Missing one (probably needs to go in the specialty department): Me and buddy sorting out gear at Ellery Lake turnout post mini-epic up Ellery Couloirs. Dude in big RV drives up, gets out. Looks at us. Looks up. Looks at us again. Looks up again. Then looks at us once more:
In pitch perfect Slim Pickens voice: "You boys gonna scale that peak?"
Climbing at Swan Slab one day, the driver of the Green Dragon said to the tourists "This is where the climbers Practice their climbing" PRACTICE?!? This is real climbing buddy! Later that day while riding my bike to the Manure Pile, I passed the bus and yelled "This is where the climbers practice riding their bikes!"
Spot on with Mt. Everest, but forgot my second bane: El Cap! (I've stuck to mostly alpine and multi-pitch sans aid up til this point, it'll happen eventually.)
Gearing up at the parking lot for Ancient Art, hiker sees California plates: "You boys climbed that El Capeetan?"
Co-workers, "How was your weekend?" - "Great, was in Yosemite climbing". "Oh neat, did you climb El Capitan?"
While in Squamish, countless times, "Oh, from California? You climbed El Cap?"
If I had a dollar for every time I've been asked if I climbed El Cap, I could buy a new rack.
I should probably suck it up, buy aiders and ascenders and just do it one of these days. Maybe I'll just rap it though, I hear that's pretty easy.
I was bouldering in Acadia NP, Maine in 2002 and everywhere we went we would get the 'What the heck are those things' in regard to our crash pads. So we just started randomly telling people our crash pads were actually for our traveling puppet show. I guess word spread quickly and about 3 days later a gaggle of kids with their parents came up to us and asked when the next show was. Sadly the only show they got was us flailing on some terrible rotten rock covered problems.
A friend told this story. He was leading something, gripped, sewing machine leg, whatever, not making much progress. A suburban couple walking by stops to watch the drama as my friend is fighting for his life. "Come on, honey, lets go. He's GONNA make it," says the husband to the wife. They were just watching to see if he was going to fall!
The best for me personally, was me following a route, and getting wigged out on the traverse crux.
It wasn't that bad, but hell, every traverse is a crux for me...
so I'm bout 30 feet off the ground, and hikers are watching me wig out while my partners are trying to give me encouragement. At long last, one of the hikers, a skinny little boy of no more than 13, yells up...
'need any help?'
HAHAHAHA, the idea of it knocked the fear out of me and I finished the crux.
I had some genuine Canadian blended whishkey this afternoon at Dad's. The wake didn't last half as long as it should. I've come home and insulted Anders. I have a Cndn. lapel pin I want to give you next LIFT, MY TEE, cus you are the best Canaduck we got here.
Sh#t, sh#t, sh#t... Is that really a pink goddam rope? One solid pink? EEW!
The following account was contained in a letter I sent Steve Grossman, who asked whether I had done any climbing with Mark Powell. He posted it in one of the Needle's Eye threads and then I think it was reposted in the thread on my Red Rock trip report. In spite of the fact that it has obviously been around, it seems like this is a good place for it too, especially since the political aside at the end seems prophetic in view of the alternate realities advanced by the recent presidential campaigns.
Although we always camped together in the Oreville Campground, I don't recall many times when I ended up climbing with Mark. In fact, the only climb I can remember was an ascent with Mark and Bob Kamps of Sandberg Peak, a preposterously named and precarious-looking pinnacle perched right at the edge of a Cathedral Spires pullout.
Probably the most memorable feature of that climb was an interaction I had with some tourists, a story which now has been told and retold, having been appropriated by others and recounted as if it had happened to them. But you twisted my arm so I'll tell it again...
Mark was leading, Bob was belaying, and I was on the ground watching. A tourist pulled up and watched Mark lead for a long time, long enough to see him place a piton or two and clip into them, and finally reach the tiny summit. After watching all this, the guy got out of his car, walked over to me, and asked, "How'd they get the cables up there?" (Mind you, he and his wife had just watched how they got the cables up there.) I was very polite, and in my best imitation of the professor I would become, I offered a careful and detailed explanation of exactly what Mark had been doing. At the end of this mini-seminar, his wife (whose size seemed to preclude an exit from the car) leaned out the window and shouted to her husband, "How'd they get the cables up there?" To which her husband replied, in tones rife with exasperation, "I don't know, I can't get a straight answer out of this guy!"
Experiences like this caused us to make a bunch of tee shirts with the legend "Pinnacle Repair Servce" on the back.
Photo by Bonnie Kamps
Bob had one; I can't remember whether Mark got one or not. These shirts were, as I had hoped, self-explanatory to most of the tourists who stopped, the clanking of iron and occasional banging of pitons only reinforcing the repairing theme. Pinnacle repair was a notion they had probably already been exposed to by postcards sold locally showing Herb Conn rappelling down George Washington's nose while on one of the Park Service's periodic missions to patch cracks in the sculpture.
The tee-shirts were more successful than I anticipated, leaving us to ponder the fact that many people are happier with a false explanation that conforms to their preconceptions than with a true explanation that does not. One cannot help but wonder, 30 odd years later, what role this phenomenon may have played in the civic and political life of our nation.
I have a buddy, (same one who was with me at Ellery Lake, upthread), who calls tourists "Griswolds." As in the Chevy Chase Vacation movies. I kind of like that. "Touron" is a bit too harsh for my taste. Griswolds are well meaning boobs who you gotta love at the end of the day. Ha ha!
Have yet to run into any Griswolds with Beverly D'Angelo class wives though! :-)
Oh wait... my wife is in that class! Maybe that means I'm Clark Griswold!
So it's dusk, my pard and I are topping out right below the South Chasm View overlook in the Black Canyon. A herd of Texans observe, with some concern. "Do you need help" etc. (as if). Then comes one I've never heard before:
While at the top of the second pitch on Black Wall, Sespe Gorge (right next to the road) - car stops to watch a bit, kid yells up "I'm so proud of you" - I quickly respond "So is my mom".
I was asked while waiting in line to buy a cup of coffee at Curry Village "Are you a dirtbag?" Ummm...sans caffeine, my brain could not come up with a sharp and witty retort of "No, are you a touron?" Instead, I just stood there wondering since when is the natural adjective for climber, dirtbag? Mind you I was clean, hair brushed and dressed reasonably and it is not like I am sooo sucky of a climber that I need to carry my rack to safely travel through Curry Village. The appropriate question for that would have been "Are you a poseur?" of course.
LS: I got heckled on the finger crack start of Nutcracker once by bunch of Mexican guys who walked over from their picnic. It was pretty funny, really. They didn't offer to help.
Comes around goes around Melissa. Last Sunday LS heckled ME as I started up a route. She didn't offer to help either. At least not then :-)
I was all, WAIT JUST A DAMN MINUTE HERE. Harassment is MY JOB damnit. I'm not supposed to be on the receiving end of it. Sheesh! I hadn't even made the first clip and both my partners were letting me have it right up the keister.
If I had a dollar for every time I've been asked if I climbed El Cap, I could buy a new rack.
I get the same thing with Half Dome. I just need to hurry up and climb Snake Dike already so that I can tell them yes (while conviently omitting that I climbed the side, not the Face).
Some woman to me after I topped out the Chief in Squamish after fourth-classing the easiest route up it, "Did you just climb up here?"
Me, "Yeah."
Her, "By yourself?"
Then her kid runs in and shouts, "He free soloed it!!!!"
Her, "......."
Also had plenty of people ask me how long it took me to climb up, if I have ever camped on the wall, etc.
When I soloed snake dike, some tourist guys at the top figured they could go down the way I came up, and started heading down there to check it out. I talked them out of it, though.
frozenwaterfalls - I always though of myself as a dirtbag, in the normal sense. At some point, it became associated more with what we're doing, than with homelessness. First one to institutionalize it was probably Fitz Cahall in the Dirtbag Diaries. It's the modern day stonemasters but also includes snowboarders, surfers, etc.
"At both ends of the social spectrum, there exists a leisure class."
This was over twenty years ago but it's real so here ya go;
I was on the Montrose side of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison checking the progress of a couple of guys climbing the Hallucinogen Wall.
It's still a multi day climb, though considerably less days than back then.
A couple drove up in an RV, and stopped, wandered around, and asked what were we looking at. After the inevitable explanations, they were silent for a while and then the wife asked...
"Are they married?" and I honestly thought for a moment that she meant were they married to each other, don't ask me why, lol. I said no, they were not married.
She said; "Well ofcourse not, what sort of wife would let her husband do that?"
I immediately said; "What sort of wife would STOP her husband from doing what he loves to do?
Even if you could, it would make him less of a man, it would turn him into a...."
Ooops, I found I was staring at her husband at that point. They left, rather hastily, I thought.
It was such a culture clash I have never forgotten it.
Here's one that's related to dirtbaggery, in a way.
I was a PSIA certified ski instructor going up the lift with a student who appeared to be about 20 but I'm no judge. He said to me; "Where do you go in the summer? Where is your home?"
I said in the summer I continue to live right here and I have two summer jobs, plus I chop all my winter wood and do a lot of hiking and climbing.
He said; "You can't live here." I said, yes I do, and so do a lot of others.
He continued to repeat that no one could live in a ski area. That his Dad said all of us live in the nearest big city (230 miles away) and commute every week.
There was no gainsaying him. He really thought every one, all of us, the builders, the painters, grocery clerks, deli owners, bus drivers and bakers, not to mention ski instructors all actually lived in the nearest big city and ran right back to it the minute the ski resort closed.
"No one lives in the mountains," he said.
I gave up. But I'll never forget that "no one lives in the mountains."
Let us know!