essay


niobe burden

Half Dome Comes Clean
- doug robinson

By 1972 the clean climbing revolution was still virtually unknown, yet it was poised on the brink of swifter success than anyone involved could have imagined. The steel pitons climbers had always used to secure themselves, and the chipping scars they made on the rock by placement and removal with a heavy hammer, were threatened alike by unobtrusive and even flimsy-looking nuts-aluminum wedges that could be lightly slotted into cracks with two fingers. A handful of climbers had gotten a bit obsessed with this new game that Royal Robbins brought back from England in 1967. It challenged us to do things more simply, but required greater awareness of the configuration of cracks, and a bolder approach. The manifesto of the movement, The Whole Natural Art of Protection, was published that year in the Chouinard Equipment catalog, alongside the newly-designed clean tools, Hexcentrics and Stoppers.

Long routes had been going clean in the Palisades for several years, but up there the fractured and blocky alpine granite took nuts easily. Yosemite, with its notoriously smooth and flared cracks, was another story. We took it as a challenge, but for a while longer carried hammers just in case. Finally in 1971 Jay Jensen and I climbed hammerless up a Grade IV, the East Buttress of Middle Cathedral Rock, and the next year we pushed the first clean grade V up the Steck-Salathe on Sentinel Rock. That left us staring at the biggest walls.

Then along came Galen Rowell's first assignment for National Geographic: cover a big wall climb in Yosemite. Galen invited Dennis Hennek and me to do the classic Northwest Face of Half Dome, and I said sure, as long as we could try to climb it clean. Dennis and I both knew that we were ready and the time had come for a hammerless ascent of a big wall. Galen, however, had a crucial assignment for his budding career to get in the can, so he suggested putting pins and hammer in the haul bag just in case.

Galen Rowell was a Chevy mechanic at the time and the proprietor of a somewhat greasy dive of a shop down on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. Once when my Volkswagen blew up near Sacramento, Galen generously drove all the way up and towed my car back to his shop. There were limits, however, to his hospitality; I did my rebuild out back, where my foreign car couldn't offend any red-blooded customers. Every spare minute Galen slipped out of the shop into the office in back, pounding away on a well-lubricated typewriter. He wrote, for instance, about one of the many thousand-mile weekends when he would appear on my doorstep at Cardinal Village up Bishop Creek for a quick bivy on his way into the mountains.

We had done some fine routes together, including The Smokestack, the first modern route on the Wheeler Crest, which featured offwidth and flaring-chimney cruxes. Looking up at the thousand-foot buttress from Round Valley, it was dwarfed by the backdrop of the 7,000-foot escarpment it lived on; we underestimated it so badly as to wear mountain boots for our first attempt. Galen tilted his shot of the attempt a wee bit too much, but that didn't get us up the moves either, and we had to come back to take it more seriously. The climb was so good that we soon did the buttress next door, Adams Rib. Today there are dozens of fine routes on the Wheeler Crest, but the pace of development has stalled. It is ironic that the Owens River Gorge, a few miles away, draws international attention for good but short sport routes packed into a slot in the ground with no view. Every year now ten thousand climbers pull over the rim of the Gorge with the Wheeler Crest full in their faces and don't even see it. As much exposed rock as Yosemite Valley, with major lines awaiting even a first attempt, and climbing fashion has shifted so much that this vast mountainside draped with granite has become effectively invisible. But I digress.

I was thinking more about driving, about Galen behind the wheel of many a Chevy. He is a fast driver. He is like most climbers in that he knows the mountain roads well, has an adrenalized urge to get places in a hurry using them, and does it just for sport. But unlike the rest, he had that shop to rebuild and tune and tinker. The result was a succession of powerful mountain cars. Add a dose of testosterone, and it's easy to see that everyone who has climbed with Galen for any length of time ends up with at least one epic tale of a badly stuck vehicle. Mine took place at 10,000 feet on the Rock Creek road. The snow was getting deeper as we climbed, and Galen had been suffering the usual beginners frustrations on skis, and... Anyway, a lot of digging ensued.

Dick Dorworth wrote some inspired words in Mountain Gazette around then about Night Driving, and it was he who captured the archetypal image of Galen at the wheel of a Chevy hurtling through Nevada at ninety per and all the while carrying on an animated discussion full face with someone in the back seat. One of the best things about traveling with Galen was that those conversations kept spilling over from climbing into a much broader world of ideas, and ranged from the place of aggression in the evolution of man, to how climbing fit into the life of the satanist/magician Aleister Crowly, to-whoa, Stop!-there's an eagle.

Sure enough, the eagle was standing on the edge of a gravel road in eastern Nevada. Galen reigned in the Chevy and backed up until we were staring at the great bird from ten feet away. It stared back, steadily. Magnificent being, it could easily have carried off a large marmot, and wasn't the least bit intimidated by a pack of humans in a big car. When it had had enough of us, it turned and stalked off, rather stiffly, into the sage. We had been summarily dismissed.

Dennis Hennek had already made the second ascent of the North American Wall by the time we met. He loved the challenge of clean climbing, and one of the early places we practiced it together was weekend forays from Ventura to Tahquitz Rock. There we made the first clean ascent of the Open Book, which had become the first 5.9 in the Americas when Royal Robbins freed it in 1952. My prototype Tube Chocks were handy in the offwidth crux. Later Dennis got the job of tearing down the movie set of Lago, which had been built near Mono Lake for a Clint Eastwood epic, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Dennis crafted together a fine little cabin from the salvaged wood. It sat in the first line of willows up from the waters edge. From the loft you could see the sunrise over the lake, then roll over and watch 'baby cakes' and coffee underway on the wood range. One day we got completely skunked on the north pillar of Mt. Goode. Almost worse than missing the climb was abandoning the name we had already picked out, 'Goodie Goodie,' from a line in The Night Climbers of Cambridge: "This climber had the interesting habit of saying 'goodie goodie' after each successful ascent." Our consolation was a superb first ascent on Cardinal Pinnacle, clean all the way, and named after a cucumber we peeled on the summit.

August 1973: The biggest aluminum steamer trunk you could imagine arrived air freight from National Geographic, and it was just bursting with Nikons, lenses, and many cases of film. Galen went to work sorting and packing camera gear for Half Dome while Dennis and I racked the hardware. On the climb I could only manage to shoot three rolls of film, which was a lot for me, and Dennis did about the same. Galen, of course, rarely emerged from behind some lens or other. In the end a Geographic editor commented that this was the smallest lot of slides they had ever picked a story from: 10,000.

The climb went "vedy" clean, including anchors constructed of nuts and runners even when there were fixed pins and bolts right in our faces. The hardest part of the protection and aid was finding alternative placements to fixed pieces that were often lodged in the best parts of the crack. The crux was clearly Dennis' lead of pitch 23, an incipient crack sprouting rurps and bashies; it would not have gone clean without prototypes of Tom Frost's wild new Crack'n Ups. In the end we did use one fixed pin, though Galen remembers it being one Dennis clipped for the pendulum in the Robbins Traverse, while I thought it was one Galen clipped for aid up in the Zig Zags.

Three pitches up the face, far enough so we figured that it would be too much trouble to go back down for them, Dennis casually mentioned to Galen that he had been rummaging through the haul bag and couldn't seem to find the pitons anywhere. Galen's only comment was that Dennis wasn't a very convincing liar.

Seven pitches up is a ledge, sloping but good sized by wall standards, where we stopped for the day. We were getting comfortable and sorting gear when Galen suddenly decided we needed a shot of bivouacking in a hammock. In a flurry he dug one out, set it up, and hopped in. I snapped a photo, and no one could tell when it came out in the Geographic that Galen was hanging just above a big ledge. What I didn't realize until much later was that Dennis was behind me, documenting the whole process. Apparently an old-maid photo editor kept this shot in the lineup right up to the final edit, leading to speculation that I might become the first white male nude in National Geographic.

A highlight of the second day was the Robbins Chimney, and right after lunch I drew the lead. Quite recently a friend overheard in Boulder, Colorado, a modern nerve-center of climbing wisdom, the opinion that "nobody climbs the Robbins Chimney, you just go around to the left." I guess that news hadn't gotten to Yosemite twenty years earlier, because I was eager for the notorious lead, though it was narrow, flaring and steepened inexorably to a runout crux. At that point I was eighty feet out with no chance of fitting any clean hardware into the flaring offwidth crack, and gulping down little waves of panic. The pitch was typical of Yosemite climbing of that era: awkwardly offwidth and completely unprotectable, with the climber making sweaty progress only inches at a time, his back against the wall and staring out over thousands of feet of lovely but quite empty space, all the while trying to maintain his cool and a few shreds of concentration, as carefree shouts from swimmers in the Merced River drift upward on every meager puff of breeze.

Higher, another notorious offwidth was completely missing from the face. Psych Flake, as it had been called on the first ascent, was 80 feet tall, only eight inches thick at its base, and detached from the face along its bottom. The route followed an offwidth crack up one edge. Legend had it that the whole flake would vibrate if struck by the heel of the hand; and legend also made it out to be a spooky lead. Then one summer not long before our climb, the first party up there for the season found it missing, just completely gone. We stared at the downsloping ledge where Psych Flake had recently rested. It was still covered with some of the sand and gravel that had lubricated the great flake's passage. Fortunately, a straight-in crack in the wall behind made an easy alternate pitch. It even had a lieback edge not far inside, hinting at future exfoliation.

Thank God Ledge, with its dramatic position just under the Visor leering over the top of the face, was named for offering a timely escape from the prospect of climbing the Visor's stacked crockery. It is exfoliating too. Recent years the crack behind Thank God Ledge is twice as wide as when we tiptoed and then shamelessly crawled across. Perhaps it will become a horizontal chimney before disappearing completely.

Chuck Pratt, who was probably the first person to walk upright across Thank God Ledge, was once coiling his rope on the summit when he slipped into one of his trademark raves. He began complaining loudly to no one in particular, or more likely addressing his monologue toward the heavens in general, commenting on the general perversity of ropes, and how they would cheerful and seemingly willful become caught under flakes, stuck in cracks at inconvenient times and distances, and generally make life miserable for the poor climber, who is minding his own business and just humbly trying to make a little vertical progress on the rocks of the world, thank you. All the while he laid on neat coils and shook out kinks in his meticulous fashion. Having finished both his soliloquy and a textbook mountaineer's coil, and having made perhaps too convincing an argument to the fates at large, he flung the coil with all his strength out over the dozens of acres of gently-rolling summit slabs. It sailed directly into a deep crack parallel to and not far back from the Northwest Face, never to be seen again. Someday, in the geological equivalent of a glacier spitting out a climber swallowed by its bergschrund centuries before, Chuck's rope will fall out of the sky into the forest that replaces the meadow that in the next hundred years will replace Mirror Lake.

Which reminds me of a geological interest sign along the Tioga Road that announces "Exfoliating Granite." That makes the process sound so immediate, that every time I see it I'm tempted to screech to a stop and watch for it to happen. On the other hand, after a few decades of seeing the walls in the Valley change, after hiking over freshly deposited talus beneath Sentinel, the Three Brothers, Glacier Point Apron, and Elephant Rock as well as Half Dome, I realize that it is a relatively immediate process. With all that exfoliation going on, climbing the face of Half Dome begins to resemble a game of 'flakes and ladders.'

Doug Robinson is a climber and writer living in Aptos, California. Doug and climbers such as Royal Robbins, Yvon Chouinard, Tom Frost, Dennis Hennek, and Jay Jensen inspired and created modern, clean climbing as we know it. This essay originaly appeared in Doug's book A Night on the Ground, A Day in the Open. To climb with Doug: movingoverstone.com