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Off White
climber
Tenino, WA
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Topic Author's Original Post - Dec 13, 2015 - 03:28pm PT
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Obituary
His book, We Aspired - The Last Innocent Americans is a brilliant glimpse into life in the Tetons in the 60's, including a major rescue on the N Face of the Grand. He was a great faculty member at The Evergreen State College and a very good man, and he had no small impact on North American mountaineering.
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SteveW
Trad climber
The state of confusion
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Dec 13, 2015 - 04:00pm PT
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My condolences to Pete's family and friends.
Got to do the West Rib (but didn't summit) of Denali
in 2003--a grand route for sure.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 13, 2015 - 04:10pm PT
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My condolences to his friends and family too.
Pretty amazing folks that you had around at Evergreen College while you were in school there Off.
Another indelible climbing personality has stepped into the next adventure.
Rest in Peace good sir.
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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Dec 13, 2015 - 04:14pm PT
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Oh man. He was an inspiration.
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TomKimbrough
Social climber
Salt Lake City
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Dec 13, 2015 - 04:31pm PT
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I signed out with him many times in the mid '60.
He always gave excellent advice in the old Jenny Lake Ranger Station.
I did get to climb with him in Little Cottonwood back when his book first came out.
A fine man!
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Fritz
Trad climber
Choss Creek, ID
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Dec 13, 2015 - 04:42pm PT
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Condolences to his friends and family.
I read his fine book a few years back and gained an appreciation of his humor and mountain adventures, but unfortunately never got to meet him.
Another of the few remaining "last of their kind."
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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Dec 13, 2015 - 04:57pm PT
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Like Tom, I signed out with him many times in the mid-sixties. And ended up on a big rescue on the Grand with him once, having been drafted into the NPS on the Lower Saddle when it became evident that additional fit personnel were needed.
I feel a great sense of loss: Pete was a penetrating chronicler of a truly bygone era, and many of his contemporaries, Jake Breitenbach, Barry Corbet, Willi Unsoeld, and Leigh Ortenburger have already met untimely ends. With the recent passing of Doug Tompkins, the curtain seems, more than ever, to be descending on the final act of a generation.
I've been trying for years to fully understand what Sinclair meant by the title of his book, We Aspired---The Last Innocent Americans, since I've always felt that age-wise, I belonged to that cohort and have wanted to know exactly what "last" and "innocent" really meant. I think it was more than
...we were trying to live according to the heroic virtues: courage, friendship, self-possession, piety toward the gods of nature, and loyalty to each other and to a code of behaviour, while competing to achieve the highest standards of performance we could aspire to,
but never really figured out anything deeper.
Pete's book was also about a climber coming to grips, decisively, with the end of his climbing days, another theme of some interest to those of us who are still soldiering on as well as those who have hung up their spurs.
The economy and thoughtfulness of his writing and his ability to invest the carefully-observed vignette with profound metaphorical significance makes his book a special document in the archives of climbing lore. Pete was a keeper of memories. Now it is up to others to carry on.
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bvb
Social climber
flagstaff arizona
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Dec 13, 2015 - 05:11pm PT
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Oh, that subtitle: The Last Innocent Americans. He lived long and well.
Twilly did an independent study contract with Sinclair one year that had Twill reading I think it was 80 books in a single quarter. I always meant to find out more about that! I re-read We Aspired every few years; in addition to the narrative it offers on Sinclair's early life, it is required reading for any student of the National Park Service's evolution from a tiny, heart-on-sleeve, seat-of-the-pants Federal agency into the windowless monolithic bureaucracy it has become. Everything Horace Albright - and later, Sinclair -- warned us of has come to pass. I'm very surprised that his passing has not received any significant attention.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Dec 13, 2015 - 10:02pm PT
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I too remember signing out with Pete at the Climbing Ranger Station at Jenny Lake in the late 1950s and early 1960s, also bouldering a bit with him at the local rocks. When I think of those days his image comes quickly - and fondly - to mind.
He ate lots of spaghetti, which he shared with me on a few cold and rainy summer days. And he would loan out some pretty entertaining paperbacks he kept at the ranger station!
RIP, Pete.
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SalNichols
Big Wall climber
Richmond, CA
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Dec 13, 2015 - 11:40pm PT
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@rgold, you left out one of the great historians of the Tetons, Leigh Ortenburger.
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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Dec 14, 2015 - 02:53am PT
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You're right; I've edited my note to include Ortenburger. I was thinking at the time of people killed in the mountains, and also Ortenburger was a bit older (I think about six years older than Sinclair), but Ortenburger was certainly one of Sinclair's important contemporaries.
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Bad Climber
climber
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Dec 14, 2015 - 06:08am PT
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Condolences on this man's departure. I was unfamiliar with him, but his book sounds excellent, and I'll honor his memory by giving it a read, if it's still available. Only climbed once in the Tetons, back in the early '80s.
BAd
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Claw Fang
Ice climber
High Falls, New York
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Dec 14, 2015 - 09:01am PT
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Pete was the Ultimate cool dude climbing ranger - he and buddy Stirling Neal established the archetype that all future climbing rangers should follow. So many rabid hours spent at the Jenny Lake Ranger Station. Belatedly (about 8 years ago) I read his "We Aspired ..." book which brought back so many great memories and fortunately, after being re-in-aspired , I managed to reach him on the phone and we chatted for a while.
It is worth pointing out that Pete probably knew and understood Gary Hemming better than anybody.
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bvb
Social climber
flagstaff arizona
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Dec 14, 2015 - 12:23pm PT
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and I'll honor his memory by giving it a read, if it's still available.
Oh, yes, it's very much available. Although the press runs have been small, it's in the third or fourth printing of it's second edition. The current edition looks very different from my battered dog-eared first edition copy. Utah State University press as of FE in 1993. Amazon has it, of course, in it's Velociraptor distribution clutches.
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Wick
Trad climber
NY
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Dec 14, 2015 - 03:18pm PT
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Richard, sorry to hear, seems like the passing of acquaintances and friends and close friends are happening more and more as we age-perfectly understandable but all sad news just the same.
I remember being in the Tetons in 1966 with Hudson, Suhl, Leemets, Gran, DeMaria, Dorothy Herchland, Carey and others who's names I wish I could remember. We started a camp fire and keep throwing on larger and larger logs till flames were roaring up 75 feet or so, the flames were so high they could be seen from the main road-the first ranger came to us in fits of rage and panic, demanding we put it out-he left us babbling to himself after we wouldn't even acknowledge him being there. He went to get Pete, when Sinclair finally arrived, the first thing we did was hand him a beer, Pete said something like, "Well, I guess we'll just have to sit around drinking beer and watch it die down", a practical man with common sense and humor.
Dick
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Dec 14, 2015 - 06:40pm PT
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i also used to sign out with him at the Jenny Lake ranger station in the 1960s…sometimes…when i wasn't going solo and avoiding any ranger or Exum guide sightings…
i think he influenced NPS looking the other way when i soloed the Grand's north face…and a few other such…
One time Gifford Pinchot III and i got off the plane from Connecticut, still in our business suits, and raced over to sign out before the ranger shack closed for the day…heading for the Grand Traverse and planning to spend the first night high on Teewinot. He looked at us and our recent altitude gain from sea level and politely said ,"oh yeah, sure you are…" Which by-the-way is just what we did…lol
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Dec 14, 2015 - 07:58pm PT
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I'm trying to recall what year it was that soloing became legal and signing out voluntary. Mid 1960s?
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Dec 15, 2015 - 02:03pm PT
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i don't know, John…perhaps you and i had some unintended influence on that???
the politics were all above my pay grade
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JLP
Social climber
The internet
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Dec 15, 2015 - 04:24pm PT
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I think it was more than [...] but never really figured out anything deeper.
By the end of his book, even with that years-later prologue from the deck of a cruise ship off the Alaskan coast(?) - I wasn't sure he did either...
Good book, though, and as you say, it gave me a sense of an era gone by. I think it did have something to say that was larger than he could articulate. 80? Not a bad run...
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Dec 15, 2015 - 09:06pm PT
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The title The Last Innocent Americans may have had something to do with a growing awareness of how American climbing fitted into the larger world of climbing, and the advances in technique and equipment. When I read an old Jan & Herb Conn description of needles climbing from the 1950s, complete with cute amateur drawings in a stapled three or four page self-publication, and compare that with the the surge in climbing media twenty or so years later, I see clearly a shedding of innocence and a move towards mass participation and professionalism (not the Barry Corbet mountain guide model).
The comparison with what was available in the early to mid 1950s - and my innocent delight at the time - and what was available fifteen to twenty years later is striking, still, when I think of it. Maybe you have to live through those years as an adult to fully understand.
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