountains together.

We did the route in the standard time of four days, and it was an enormous help to know firsthand that El Capitan actually had a top. In fact, I felt so at peace that I decided that climbing El Cap would become a regular pastime for me, too, as it clearly was for Steve Gerberding. I imagined myself taking long weekends at age 50 just to go knock off yet another El Cap route鈥攖hat I would spend as much time as I could toiling pointlessly in the sky. I actually called up John Middendorf at the Black Diamond Equipment Company to order a full complement of the specialized iron pitons and hammers and hammocks required for routes like Mescalito and Pacific Ocean Wall, and I began to find exquisitely roundabout ways of letting even nonclimbers know that I had climbed El Capitan, somehow bringing it into virtually every conversation I had.

My Louisiana-born-and-bred girlfriend didn’t quite get how impressed she was supposed to be, so I actually drove her up to Yosemite to show her the thing鈥攈er first-ever visit to proper mountains. Stopping at El Cap Meadow, after the long drive from the coast, I pulled her out of the car, pointed, and waited鈥攚aited for her jaw to fall and for me to loom suddenly larger in her eyes. I bounded around in my excitement, thrilled as ever to be below the stone myself, right up until I noticed that it was having absolutely no effect on this girl. In retrospect, I’m sure I had simply oversold it, ruining any possibility of a genuine response on her part. At the time I figured she just needed some help. We happened to be standing in the tall grass near a German man who had a pair of binoculars, so I asked if I could borrow them. I hoped to pick out a climber somewhere on the wall, show the climber to my girl, and thus make a last-ditch effort to impress upon her the wall’s magnificent scale (and so my own magnificence).

“People climb this thing?” the man asked, when he divined my intentions.

“They sure do.”

“I can’t believe that,” he said, quite firmly.

“It’s true,” I insisted. “I’ll find someone here in a minute.”

“No, that can’t be,” the man declared with great finality.

“I’ve actually climbed it myself,” I said, lowering the binoculars from my eyes.

“You’ve got to be joking,” he replied, breaking into a broad grin. “No, no, I don’t believe that for one moment.”

“Really,” I insisted, now getting a little irritated. “I’ve climbed it twice.”

“That’s preposterous,” the man told me, right to my face. “You’ve done no such thing. Now give me back my glasses and I’ll be on my way.” With that, he took his binoculars and stormed off.

When I turned to my girl, she could scarcely suppress a giggle. That afternoon, however, we bumped into Steve Gerberding by the side of the road鈥攁 coyote, he seemed to me, so self-confident and so inalienably cool. He generously asked if I’d been “up on the Big Stone” lately, and I was thrilled to answer in the affirmative, feeling that I had taken yet another small step down what I saw as a whole new, vastly longer, and more serious path. I even asked the same of Gerberding: “How about you? Been back up there?”

“Bunch of times,” he said. “Yeah.”

Then I asked a question I immediately regretted: “You never get tired of it, huh?”

I’m still not sure what I was asking. Will I ever tire of it? Maybe. Or, perhaps I already sensed the passion slipping away from me鈥擨 certainly haven’t been on El Cap since鈥攁nd perhaps I knew that I would never become half the climber that Gerberding was, much less a climber he might consider a peer. Maybe I was uncomfortable with this, caught in a wavering moment between one code of self-evaluation and the next, arguing it out in my head. Whatever I meant, I hinted, albeit vaguely and unintentionally, that Gerberding had made questionable use of his time in this world.

Gerberding, of course, was too gracious, or controlled, or self-contained to take the bait. “Nope,” he said, “I never do get tired of it. It’s too big.”

Dan Duane is the author of Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast, and Looking for Mo, a novel. This article is adapted from El Capitan: Historic Feats and Renegade Routes, to be published this October by Chronicle Books. Duane lives in San Francisco.

Five for All Time

A brief survey of El Capitan’s most mythic ascents and a sampling of the rock’s approximately 100 other routes, plus storied features on The Nose.

1. Salath茅 Wall
Yvon Chouinard named this 36-pitch route after his hero, John Salath茅, the Swiss-born blacksmith who pioneered big-wall climbing in America and forged the first hard-steel pitons鈥攅ven though neither Chouinard nor Salath茅 was the first to climb it. Royal Robbins, Chuck Pratt, and Tom Frost first clambered over the final headwall in 1961 and, sharing Chouinard’s high opinion of Salath茅, chose to formalize the name.

2. The Nose
In 45 days over the course of one and a half years, Warren Harding, 34 at the time, along with a changing roster of partners, placed 700 pitons and 125 bolts before reaching the summit via The Nose on November 12, 1958. Thirty-six years after this first ascent, Seattle resident Lynn Hill, 33, climbed it without mechanical aid in less than one day鈥攕till the fastest free ascent of The Nose.

3. North America Wall
Golden-era (1950s) Yosemite climbers didn’t find the loose and flaky black diorite of the southeast face as appealing as the white granite of the southwest face, so this route was not climbed until 1964, when Royal Robbins put together the best team in the Valley: Chouinard, Frost, Pratt, and himself. Named for the shape of the discolored rock, it was the first route done without fixed ropes鈥攁nd as a result raised the bar for good style.

4. Muir Wall
Shortly after Chouinard and T. M. Herbert put up this route in June 1965, Robbins chose the most dull and tiresome way to repeat it: solo, reclimbing every pitch in order to remove the pitons he’d placed minutes earlier. “I began to hate the climb,” he wrote later. Nonetheless, the nine-and-a-half-day ascent remains one of the most inspiring feats in Yosemite history.

5. Pacific Ocean Wall
Even after Jim Bridwell, Billy Westbay, John Fiske, and Fred East first summited Pacific Ocean Wall in 1975, Camp 4 rock rats considered this the biggest challenge of the decade because of the unstable belays, spotty protection, and necessity for sophisticated aid tools. Today, routes such as Wyoming Sheep Ranch, straight through the North America diorite, and nearby Lost in America are among the hardest climbs on El Cap.

CLASSIC ROUTES, CONT.
6. West Buttress
7. Mescalito
8. Sea of Dreams
9. Wyoming Sheep Ranch
10. Tangerine Trip
11. Zodiac

FEATURES ON THE NOSE
a. Sickle Ledge
b. Stoveleg Cracks
c. Dolt Tower
d. Boot Flake
e. Great Roof

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