Chuck Pratt and Royal Robbins El Cap Spire,the Salathé Wall,El Capitan,Yosemite Valley, California.(September 1961)
Once upon a time a new generation of
climbers saw that it had stumbled into Paradise. On every side there were
boulders, crags, spires, domes and walls, mostly untouched. There was even the
World's best cliff, a solid square mile of rock, and closer to the road than
Dinas Cromlech. The sun hardly ever stopped shining. This was in California in
the '50s.
The story of those explorers is well-known.
Amongst them the most driven and ambitious, which is what counts in
rock-climbing, were Royal Robbins and Warren Harding. Robbins succeeded on Half
Dome and the SaIathe Wall.
Harding got The Nose and the Leaning Tower.
Robbins was the more competitive of the two and went to considerable lengths
to show Harding and everybody else just how Harding's climbs should have been done. But the two seem
inseparable, really, and if Harding hadn't existed Robbins would have had to
invent him. Eventually Harding produced his own zany memoir, Downward Bound.
Now here is Robbins's story, as told by Pat Ament.
I'm forced to guess that Ament has great
charisma, or is especially lovable or something. He's not so good a writer as
Robbins himself, or as the boulder problemist, John Gill, each notable for
lucidity, polish, intelligence, even wit. Yet both had chosen to put their
lives in Ament's hands. Of course, a younger disciple will say nicer things
about you than you could, with propriety, say about yourself.
I've never opened a climbing biography with
greater interest. Ament feels privileged to have known and climbed with
Robbins, and who wouldn't and he conceded that his approach
is reverential. Ament is a wild, loose writer, often carried away by his
extreme enthusiasm so that the language is sometimes inflated. The reader may
judge for himself. In discussing Robbins and his influence upon others he uses
such terms and phrases as: purity of ideal; spiritual progress; maximum
personal growth; incisive mind; ideologically brilliant; the power of his
perceptions; intelligence polished to the texture of granite; and so on. These
words are immoderate and inappropriate to the sphere of play. Occasionally his
logic, too, gets itself into fixes.
The descriptions of climbs are often
surprisingly uninformative and flat. The account of the historically important
second ascent of The Nose names only two features in the course of the seven
day expedition. An outsider, I notice occasional mistakes of fact and presumably
insiders will notice many more. I get the impression that the viewpoint
is decidedly partisan and major figures outside the Robbins's circle tend to be
dismissed or patronised. Ament remarks that Harding 'had almost always kept his
resentment disguised'. That's ungracious and it's hard to see how it might be
substantiated. From his own writings and from a single casual encounter, I
can't imagine Harding as the type to weary himself with the burden of
resentment. However, I write at a distance of 10,000 miles.
I can see the difficulties Ament faced.
Robbins has a lot of climbs under his swami belt and brevity or selectivity
becomes necessary. (Indeed he made interesting ascents not even named; for
instance, the north arete of El Bisbe at Montserrat in Spain, accomplished,
surprisingly, before any British party had climbed on the mountain). And it
appears to me that he's a much more complex character than any of his great
contemporaries. He's so tightly buttoned that one suspects the presence of
stress behind the cool facade.
Despite these complaints I found the book
fascinating. It would be nice to see an objective history of Californian
climbing written by someone uninvolved, but in the meantime all rock-climbers
should read this biography. Who'd have guessed that Robbins had had such an
unsettling childhood? Or that at the age of 27 he'd still be obliged to
hitch-hike across America en route for Europe? Or that, quite recently, the
guru of American climbing would have difficulty in getting an anti-bolt article
published in American climbing magazines?
The text is greatly fortified by over 200
photographs, all in black and white, and stronger for that. They include some
professional studies of the big walls but mostly they're revealing casual shots
of climbing and people. The captions are occasionally dismaying and it will be
observed that in one or two of the portraits the hero's patience is dangerously
close to snapping. However, for me, this collection brought the era to life to
a degree unattainable by colour glossies.
Robbins and Harding ran into serious
problems. They were too successful too young. They kept soldiering on and they
produced countless magnificent climbs but none of these could have the same
impact as the first great experimental pushes into the unknown. Twelve years
after his first route on Half Dome, Robbins went back for an eight-day effort
there, and 12 years after his first route on El Cap, Harding returned for a 27
day epic. Despite all the intervening arguments on bolting, each used more
material than on his original climb. Soon, though still children really, they'd
done so much climbing that they began to feel very old. And the new experts arriving looked younger every year.
So where have all the soldiers gone? Well,
mostly they found themselves raising families, starting businesses and
searching for new interests.
Robbins turned his energies into the first descents
of rocky rivers and he joined the Modesto Rotary Club. Tom Frost became a
devout Mormon, Layton Kor a Jehovah's Witness. And one afternoon in 1983,
sitting in his kayak on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, Robbins himself
felt somewhere behind his right shoulder 'the unmistakable presence of God'.
Everybody seems to be living happily ever after.
Harold Drasdo: 1993
