Pilgrims of the Vertical

Yosemite Rock Climbers and Nature at Risk

Joseph E. Taylor III

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780674257108
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Few things suggest rugged individualism as powerfully as the solitary mountaineer testing his or her mettle in the rough country. Yet the long history of wilderness sport complicates this image. In this surprising story of the premier rock-climbing venue in the United States, Pilgrims of the Vertical offers insight into the nature of wilderness adventure.From the founding era of mountain climbing in Victorian Europe to present-day climbing gyms, Pilgrims of the Vertical shows how ever-changing alignments of nature, technology, gender, sport, and consumer culture have shaped climbers' relations to nature and to each other. Even in Yosemite Valley, a premier site for sporting and environmental culture since the 1800s, elite athletes cannot be entirely disentangled from the many men and women seeking recreation and camaraderie.Following these climbers through time, Joseph Taylor uncovers lessons about the relationship of individuals to groups, sport to society, and nature to culture. He also shows how social and historical contexts influenced adventurers' choices and experiences, and why some became leading environmental activists—including John Muir, David Brower, and Yvon Chouinard. In a world in which wild nature is increasingly associated with play, and virtuous play with environmental values, Pilgrims of the Vertical explains when and how these ideas developed, and why they became intimately linked to consumerism.

1. ADVENTURERS

I have a low opinion of books; they are but piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention. . . . No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to know these mountains.

—JOHN MUIR

The March air is warm. Soft breezes carry a luxuriant aroma of new growth up Yosemite’s cliffs. The waterfalls thunder. A blue sky dazzles. I am surrounded by the sensations of spring. By any metric this is a glorious day, but I don’t give a damn. All I can think right now is, I’m in trouble. I am spread-eagled across an intersection of two vertical faces of rock, and enough adrenalin surges through me to resuscitate the dead because I am about to fall. My right foot tiptoes on a nubbin, my right hand grasps at nothing, my left hand is slipping from a crack, and my left foot is sliding off an alleged bulge. The bucket hold that will save me remains twenty inches beyond reach. Worse still, I am losing focus. This is partly because I am berating myself for growing old and out of shape, partly because my partner is saying distracting words of encouragement. It is the wrong tactic. He should be barking like a football coach, telling me I’m not worthy or something, anything to make me angry enough to focus. Instead, I supply the insult: Move it, fat man.

I am trying to climb a popular route called Nutcracker Suite, but I am stuck on the route’s hardest, most committing move, the crux upon which everything turns. The longer I hang here the more certain failure becomes. I must go for it. I adjust my left foot and lie to myself that it is fine. I shove my left hand into the crack and clench to increase friction. Huh? Not sure I can extract that. Then I make the move, but as my fingers touch the bucket, my left foot peels and two sounds follow: first “splat,” then “phhhlbbbbsss.” I have the hold, but it is not much of an improvement. I now hang from my right hand, my face plastered to the rock, breathing like a rhino. The sole consolation is that my partner sees only the four fingers of my right hand. The rest of me remains below the ledge and out of sight. I retrieve my left hand, now bleeding freely, and reach up. With both hands I treat the bucket like a pull-up bar and lean back to create more friction for my feet. Pretend for a moment you know what you are doing. I walk my feet up and over the lip, return my partner’s smile, and impassively scan the terrain ahead. Outside, I’m a picture of cool, as if this was casual; inside my brain a confused party has erupted: Yeah! Ow! Yeah! Ow! Yeah! Ow! . . .

Looking back on that moment is a double-edged experience. I had completed my hardest climb in fifteen years, and a warm glow followed me the rest of the day. That feeling still comes back like a friendly March wind, but it is bittersweet. Even then I was feeling ever more distant from climbing and the other outdoor pursuits that had shaped me. Some changes were physical. After decades on mountains and oceans, my body was a wreck. My ankles were horror shows, my elbows had chronic tendonitis, and my right shoulder needed a surgery that has ended my ability to make that crux pull. Other changes were social. Family and friends were complicating the calculus of my life. Married and planning a kid, the risks I took when single no longer made sense. I already knew the technical climbs planned for the coming weeks would be my last, so as I scrambled toward the final belay, I knew I was nearing the end of the adventure in a larger sense.

I want to be clear. Ending my days as a rock climber was no small thing. I had read the literature since the mid-1960s. As a boy I consumed issues of Ascent in a sitting and pawed copies of Mountain and Climbing in local gear shops. I followed debates about bolts, competition, publicity, and conservation. Preserving adventure, maintaining fairness, and protecting nature resonated strongly. Even then I knew this had been the sport’s constant thread. The ability to discover new ground, much like an explorer beyond the frontier, was a sublime aesthetic experience, and being first to ascend a route by fair means was considered the epitome of sporting performance. For decades my ideal of adventure had been defined by Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna and Thomas Hornbein’s Everest: The West Ridge, two classics about men venturing beyond the known on difficult terrain. I dreamt of vast walls and desperate moments, and I yearned to be in one of those dramatic photos that garnished climbing journals. I wanted, as Patrick McManus wrote of his own youthful fantasies, a great epic in which I would “face great hardship and overcome terrible obstacles.” For a very long time I wanted to be an adventurer.¹

Thus ceasing to be a “pilgrim of the vertical,” to use Royal Robbins’s phrase, represented a massive psychic transition. My very presence in Yosemite was less to climb than to research how people have related to nature through sport. Few people believe that modern society has “been seriously affected by the small band of visionaries climbing has produced.” Even the Victorian climber Leslie Stephen admitted that “when history comes to pronounce a final judgment upon the men of the time, it won’t put mountain-climbing on a level with patriotism, or even with excellence in the fine arts.” I disagree. Like the historian Maurice Isserman, I see climbers as “products of their own eras; the way they climb, and the way they feel about climbing, can help map a larger cultural, political, and social terrain.” Revisiting the books and essays of my youth confirmed this. It no longer made sense to think of climbing, or surfing and skiing for that matter, as “an individual sport” in which athletes escaped “the formless tangle of sounds that distinguish life in the city” for a timeless, noncompetitive “communion with nature.” Mountaineers have been narrating their adventures for audiences since the late 1700s, and their exploits, like those of other outdoor sports, have been part of a prominent conversation about how people should interact with nature.²

In other words, outdoor sports were always social activities, and many athletes went on to influence environmental and social politics across the planet. The question is why. The answers are not simple, and they force us to adjust our thinking. A pastime long considered escapism was actually intensely engaged with the broader world. But this raises another issue. While it is always preferable to let historical actors speak for themselves, the past has rarely been as simple as athletes portrayed it. Imbedded in their stories are lessons about the relationship of individuals to groups, sport to society, and nature to culture. These bonds are not transparent, however, nor were climbers eager to examine the complicating details of their lives. Geoffrey Winthrop Young once said that each adventure was idiosyncratic to the individual, yet Young had a complicated sexuality and shied from “the relationship called into being by the meeting of characteristics in ourselves” when it came to himself. Similarly, Warren Harding admitted that he did not want to think “deep and heavy when it’s deep and heavy,” yet he out-debated an entire generation of moralists about the balance between the individual and the community. We cannot simply rely on athletes themselves to tease apart the complexities of their avocations. That requires a different perspective and methodology. Thus I read this literature not as a climber but as a historian, and I am less concerned with recounting great deeds than telling a story about what climbers’ stories reveal. They have played many games, with many goals, and created many, ever-shifting ways of relating to nature across time and space.³

Although I cannot match the authenticity or drama of a first-person account—those who lived adventures will always tell their stories better, and John Muir was right that “word making” cannot fully capture the sublimity of nature—I can place stories in context to illustrate the connections between climbers and their times, and I can do this more dispassionately than people whose identities remain intrinsically bound to their play. Moreover and unlike Muir, who was actually a prolific writer of books, I have a high opinion of writing. Climbers’ words are fascinating and illuminating, albeit not always in the ways intended. Thus this is a different sort of an adventure: it is an intellectual quest, and I am a peculiar sort of guide—an academic historian. So let’s just get this out of the way as well. Although I used to climb, that is not the basis of my expertise. I have trained not with pull-ups and boulders but with reading and that most precious resource nowadays: time. I have pored over texts in libraries and archives around North America. I have ruminated for years, and I am sure Yosemite’s pilgrims of the vertical have much to teach us about nature, sport, and culture.⁴

To draw out these lessons, we need to consider not only the thrilling feats but the contexts and contingencies. We need to pay attention as people ventured into the wild but also as they returned to society, because recreation was inextricably linked to identity. The tales adventurers told were partly about who they thought they were. For centuries the mere possession of leisure was exceptional, and each form of play helped further distinguish recreationalists from their cohort and other classes. Activities such as tourism, which emphasized visual senses, produced meanings distinct from games requiring physical exertion. Participants of each pastime were deeply invested in these distinctions. Play was about fun and about social positioning. Different games emerged across society, each reflecting the peculiar talents and resources of communities. One familiar example is golf. Those who played at country clubs cultivated different contacts and status than those at public courses or driving ranges. Similarly, sports like mountaineering appealed in part because they enabled athletes to distinguish themselves in a world of expanding leisure. Ascending distant peaks offered “maximum distinction” by “simultaneously mastering one’s own body and a nature inaccessible to the many,” or as Leslie Stephen put it, “Mountain scenery is the antithesis not so much of the plains as of the commonplace.” For Dorothy Pilley Richards climbing offered “a compassable world with classic boundaries to it, something you could belong to as you cannot to an expanding universe.” Rather than an escape, these sports were forms of belonging and even conformity.⁵

This is a key point. Sports were not only activities but contexts. To climb well meant disciplining oneself to rules that, while unwritten, were clear to participants. Before I could try Nutcracker Suite, I had to internalize Royal Robbins’s account of his first ascent as an ethos of adventure. He pioneered the route in 1967 to demonstrate that passive protection was safe. Using only hands and feet to move upward—what climbers call “free climbing”—he refused to hammer metal pitons into cracks, instead inserting small wedges, called artificial chocks, and linking them to his safety rope with loops of cord and carabiners. While these “nuts” are now standard tools, many viewed them then as edgy, even irresponsible. In the event of a fall, Robbins’s partner would have wrapped the rope around her waist—a body belay—to create enough friction to hold the fall, but it was an open question whether chocks could hold such forces. If they had failed, Robbins might have fallen twice the distance from himself to his belayer or, worse yet, hit a ledge. He took a calculated risk. He was an elite, by which I mean someone who climbed in a self-consciously didactic manner, and Nutcracker Suite was his attempt to redefine the game. Robbins knew that sporting culture disciplined climbers to abide by the standards of a first ascent. This is why I had to equal Robbins’s style. I had to climb using only hands and feet, and place only the technologies Robbins had used, or I had to abstain. Put another way, sport structured my behavior. The freedom of the hills, to quote a famous book, meant submitting to a lot of rules.⁶

These were some of the ways that sport influenced how people interacted with nature. Robbins did not invent this culture. He merely inherited and refined a set of historical practices. To comprehend the beliefs guiding him and others, we must examine the sport’s roots. We have to begin not in Yosemite but in London’s Alpine Club, consider when the sport was founded and by whom, and how it evolved and came to North America. This is the only way to understand Yosemite climbers’ peculiar ideas about technology, style, competition, and publicity, because none were home grown. All were well established by the time technical climbing reached the Sierra Nevada in 1930. By then climbing was already eighty years old with considerable cultural inertia. Mastering its logic will lead us to its basic assumptions. And as surely as we must study the Victorians, we must also attend to the Sierra Club. The members who brought technical climbing to Yosemite honored the sport’s history and culture, yet they reshaped the rules to suit their own social and environmental contexts. These innovations later framed the options for Robbins’s, my, and later generations, but each cohort also further refined the game to accommodate new techniques, technologies, and motives. This is why sport must be considered in a historical context.⁷

The same holds for the social and cultural contexts in which climbing developed. As a climber, I knew my pastime offered intoxicating rewards, both in the endorphins that coursed through my body and in the empowerment that came from mastering vertical nature and my inner self. Hanging there at the crux of Nutcracker Suite, I knew that more than my body would be bruised by a fall because this was never simply between me and nature. Climbing was part of how I identified myself, and my sporting labors were how I staked claims to nature. As a scholar I know my actions flowed from a gendered code that was also historical.⁸ Sport grew popular in the nineteenth century as a way to develop manly habits, what William James called the “moral equivalent of war.” Climbing’s rules were developed by upper-middling Victorians who borrowed aristocratic traditions of chivalrous masculinity to create a tempering contest with nature. That game has now attracted young men for 150 years. As Edward Whymper wrote, “We who go mountain-scrambling have constantly set before us the superiority of fixed purposes or perseverance to brute force. . . . we know that where there’s a will there’s a way; and we come back to our daily occupations better fitted to fight the battle of life, . . . strengthened and cheered by the recollection of past labours, and by the memories of victories gained in other fields.” A century later, Robbins remarked, “I think most of us who are climbers recognize that we have a deep-seated need for some sort of battle as part of our lives.” Rarely was climbing simply about getting to the top.⁹

Social and cultural contexts are critical for understanding how the sport evolved, what participants thought they were doing, and why they cared. Consider the sexual and imperial connotations of being first. Nineteenth-century mountaineers saw nature as “sensuous and feminine” and competed for her “virgin” summits. Edward Whymper likened the Aiguille de Trélatête to “a beautiful coquette,” and Simon Beisheuvel called climbers’ conquests “a unique consummation.” When John Tyndall “pressed the very highest snowflake” of the Weisshorn, he declared its “prestige . . . forever gone.” Whymper agreed. Although he, too, had lusted after the virgin summit, once Tyndall defiled it “My interest . . . abated.” Men’s gendered and sexualized language sometimes went over the top, yet women occasionally expressed remarkably similar attitudes. Nearly eighty years later, Ruth Dyar Mendenhall wrote that standing atop Monument Peak, “where no man-ever-had stood before . . . was our Matterhorn.” If some sexualized these feats, others saw them no less as conquests. Mendenhall described first ascents as “the acme of most climbers’ dreams—and sort of a last frontier in a well explored civilized world.” Men could experience mountain sport differently from women, and for both gender was expresse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Adventurers
• 2 Victorians
• 3 Pioneers
• 4 Members
• 5 Soldiers
• 6 Individualists
• 7 Experientialists
• 8 Moralists
• 9 Entrepreneurs
• 10 Dirtbags
• 11 Traditionalists
• 12 Consumers
• 13 Survivors
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Map and Illustration Credits
• Index