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TripL7
Trad climber
'dago
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Nov 14, 2009 - 08:25pm PT
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Doug!
I am glad you chose the 'Eastside' or perhaps it chose you, whatever, we are all benefactors.
Congratulations, and thanks for all your contributions!
Trip~
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Nov 14, 2009 - 09:11pm PT
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Hey Trip,
I was 15 when I stumbled onto the Eastside. I'd been working the West for years -- actually for an even decade starting with summers camped right on the shore of Tenaya Lake when there was still a campground by the outlet. A little older, after hiking the Sierra Camp loop with my folks -- Vogelsang, Merced Lake, Glen Aulin, where you could stay in tent cabins just like Curry -- I went off to Boy Scout Camp Oljato on Huntington Lake and learned to backpack.
I loved the self-sufficiency carrying me deeper into the Sierra. Adventure with pack frames. Evolution Valley -- now we're getting out there! I scrambled up a steep gully on the north side of Mt. Mendel one day. It didn't have too much ice, but my Dad got pretty concerned. So the next day I went up over easier talus to Lamarck Col.
And there it was. I had no name for Eastside. In fact it had never occurred to me that the Sierra might end, and there would be desert beyond. It was all so amazing! I stared and stared.
That was 1960. I was sitting astride the Sierra Crest for the very first time on a corner of the Mt. Goddard Quadrangle. If you had told me that day that in six years I'd be guiding those Palisades peaks I could see right down the range, or that in nine years I would move into a cabin just down there along Bishop Creek -- that I'd actually live on the edge of this map -- and start bouldering in the Buttermilk a little ways beyond?
Shut Up!
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TripL7
Trad climber
'dago
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Nov 14, 2009 - 10:18pm PT
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Doug- "Shut Up!".
Please don't, you have so much to share. What an incredible story. I could feel the pull, up...up...places I can only dream of now. Continue to take us there Doug...you have lived our dreams.
Trip~
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JOEY.F
Social climber
sebastopol
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Nov 14, 2009 - 11:06pm PT
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In the midst of a great one
At Facelift 09
Didn't quite realize
How lucky was I!
Yerian, too, said Hello, how are you?
Found out later just exactly who I was talking to.
Congratultions, Doug!
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Sport climber
Will know soon
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Nov 15, 2009 - 01:25am PT
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Hi Joey, Hope all is well. Great to spend so much time with you at the Lift this year.
My point exactly. Truly cool gifted people are so fun to be with and real and their presence enriches. Why, cause it ain't "all about them." imho, lynnie
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JOEY.F
Social climber
sebastopol
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Nov 15, 2009 - 01:40am PT
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Right on Lynne,
so cool, right place, right time,
Lucky me, lucky us.
Yeah!
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Reilly
Mountain climber
Monrovia, CA
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Nov 15, 2009 - 01:52am PT
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Wow, my first 'alpine' experience was on Mendel also! I was 13 or 14 and on my first real backpacking trip too. We camped at the base of Mendel. The old guys, in their 30's, took a nap. I looked up at the west shoulder of Mendel and went for it not knowing nothing. I got pretty far up it before reason kicked in.
Keep on keepin' on Doug! You're an inspiration.
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TripL7
Trad climber
'dago
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Nov 15, 2009 - 02:19am PT
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Doug- "It was all so amazing, I stared and stared".
It sounds like you had wonderful parents! I was dieing to get into a boyscout troop, finally when I turned thirteen we moved from San Diego to SLC, Utah. And I joined a scout troop there. Took two trips into the High Uintas and the East Fork of the Bear River. To me, it was a dream come true. Nothing like the Sierra though.
I remember seeing a movie of a family on a section of the Muir trail following it into the Valley. I was in second grade. I sat there in awe, I was viewing paradise. I lived in New York then it was 1957. I don't have the words to describe the beauty and the wonder. I'll borrow your words to use here again "It was all so amazing, I stared and stared." That's when the seed was planted.
Thanks Again.
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MW
Mountain climber
Far away
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Nov 15, 2009 - 04:47am PT
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Congratulations, Doug. Well deserved. (And probably long overdue.) You don't know me, but we met once at one of your book signings for "A Night on the Ground ..." Can't tell how much I've cherished it over the years.
Your last post confirmed something only hinted at in the book: Camp Oljato.
I also learned to backpack up there and eventually led trips (in the 80s we called it the "Keyhole trek") over Alpine Col.
Proud to have walked in your footsteps.
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Nov 15, 2009 - 07:55am PT
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John -- I'd forgotten all about you towing my red Honda into Bishop and picking up Hearst. Couldn't be the drugs... I do remember steering my car behind you, actually, tied onto your bumper with an old chunk of 9 mm rope. I think it was a piece left over from Half Dome, the rope I'd led the Robbins Chimney on. Stout, one of my best leads ever. I was amazed how tough that retired rope was and started testing it, yawing back and forth across the empty back road and getting on the brakes. Frayed it some more, but it wouldn't break. Thanks for the lift. I owe ya. And I appreciate you coming all the way to my show last week.
As to my parents, I didn't appreciate their special beings until later. You grow up, and whatever it is, that's normal. So camping on the shore of Tenaya Lake and building rafts to pole out to those shiny rock islands was just what kids did. Lucky me -- the Sierra had me totally spoiled right from the start.
My Dad first went to Tuolumne in 1927. He drove his new Model A up the coast road from Santa Monica to go to Stanford -- could barely make it that far in a day then. In his last year or so I pulled off of 101 with him, where it climbs over the Santa Lucias just north of San Luis Obispo. There's a chunk of the old road there, narrow 2-lane cement, and I taped him telling the story of that drive. Anyway, once he hit NorCal he started exploring the Meadows. Barely more than 20 years later, after a stint in Europe during WWII spying on German airplane factories (he was an aeronautical engineer), he was driving me over the same old Tioga Road, bumping through the forest and right across granite slabs, to my first glimpse of the high country.
I had to start small, on the narrow strip of beach and throwing wood chips into the campfire, but having that horizon of domes beyond, and hiking around the lake, calibrated my sense of distance and possibility. The Sierra was already inviting me into motion.
My Mom, whose life didn't run out until this September, was the poet. I have her to thank for kneeling in the woods to marvel at tiny details, and expressing their surprise. Her father had been a canoe guide in the North Woods of Wisconsin, a small town postmanster and an early conservationist. A lot of threads to come together on the bright sand by Tenaya Lake.
Galen Rowell once lamented that if I'd been a little more ambitious I would have gotten a lot more FAs. But that was his hangup. I'm built to contemplate, and trained to it too. My Dad sat reading, propped against a boulder and looking up at the sparkle off the lake. I've done my share of tearing around the Sierra, measuring passes anaerobically, and I'm still addicted to that. But alongside it there's a far quieter, more reflective side poised on the edge of the alpine zone, and I'm equally thrilled to linger there too.
Serial replies here; nice conversation about growing into respnding to a pretty special range of mountains.
By the way, I found out much later that I had barely missed meeting Alan Bard at Tenaya. It seemed his family camped there two weeks before mine every year.
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Nov 15, 2009 - 08:35am PT
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Yeah Reilly, we must have been thinking the same thing up on Darwin Bench. The gully I headed up was the first one around to the north from that west ridge of Mendel. At least that's what I recall. Have to go take another look, eh? I'd like to check out more of that ridge in general, now that Peter Croft raves so much about it being the best high traverse in the Sierra.
The "Keyhole Trek" from Camp Oljato -- that actually went over Alpine Col -- was the one I started on those early trips pulling over timberline. A first time to try out the alpine zone, to get off trail and explore, to forge my way across country, though of course both those notches in the Glacier Divide were laid out in the guidebook. It was my first experience of guiding too, of leading a trip, even though I had my Dad for a backup, and encouragement from Mike Meixner, the Assistant Director of the camp. It was pretty heady to be leading a 6-day backpack trip at 15. Thought I was hot stuff.
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Nov 15, 2009 - 09:02am PT
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Trip -- I never got too far into those mountains behind SLC, though from photos and from the enthusiasm of Tom Frost I have projects in mind up there. What's that beautiful alpine basin, the one with the small but finely formed granite peaks? Lone Peak Cirque -- that's it!
Sheridan Anderson used to talk about growing up in the country just north of there. East of Ogden, I think. His uncle took him fishing out there. Maybe I shouldn't even say so, but you know the passage at the end of the Curtis Creek Manifesto -- a book that many who know enough to judge call the finest fly fishing manual ever -- Sheridan raises the question, "Is there really a Curtis Creek? Quite possibly, my darlings, quite possibly..." Well, this is not only off topic but the wrong forum for that. But perhaps it's OK at this great distance to say that Sheridan implied that Curtis Creek actually flowed through those mountains.
I told the story last week at my slideshow of how Sheridan brought me to Bishop in 1966, when I drove there with my gear crammed into an MG Midget. Somewhere I have a slide I couldn't find for that, of camping with him at Blue Lake up the Middle Fork of Bishop Creek. Sheridan introduced me to Smoke Blanchard that summer, and that's how I got to meet the curmudgeon surfing on Smoke's couch, Norman Clyde.
Here's Sheridan a year or two before that, exulting on the Royal Arches. If you look over his shoulder, there's the Rotten Log.
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
San Francisco, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 15, 2009 - 10:31am PT
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Here, this is the best I can do with that itty bitty file:
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Nov 15, 2009 - 11:22am PT
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Oh Peter, thanks! You cheered it up a lot. Didn't realize the file was tiny; I have recently re-located the slide, so I'll scan it up big and then you can really work it over. Sheridan deserves no less.
I have an audio tape he made just a few days before he died. Sheridan knew he was going to die, though I was far too deep in denial to hear him at the time. We went out for supplies, which besides a blank cassette included a fifth of Jack Daniels and a case of beer. This was in Vegas right after one of the winter trade shows when the outdoor industry used to pigyback on the Ski Industries of America at the Convention Center.
Sheridan was living with his granny in a walkup apartment up on Charleston, to "take care of her." She was pushing a hundred, but it was an open question who was taking care of whom. He pulled his boom box out onto the formica kitchen table, uncapped the Jack, pressed record and got down to business. Granny was watching wrestling in the next room. He knew I would be worthless at remembering accurately what he had to say, but I was the only friend who showed up so he was taking no chances. I did not do my share of the talking or the drinking that night, but I still have the tape and one of these days we can transcribe it and get a really rip-roaring Sheridan thread going.
I have plenty of other Sheridan artwork -- original and unpublished -- to share too. Some of it a unique form of "comic chess" played by passing the drawing board back and forth with other artists at his flat on Potrero Hill.
I never got to accompany Sheridan to what seemed to be his main social outlet those final years living with his granny -- a strip club. He kept suggesting it, and I guess I was too broke and too prudish to loosen up and see that it would have been a rare chance to watch him work a pretty interesting venue. Think Toulouse-Lautrec at the Follies Bergere, only scaled up to Sheridan's frame, ported out to six-four and well-over-300-pounds. He would regularly take his sketch pad into a bar and use it to introduce himself to the whole room. And not just the Mountain Room in the Valley, either. In the Sixties I'd seen Sheridan stride into many a North Beach hang, and the Blarney Stone in Cow Hollow that had killer fish-n-chips right out back. And when I returned, to work at the startup of Outside Magazine in '77, Sheridan was still there and came up to the office and dragged the whole staff, Hearst included, either across Third Street or to his then favorite Irish Pub out on California Street in the early Avenues. It changed the entire evening for everyone present. Can you say raconteur?
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Jim Herrington
Mountain climber
New York, NY
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Nov 15, 2009 - 11:48am PT
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We're listening... just keep talking...
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Nov 15, 2009 - 12:20pm PT
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OK Jim, I'll try...but first I gotta go help my daughter with her homework.
Hey, can I use your portrait for my little emblem or persona or -- what do the kids call those things on My Space Out anyway -- an Avatar?
Kind of a cool name, actually, with mythic overtones. I like the way yours looks, though they are so damn small that nearly everyone else's little picture is too tiny to make out what the hell mood they're intending.
Peter's new one is good, though.
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
San Francisco, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 15, 2009 - 03:11pm PT
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Tami, oh Dougie has tons on Sheridan--- as he says upriver here, images too. It will take some time plus Dougie is really busy with a whole bunch of projects currently.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C. Small wall climber.
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Nov 15, 2009 - 03:14pm PT
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Doug, if you want to see people's avatar photo/icon/thingie in somewhat larger size, simply double click on the image itself, or click on the person's 'name' under the image - i.e. click on the "DR". Either way, you get something about four times the size of the original.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Nov 15, 2009 - 03:22pm PT
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Doug,
Since this is a literary thread, would you care to share the first piece that you wrote which truly pleased you?
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TripL7
Trad climber
'dago
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Nov 15, 2009 - 04:40pm PT
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Doug, I had the opportunity to meet you once, or at least introduce my self. Perhaps you will remember. Actually, it was one of those situations best forgotten, but ....
Don't recall the year maybe late '70's. Mammoth, cold winter night. There were probably a hundred better things to do, yet I find myself leaning against a rail overlooking a barren dance floor. Occasionally one or two couples would shuffle out onto the floor to dance to what I supposed was their favorite song.
I was about to leave when suddenly the Millis, wearing his over-sized tattered duvet, with his coveted Peruvian-wool hat(ear flaps and long toggles) walks in, strolls over and joins me at the rail. We make eye contact, he takes a deep breath and looks as though he is about to say something, then suddenly swings his head around to his right and there you were. His way of bringing your presence to my attention.
Granted, the music would limit an introduction to a nod or a handshake, but Millis saw the opportunity to yank my chain a little I suppose. We had discussed many of your adventures and he new I would be honored to meet you. But Millis, for the moment, was milking the situation. Turning another dull winter night into one to be remembered.
So, as the three of us stood there, occasionally Millis would turn his head and open his mouth as if he was about to include me in the conversation, then swing his head back over to you. Classic Millis, never one to let the opportunity for some good natured fun get away.
And then suddenly it happened, the inexcusable. A David Bowie song comes on. The realy kinky one, about two or three guys dancing together. And the next thing you know, three or four guys spring-up from out of nowhere, onto the empty dance floor. And start some utterly disgusting, slow grinding dance. A statement I suppose, about their repressed manhood or something.
Millis turns towards me and looks like he is going to puke. I was about to join him, when he let's out a loud hack and simply spits on the floor(more classic Millis). As the song was nearing its end, I noticed the two of you had disappeared, off into the Sierra night. Determining it was the sensible thing to do, I followed suite.
I will gladly delete this story(I think it's the sensible thing to do). It was the only time we came in contact, and I was wondering if you remember the evening although we never met? I am sure you and Millis had plenty of adventures, it just turned out that this was were our paths briefly crossed. Wish it had been more enjoyable surroundings.
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