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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Original Post - Mar 18, 2017 - 12:34pm PT
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Mountain Interview
Royal Robbins
Over the past fifteen years Yosemite Valley has nurtured a number of fine rock climbers, who have taken their place, by common consent, among the world's leading exponents of the sport. Already in this magazine we have interviewed their most rebellious and individualistic member, Warren Harding. In marked contrast to the cavalier figure of Harding stands the enigmatic Royal Robbins, a climbing guru whose ideological rectitude has had a pervasive influence on the actions of many of the Valley's climbers.
Robbins first became known to British climbers during a lecture tour in which he introduced his audiences to the mind-boggling problems of the North America Wall. Since then his achievements have received a growing acclaim, not only in Britain and America, but also in Europe. In Yosemite he has played an important pioneering role, and has many fine first ascents to his credit, including four major routes on Half Dome and three on El Capitan. But perhaps his most inspired achievement on Yosemite's granite walls was his remarkable, ten-day, solo second ascent of El Cap's Muir Wall. He has taken his advanced wall-climbing techniques to the Kitchatna region of Alaska, and he played a leading part in introducing them to Europe with his two major first ascents on the West Face of the Petit Dru.
Robbins has also fashioned himself a growing reputation as a writer. He has produced a considerable and ever-improving stream of articles on his climbs, reaching a peak with the magnificent Tis-sa-ack piece (which we republish on page 21).His recent booklet on technique - Basic Rockcraft - has received a warm response from reviewers.
He is a regular visitor to Great Britain where, like a pilgrim visiting the Holy Land, he makes incognito trips to Wales and Scotland to recharge his ethical batteries. It was in London, during one of these visits, that we cornered him for this interview.
Mountain: Royal, your name is almost synonymous with big wall climbing in Yosemite. How did it all start? What was your first big climb there?
Robbins: The Salathé/Steck on Sentinel was my first really big route. I did the second ascent with Jerry Gallwas and Don Wilson. We went prepared for five days and got to the top in two. Even today it seems a fast ascent. We must have been infused with some sort of energy and ability which only comes rarely - it isn't there all the time. In fact it's not really ability, but a combination of elements. I guess its inspiration.
We did some pretty wild things on that climb - things that hardly bear thinking about. At one place we had to make a long traverse. I had to lower my friends who then went across and up to a stance. When it came to my turn as last man I just held the rope - I figured that I could somehow walk across. I had no judgement about such things in those days. I took quite a swing and bounced about 150ft. across the wall. When I finally stopped I was pretty battered. But we were young and healthy and resilient, and it was O.K. - and we probably saved half an hour just doing that.
You didn't have jumars then, so presumably sack-hauling techniques were pretty rudimentary.
Oh yes - we just took up a thin line and hauled the things up. Looking back, that's another thing that surprises me. We must have been very fit.
So that was a big success. Then what happened? Did you start thinking about new routes?
Well, that was in 1953, and what you have to realize is that climbing wasn't considered very important then. We were doing it totally for the thrill of it, and not because we gained much respect from our peers. There were so few people climbing and there was very little competition.
You mean there was no prestige attached.
Right. If it had been as important then as it is now I would have gone into it more deeply and more immediately, I'm sure.
As it was we just climbed off and on for the next few years, and I even went a whole summer without climbing at all. Then, in 1955, we became more focused on climbing - when I say "we", I mean a small group of us, including Jerry Gallwas and Don Wilson, my Sentinel companions. We got interested in the face of Half Dome and here we saw a very great opportunity. It seemed audacious, of course, but you never know... This is the sort of attitude that has characterized my climbing since then - the wild thought, the dismissal, the wondering, and finally you really look into it and there is something there after all. Warren Harding was on our first attempt on which we did very badly, climbing very slowly. I spent a whole afternoon just doing one pitch.
Was this the first time You had climbed with Harding?
No, I had climbed with him once at Tacquitz Rock. I remember that well. He had a good reputation at that time. We were doing a short new route; he nailed up one pitch and belayed in a sort of alcove. When I got up there I found he was sitting in slings hanging off two pitons - an angle driven in low down, and a wafer-thin pin driven straight up. Just as I arrived the angle came out, leaving us both hanging from this one little piton. I remember being surprised that I wasn't more afraid... I guess it was so 'this or that' that there wasn't much point in being afraid. Anyway, we got another piton in and the moment passed. I remember it very well, though, because that was just the sort of thing that none of our group would have done. We were very careful, and always had quite a lot of pitons at stances. Harding must have been made of different stuff or something.
How have you got on with Harding over the years?
Off and on - in some ways our attitudes are very different.
You're younger than he is. Do you think your feelings stemmed from that, like the aggressiveness you attribute to Petterson in your Tis-sa-ack article?
I'm sure I had at least my share of those unpleasant characteristics, but I don't feel they were operating in this case. I don't feel competitive towards Harding in the climbing sense; I don't think I ever have. It's difficult to know what my feelings really are in a scene like this because there are so many defence mechanisms at work.
How did you get on with Harding on Half Dome?
Pretty well. that time, but Don and Jerry were not as keen on the project as Harding and I. We would have gone on, but they preferred to retreat.
You mean they didn't like big walls?
No, it wasn't that. They had already done a lot in that respect. It was just that things were going so slowly that they thought we didn't have much chance of success - whereas Harding and I would have carried on and made an escape exit to the left if necessary. It seemed possible. Anyway, after we got down I asked Harding if he would be keen to return the following year. We both felt ourselves to be more passionate climbers than the other two, who were, shall we say, more balanced individuals. We were more eager.
But in fact you didn't get together to do the route. Why was that?
I can't remember exactly what happened, but it seems to me that Jerry said he had written to Harding in Alaska and Harding couldn't make it. So we got a young climber named Mike Sherrick to join us. He was brilliant. There are few people who have seemed to me to have as much natural ability as Mike - Chuck Pratt, certainly, but I can't think of any others. As a matter of fact I was really jealous of him because he was one of the few climbers at that time who I felt had more natural ability than I. That was really when I first started being competitive and started pushing myself in a way that I haven't stopped doing since. I suppose I've done this in some ways in order to maintain the pleasant aura of success that made me feel so good in the early days. I liked that so much that I determined to keep it coming, no matter what I had to do to get it.
So you completed the Half Dome route with Gallwas and Sherrick.
Yes, that was a great adventure. We did the route in five days and we suffered a lot from both heat and fear. We were really scared because we hadn't done anything like it before. We took up 1,000ft. of extra rope, just in case we couldn't get up after the long traverse. We could have used the rope to get down to the ground again, but as it happened it would have been perfectly possible to retreat down our ascent route.
Did you have better equipment by that time?
Jerry had made some copies of John Salathé's fine pitons. Salathé was the inventor of hard steel pitons of superlative design, craftmanship and toughness, and he made them specially for Yosemite because Yosemite demanded a certain type of piton that wasn't available. Others were copying Salathé's pitons too. Jerry made some, and also made the first 1¼" angles. It was the first time that pitons that big had been made in steel. One of the reasons that so many bolts were placed in those days was that we didn't have these big pitons. In fact even they weren't too big; sometimes we placed two bolts because we didn't have 1½" pitons.
Had you improved your hauling methods by then?
No, and we had a very hard time. Two men had to haul all the time, as we had put all the things in one bag. It didn't occur to us to use separate bags. We got so tired of hauling the thing that after the last bivouac we took a chance and tossed it off.
Were you as fit as on your Sentinel climb?
I think so, but this was a tougher climb. It was in 1957, four years after the Sentinel. Considering our success on that, it was quite a long time before we did this new Half Dome route.
It was shortly afterwards that Harding started on the Nose, wasn't it?
Yes, with Mark Powell and various others. At that time Powell was one of the top American climbers. He was a sort of Hermann Buhl figure, with great intensity, drive and determination. He would starve himself to keep his weight down and would make some very bold leads for those days. He and Harding made a really strong team. But then he got injured on an easy climb, which put him out. Harding's other partners came and went, for none of them had the determination that has always marked Harding and made him just the right man for that sort of climb at that time.
You did the Half Dome climb in good style in one push. Did you feel irritated by the way Harding did the Nose?
Well, it would be more apt to say 'the way he was doing it'. At one stage he sent me a card saying : "Why don't you join us? We're this far". I didn't feel too competitive about it; I was happy with Half Dome and I knew that if they did El Cap it would be with different methods, so our position would not be threatened directly. Anyway, I figured that they were adopting the only possible tactics for those days, so I wasn't uptight about it.
But it was generally agreed at that time that a route done in one push was better than one done by siege.
Well that didn't come into it. There was little doubt in our minds that whoever made the first ascent of the Nose had achieved something bigger and better than anything else that had been done. In the early days we dismissed it because we reckoned it would need bolts all the way. But this was just a rationalization of our fear, and Harding was the first to break that fear - partly because he had to get up, as Half Dome wasn't there any more and the Nose was the next logical step.
Do you think Valley climbing would have proceeded at such a pace if you and Harding hadn't been there at the same time?
It wouldn't have made much difference. Someone else would have come along. Competition would still have been there. If you're a climber and you want to operate at the top and do good things - important climbing achievements - then you look for the next thing to do. At the time that was El Cap. Obviously the men who did Half Dome were going to feel some kind of reaction against the guys who were working on the next step. And we did - especially because I am more competitive than most. But I wasn't feeling rancorously competitive. I would have liked to have done El Capitan, but I declined to join Harding because it was his scene, and because I didn't want to do it that way, even though I didn't think it could be done any other way.
There was no thought of muscling in?
No.
That hasn't come at all yet, has it?
Yes, I have done it, but I wouldn't do it to Harding because he was my friend. In general, once a climb has been started in the Valley, others leave it alone unless there is some sort of haziness, in terms of rightfulness of property, that people can take advantage of.
Presumably The Wall of the Early Morning, Light was like that.
No, I don't think so. Schmitz and Madsen made the first attempt and then gave up. Everybody knew they had. The next party went up and they gave up. But it's just the opposite with this so-called Aquarian Wall which Schmitz and Bridwell have been working on and have tried several times. [Now completed - see Yosemite notes in Mountain 19.] They are doing it in good style and not using fixed lines and so on. As long as they are there. in any sense, their position will be respected, although it won't necessarily continue that way if they spin it out too long; there might well be someone who'd come along and do it. Few people have the inclination to go in where other people have been working. but it's understood that everyone has the right to. I would if I wanted to, and if they weren't my friends. If it were someone that I didn't care about and was fiercely competitive with - like Ed Cooper, say - then I wouldn't worry,
Was Salathé Wall a direct reaction to the Nose - the next step, so to speak?
It was the logical next step. but I wouldn't describe it as a reaction. Actually, it struck us that the first thing to do was to make the second ascent of the Nose, without fixed lines. But we weren't sure that it was possible. Anyway, we planned for ten days and made it in seven. That was Chuck Pratt, Tom Frost, Joe Fitschen and myself. Two guys climbed while the others prussiked, carrying the supplies. It was really murder. On the second day, when we did 600ft., the sack haulers were having such a hard time that when Joe and I reached Dolt Tower I descended a few hundred feet to help them out. You must remember that it was all done on prussik knots with conventional shoulder abseils - no brakebars or anything like that. Doing that kind of a wall with those methods nowadays would seem like a hell of a lot of work.
Had your pitons improved by then?
We did it four years after Harding, and we had some bongs by then. How Harding used his stove legs I'll never know. Dick Long was making pins, and Chouinard too. We also had rurps. Chouinard had gone up the first few pitches and chopped some bolts because he found he could use rurps instead.
When did Chouinard appear on the scene?
I can't remember exactly, but it must have been in the late 'fifties. The first thing I heard was that this guy had come out to Stoney Point, where we had done some hard boulder problems. He had done one of mine in better style - and I said 'who is this guy?' So of course everyone then tried to do it in better style.
How can you do a boulder route in better style? Surely you either do it or you don't?
Well you do it with one hand - or even no hands. It didn't really bother me, but I just felt that I would try to do it better. I remember thinking that he had done it on purpose. Chouinard has always been anti-competition on the surface, but I'm not sure that it's that way underneath.
He displays a greater subtlety perhaps.
I think so. My overtly competitive attitude is partly because of my lack of subtlety, and partly because I was part of a group that reacted against the lie of the older generation that there was no competition. We openly accepted it, most of us quite willingly, and in talking about it we figured that it was all right providing one didn't become mean-spirited about it. We thought that it helped advance the standards of climbing. Right now there is a stronger feeling against competition. I know a lot of climbers who feel it has no place in climbing and want to avoid it, but I think most of them are kidding themselves, though there are some exceptions. For the most part it's just fashion.
Presumably Chouinard's was the most importiant influence in improving the general quality of equipment.
Yes, that's certainly true.
What was his background?
Well, he came to Yosemite from the Tetons for one thing. He lived in California, but he always went to the Tetons to climb. It was only some time after the scene had started in Yosemite that he decided to join it. I'm sure that at first he thought 'that's just rock climbing'. He is a mountaineer first and a rock climber second, but when he finally came he came in a big way.
He started making pitons pretty early, just for his own ascents with Tom Frost. At first he made ring angles which were better than those available; the rings were thicker and the design was better. So right at the very beginning he started putting his own touch on his equipment matching it to the needs of the climb he was doing. He has this amazing ability for getting to the essence of the problem and making the correct piece of equipment. Soon the rurp appeared. It was probably his biggest breakthrough in terms of the influence it has had on climbing. Nothing else he has done has had quite the same effect.
Did it allow harder aid pitches to be done?
Using rurps can make an A4 pitch A2. They allow climbing on a given piece of rock that wouldn't otherwise be climbed except with bolts.
But isn't there a basic insecurity with rurps that automatically makes the climbing more precarious?
No. On a bad pitch you're more likely to get good rurps than anything else. And a good rurp can be quite good. You very rarely hear of them coming out, and they have even held some short falls.
Let's get back to the Nose. You did it with better pitons, but with greater expenditure of effort. Then came the Salathé Wall.
No, you're too soon. We did the Salathé some time after. You mustn't think we were out to grab a new route on El Cap and make a name for ourselves. We weren't interested in that: we were interested in climbing.
What you said previously seems to contradict that.
It's quite possible! Maybe there was a bit of both. Maybe we were just afraid of the Salathé and maybe we felt we had some laurels to rest on. Whatever it was, we spent the next two seasons doing routes in the Tetons and the High Sierra, and other smaller routes in Yosemite. It wasn't until 1963 that we got round to doing the Salathé. I remember when we were in the meadow looking at it and we pieced together a sort of route that looked as if it might go without too many bolts. We had been unenthusiastic about doing another route on El Cap because we didn't want to place 100 bolts. 125 had been placed in the first ascent of the Nose, and a route like that just wasn't worth it to us - it was too much work. But when we saw this line our spirits went up. Imagine a route on El Cap following this round-about line and not using many bolts! We had to get it. We were very, very enthusiastic.
But you thought that pitons would be needed most of the way.
Oh yes.
So the fact that there was a good deal of free climbing was an extra bonus.
Yes. There wasn't all that much though. About 40% of it goes free now, but it was less then.
And the Nose - about 20% now, and 10% then?
I would guess so, unless you're Jim Bridwell or someone, and then it's 40%. We wanted to do the Salathé in as adventurous a way as possible, but we didn't think we could get to the top in one push because of the experience we'd gained on the Nose. We planned to push a route up to Heart Ledge, and then leave fixed ropes to the ground - so we did that in 2½ days and came down. We returned a few days later, prussiked back up the ropes and dropped them behind us. This was making a real adventure of it, because we didn't know whether we could make the top. We were one third of the way up and had placed 13 bolts, and we figured that we might have to place another 20 or 30.
Anyway, we just carried on and did the best we could, and we got to the top in six days - without any more bolts. If bolts had been needed, we might have spent another three days on the climb, and we'd only come prepared for six. We cut it very fine.
It must have been very exciting coming over on to that headwall.
Yes, it was fantastic. We had picked it out from the ground. There's a great overhang with this Vector-like line to the right of where we went, but our line went straight up the most unlikely part - right over the overhangs and up a blank wall cut by one crack. From the ground it looks very dodgy, but somehow we were just led straight to it.
This was on the fifth day?
Yes, but we fixed ropes up half of it, retreated to a bivouac, and returned on the sixth day to complete it. There was one point when I was hanging from two pitons on the wall - Chuck had just cleaned the pitch and the others were all above me on a ledge. They fixed the lines for me, and I got my prussik knots fixed. I was so frightened that I tied a big knot in the end of the rope as well. Finally, I let myself out on the end of the rope for about eight feet; I thought that that would be about right, so I let the rope slip through the piton. But it had been holding me in so much that I swung twenty feet out from the wall - two and a half thousand feet above the ground. I had a good rope and everything, but I was so afraid that I could barely suppress a shout of terror.
It was obviously a tremendous ascent - you must have had as much adventure as you wanted.
We felt really proud that we had judged it right and cut things really fine. We stuck our necks out as far as could reasonably be expected.
The possibility of rescue must have been fairly remote
Very remote. It might have been possible, but it would have taken several days and there just weren't the ropes around at that time. We figured we would have to be very careful not to get hurt.
What came next?
After the Salathé I did other grade sixes, which were quite hard. On the hardest, Arches Direct, I had three falls on one pitch - one a fifty-footer. Soon after that I went to Europe for the first time.
When did you do North America Wall?
After the Dihedral Wall. It was during the second ascent of that route that I perfected the sack-hauling method that is used now, in order to avoid all that tedious, energetic work. I figured that we would need to improve in technique if we were to do Dihedral in one push. It had taken a total of 38 days and was supposed to be harder than the Nose. We had just begun to use Jumars by then, and we had one pair for the route. So Tom Frost and I had one each. The one who was climbing used a Jumar and a prussik knot, and the hauler had one to make that easier. After that climb we got on to thinking about the N.A. Wall. By that time - after Cooper's team had done the Dihedral and so forth - the competition for big wall routes was becoming more intense.
Did ethics start to develop then?
They already had. We had quite strong views when we did the Salathé.
Then Ed Cooper came along and sieged the Dihedral. Presumably that ruffled a few feathers.
Yes. I was really down on that. He knew how we had done the Salathé, but he was very strange, he didn't communicate. I have never said a word to Cooper. He just came in and started on this route. We took great offence at this - especially me - because this guy had never done a climb in Yosemite. He carefully avoided that, I thought. He came along to do this big wall and get himself a new route on El Capitan - which we thought should go to those who could do it in better style. Anybody could come along and whittle away at it.
Of course he had done Grand Wall on Squamish Chief.
Well, yes, but stories got down to us that he had avoided some of the cracks because they were dirty, and bolted up blank rock instead. This to us wasn't climbing but something we wanted to avoid. So when, as an outsider, he came down and started applying these techniques to Yosemite, we thought he was being rather presumptuous.
He was the driving force, not Baldwin?
Oh he was the force, no question of that. He was like Harding, but darker and more sombre, without Harding's liveliness. But he did have the same aggression and determination. Glen Denny joined them when they were about halfway up, and he added quite a bit in terms of technically climbing ability, as he had already done a lot in Yosemite. I was very critical then, but I don't feel that way any more. Now I'm a little more mellowed, and it doesn't matter. One has to admit that they did put up a very fine route and they did do a good job in terms of not overplacing bolts. They took 14 days to climb the first 700ft., which seemed excessive to us. But I have to give them credit for making good use of the time, because they only placed two bolts in getting up there. I thought that was good.
It was very hard presumably.
It was. It's easier now, but I was very respectful when we did the second ascent, because they did such a good job on that part - and all the way, as it turned out.
So your original feelings were irrational.
No, I was right in terms of my own premises, my own frames of reference. Any experienced Yosemite climber could have done that route much faster.
So speed and style were the causes for complaint, rather than equipment and techniques employed?
No, we had to admit once that it wouldn't have been possible without fixed lines. But what galled me most was outsiders coming in and doing what Yosemite climbers were reluctant to do until they could do it in the right way.
Did the same feelings affect you when Ward-Drummond arrived with over-ambitious plans?
No.
But he planned to do North America Wall in an equally presumptious way.
Yes, but he wasn't going to take anything from me. He hoped to do a second ascent.
But if he had been successful, all the international prestige of the route - the pinnacle of Yosemite climbing - would have been weakened. Surely that would have damaged your credibility and that of Yosemite climbing in general?
I don't think in those terms, and I don't think many American climbers do. The international importance of Yosemite has come as quite a surprise to most of us. We were used to being ignored by the American Alpine Club, for example. It didn't bother us. I was once asked to join, but I didn't see the point of it. We were just interested in climbing in Yosemite. When the article on the Salathé Wall first appeared in the A.A.J., several years after the climb had been done, that was a big thing - we were getting some belated credit for our climbs.
Presumably Chouinard was quite aware of the wider significance of Valley climbing.
Certainly more than any of the rest of us. But we really just weren't interested in publicizing Yosemite. For me, writing an article in the A.A.J. was a little unreal. Since then the explosion of Yosemite in the world scene is much more a thing in the minds of others, particularly the English. You people seem to be taking it more seriously than we ever did, if I may say so. When I first came to England I was made to feel pretty important, and this to me was unreal and surprising, but nice - you know. It's always been a little unreal, so that when you talk of my being knocked off my pedestal it's rather meaningless. The pedestal itself has always been a bit unreal to me. Let's go back to North America Wall. By this time things had gone so far that I was getting greedy. I was anxious to get a certain wall before someone else did, and a new route on El Capitan would be that much more to add to one's reputation. So I started thinking more in terms of doing climbs for fame than of doing them just for the fun of it. Glen Denny and I got together and made a reconnaissance. We got about 400ft. up before I pulled a pin and Denny burnt his hands holding me, so we had to come down. We thought we could go up on another recce, perhaps place any bolts that were needed, and then abseil off, but without leaving any fixed lines. It wouldn't be perfect style: the bolts would help us, and so would the knowledge of the route, but it would still be fairly good style and still be an adventure. So we came back later with Tom Frost, climbed about halfway up the wall, placed about 18 bolts, and arrived at a good ledge which would form a base for work on the upper part of the route. Then we roped off, without leaving any fixed lines. Ultimately, when the time was right. Denny couldn't join us, so Chuck Pratt and Yvon Chouinard came along and we climbed it. The third pitch was really difficult and intimidating. In a way it was much worse repeating it, knowing what it was like. It's a long run of nested, tiedoff pitons. The real drawback with not leaving fixed lines was having to do this again.
Were you as apprehensive on this climb as on the Salathé?
More, I think, because of the nature of the upper section. We had to make several pendulums, and it would have been very difficult to retreat. But it was the unknown that scared us most. We looked up and saw what looked like some horrible overhanging cracks that might have to be climbed free. We were very pleased to have Pratt along just in case!
Your ambition seems to have put you somewhat apart from other climbers. How do you feel about that?
Well, it's true. But even though I might have mixed feelings about it, one always goes in the most important direction - most important to oneself, that is. I dislike certain elements in my personality, but I can't honestly say that I would do things any differently.
Do you get much criticism from your contemporaries?
I think my attitudes are resented, but nobody has yet expressed the fact openly - in the way that Frost criticized Whillans in your Annapurna feature, for example. The nearest to that I have had was in letters from Chris Jones and Doug Scott: they came closer than anyone else to saying that I am overambitious and selfish.
Let's move on to the Alps now. When did you have your first season?
In 1962. I met up with Gary Hemming on Chamonix, and we did a new route on the Dru. I had climbed with Hemming very early on, and our paths had criss-crossed through the years. I was very sorry when he died.
It's said that he was a man of great emotional extremes.
That's true. Part of the reason why he went in the direction of drugs, spiritualism and mysticism, which he did to some extent, was that he had such turbulent emotions and wanted to control them. He wanted an answer, a way of dampening the suffering he was going through most of the time. Climbing was a way of doing this. He thought - obviously we all do - that if he did a certain climb things were going to be better. Anyway, he had all the ideas. He knew our particular rock skills. The line on the Dru was just right for the time - a major new line on a big wall. And it was hard. If I had been John Harlin it would have been splashed all over Europe. But we didn't view things that way.
Obviously the competition was there among climbers, but the outer world was something we were trying to get away from, not become noticed by.
You appear to be contradicting yourself again.
I'd be foolish to try to resolve these contradictions. I'm just trying to give an honest impression. I'm not in the least bit interested in being noticed by the general public, newspapers, television and the like. But having the respect of climbers is something else. In the old days I felt I wanted the respect of my peers. Some people, like John Harlin for example, thrived on all types of publicity. He just wanted as much as possible coming from any direction. I'm not quite that way.
Incidentally, when did Harlin appear on the scene?
I met him in Philadelphia, at the American Alpine Club meeting that was so laudatory towards Yosemite. I spoke on Yosemite, and in the evening he spoke on his ascent of the Eigerwand. There was an atmosphere of euphoria at that meeting. The successes on the Eiger, in Yosemite and on Everest gave one the feeling that one was witnessing a renaissance in American climbing.
Harlin was an extraordinary person. He took me in completely, just as he did many others. It was his subtlety and the strength of his personality. I thought he was motivated by good ideals and wanted to do good things, generous things. Later I changed my opinion about that and decided he was someone else entirely.
Do you think he used the climbers around him?
I think he used anybody he could. That's the main thing I objected to. I remember when we were in Chamonix once, without transport, and he wanted to go to the Calanque. There were two English climbers there, and he said: "I'll go over and talk to these guys - I can get them to do anything I want." He put it in such a way that it rather shocked me, because I didn't believe in using people. It sounded as if he would indeed use those guys by the sheer force of his personality. That was the first thing that turned me off a bit. Later I saw more and more of this aspect of him, and I realized that if he hadn't respected me for being a better rock climber he would have had contempt for me too. He had contempt for anyone who was weaker than he was.
Did he enjoy the company of people who were better than him?
My impression was that he used them so that he could get as good as they were. If he ever did, they could be dismissed.
What was his relationship with Kor?
Much the same, in my opinion. Kor liked him a lot, just as guys like Dougal Haston did; Haston had the greatest respect for him. I don't thing Harlin thought too highly of Kor though. Kor could certainly nail better, but no doubt Harlin thought that if he worked on it, he could nail well too. He probably thought highly of Haston, though, because Haston was better at things than he was. Harlin asked me to go on the Eiger Direct with him, but I declined because I'm not an expedition man and I didn't want to be involved with getting someone else to the top of a mountain. Also I didn't really understand that type of climbing and would have been too much out of my element.
You did a new route on the Dru with Harlin. Whose idea was that?
His. I had looked at it earlier and thought it a nice line, but we have many routes like that in the States. I didn't really see the point in coming all the way to Europe for that.
So I wasn't too ambitious, but Harlin persuaded me. When I got to the bottom I was keener, as it was a good line on good rock. If you've been doing it for years, climbing a steep granite wall for three days just isn't adventure any more - you know you can do it.
There was the weather factor, though.
Yes, we did have that risk, and I thought that here I was not completely within my own element. Actually, after Harlin got injured, I felt we really were playing the climbing game for keeps. Much of the terror of the big walls of Yosemite is illusory, but here was a situation where death was really looking at us. Oddly enough, I wasn't afraid, and that was odd because generally I am in those circumstances.
What about Harlin's climbing ability?
Well, he was the greatest American alpinist of his day. Harlin had a genius for getting publicity, though, and he let a lot of misleading things develop. The idea that he cut his teeth on El Capitan - or that he was a Yosemite climber at all - is all nonsense. When we brought Yosemite techniques to the Alps, or in particular, when Gary Hemming did, Harlin took all the credit for it. But he had nothing to do with it, except that he jumped on the bandwagon. That sort of thing was what made us object to Harlin: he was so good. and yet he needed to do that.
Bonington has said that Harlin was responsible for pointing American climbers to Alpine possibilities. The South Face of the Fou was cited.
Well he didn't point Hemming and me at the Dru. Harlin saw what we'd done and went on from there. But other people had seen these routes too. And anyway, when it comes down to it, I did most of the leading on the second Dru climb, and Frost and Hemming did the leading on the Fou. It wasn't that Harlin wasn't capable of leading, but just that he took all the credit for the climbing when actually his greater achievement was in public relations.
And motivation?
He had a lot - I don't doubt that - but somehow it seemed out of balance.
You haven't been back to the Alps since then?
Not to climb. I would like to do the Walker Spur some day, and possibly the Eiger, but it's getting to be such a problem fighting all the people on them that they don't attract me so much any more. But don't get me wrong - I have no illusions about the difficulty of the Eiger. I didn't agree with my friend Dornan's deprecating remarks in his review of the Harlin book in Ascent.
Since your visit to the Alps you seem to have been looking for more serious tests in your visits to Alaska and your solo climbs in Yosemite.
That's true.
Is this because the Alps made you think that Yosemite was intrinsically safe?
No. I realized that long before I went to the Alps.
But you didn't solo Muir Wall before. Was that inspired by Bonatti's route on the Dru?
Not directly, though of course Bonatti's superb feat stands as a great example to us all. Bonatti, I think, is in the great tradition. He should be emulated. His achievements are neither technological nor technical tricks, but are primarily achievements of the human spirit, and that goes deepest. For me, at that time, Muir was just the next obvious step. In order to feel that I had achieved something comparable to our original Half Dome route, I had to solo it. It might have been even harder, but the main point was that for me it was in the same category, with the same blend and balance of tension, as the Half Dome climb.
What about Alaska?
We just went to make some first ascents, and to get some alpine climbing, which was something new for me. I wanted to get away from pure rock. When I went to the Alps I wasted my time doing rock climbs when I could have been learning alpinism. Nevertheless, when I go back to Alaska I would like to do a big wall - the sort of climbing that I know, but in much more formidable conditions.
What about Cerro Torre?
I would love to climb that!
Do you agree with Chouinard that climbing big walls in alpine conditions is the logical extension of present developments?
Certainly. Quite apart from being interested in making a reputation and some money, my primary reason for climbing is still the personal thing it gives me. If I didn't have those other things I would still be doing mainly what I am doing. I'm still going in the direction I started off in... trying to find some sort of peace of mind in doing the ultimate climb that will make everything else all right. To me, it used to be N.A. Wall, or something like that, but some time ago I realized that the ultimate challenge in mountaineering is the one that makes the greatest demands on the maximum number of human qualities. The Eiger has always been the epitome of this. Look, to do these big new routes in Yosemite, you needed ability and competence, certainly, and also things like a spirit of adventure, strength, a certain agility, an intelligent knowledge of rock climbing, and a bit of endurance. On the Eiger you need all these things and many more. Therefore it's a higher level of achievement. I want to do a climb that takes the ultimate - and still succeed.
Although most of the climbs you've done have been free of objective danger, you did have it on the Dru.
We had a storm on the way down, and I felt that we were in a very exposed situation. If we had been caught on the wall it would have been very serious, and l've heard some fearful stories from friends of mine that have been caught there in bad weather.
So you feel that this is an experience that you've missed.
Yes. Even climbing the Muir Wall solo - probably my biggest rock-climbing adventure and potentially the most dangerous - was still completely controllable. It all turned really on my own skills. But in bad weather, when you put self-control up against all kinds of things that you haven't been through before - well, that's a much stiffer game, and a more lifelike one. I think that the more you can approximate the rigours of climbing to the rigours of life, the more complete a game it is.
The Eiger is the best example I can think of. It's a very dangerous mountain, and if things turn bad your chances of coming out of it O.K. are immeasurably greater if you're a Buhl, a Rebuffat or a Whillans, than if you're one of many other mountaineers that have gotten on the thing. In other words, even though the technical difficulties and the objective dangers are very great, it still turns mostly on your personal qualities.
It's such a demand on these qualities that it's hideously frightening in a way - a real measure of a man.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 18, 2017 - 12:36pm PT
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The preceding conversation took place in London, in October 1970. Soon after Robbins had returned to the States, Warren Harding and Dean Caldwell made their highly controversial ascent of the wall of the Early Morning Light. The American climbing world became divided into two schools of thought: one condemned the number of bolts used and the large amount of publicity that the climb attracted in the popular press, while the other maintained that these were minor flaws compared to the climbers' magnificent achievement in making a 27-day climb. Many people held both points of view. Two months later, Robbins and Don Lauria repeated the route in six days. In the process they removed a number of the offending bolts from the earlier pitches, yet, curiously, did not continue to do so on the later ones. In some ways this second ascent was even more controversial than the first, for it raised questions of interference, ethics, and a whole range of issues that face climbers, not only in California, but throughout the world. Clearly, our interview was now out of date, so we arranged for some further discussion to take place in the States. Allen Steck (Editor of Ascent ) and Galen Rowell acted as our representatives, and the following conversation took place at Steck's house in Berkeley, California. Readers should note that although the official guide book title of the route in question is The Wall of the Early Morning Light, it is referred to throughout the ensuing interview as The Dawn Wall.
Rowell: What was the original idea behind your Dawn Wall ascent? Did you set out to eliminate or change the existing route, or were you just planning a normal second ascent?
Robbins: Good question. It's hard to sort that out. In fact, it's almost impossible. I have always wanted to climb every route on El Capitan, but for weeks before we did this one I was wondering what the climb meant for Yosemite, what sort of creation it was, and what should be done about it if it was really as bad as it seemed. I considered several answers, and I'm not sure that I picked the right one. But anyway, we went ahead with a climb that was really based on a desire to remove what we thought was a blot on the Yosemite landscape.
Rowell: Was the decision to chop the bolts motivated purely by the fact that there were so many on the route, or were you influenced by the almost shameful amount of publicity the climb received?
Robbins: No, we were influenced solely by the way the route was done. If we had thought it was a valid route, and no criticisms had been levelled at it, we would have accepted it as the future of Yosemite climbing. But we thought it wasn't valid and, having come to that conclusion, we decided we should do something about it. It was that decision that we acted on. The publicity had nothing to do with it; we may have been repelled by this, but none of our actions were based on it.
Steck: Did Lauria share your views?
Robbins: Well, that was funny, because I was under the impression that he was all for erasing the route. When I called him and asked him to come and do the second ascent, he was keen. Then, when I said that I understood he was interested in stripping the bolts, he said he didn't mind, but would go along with anything I wanted to do. Well that really put it on my shoulders, because I'd expected him to be keen to do it. Lauria shouldn't be depicted as a climbing fanatic: he's a fine climber, he's easy-going, he has a big. broad smile, and he enjoys life and climbing. He isn't the sort of person who would go out in a petty way to put someone else down. He certainly didn't do that here, although he did feel something of the way I felt about the values involved.
Steck: Why did you go out so soon to erase the route? Wouldn't it have been better to have waited a little?
Robbins: Well, I remember going to see Schmitz and Bridwell to talk the thing over. They were all for erasing the route, especially Bridwell, and they were seriously considering doing it themselves. I was keen on doing the second ascent and seeing what the route was like, so I suggested that I should do this and leave the third ascent and the problem of erasing the route to them. But they said that if I did this, it would give the route currency, and they wouldn't subsequently take the drastic step of erasing it. In other words, to repeat the route once, without erasing it, would be a form of approval. So that way they put me in a spot. In the end I didn't say what I was going to do, but I did say that if I climbed the route I would do something about it.
Rowell: By removing the drilled anchors after using them for aid, you deliberately violated the first-ascent principle stated in your own book. In doing this, were you acting rather like a policeman who goes through a red light to catch a speeder?
Robbins: I didn't really violate it. This was an exception to the rule, because it was an exceptional situation. What I said in the book was that we shouldn't change routes or improve them: we should leave them in their first-ascent state. Here, our idea was to remove the route entirely.
Rowell: Weren't you worried about people misunderstanding your motives - believing that you were making a personal attack against Harding, for example ?
Robbins: That was one of the most difficult parts of the whole thing. It has pointed out that I put my reputation at stake by deciding to do this in the first place. But my concept of what should be done did not include a personal attack on Harding: as I said in Summit, I admire Harding because he is a great exponent of individualism, which I think is one of the most important features of climbing. It's one of the things I came into climbing for. Harding and I differ in our methods, and sometimes he does things that I feel are harmful to the spirit of Yosemite climbing. But that's a question of philosophy, and has nothing to do with Harding as a person.
Steck: The interesting thing about this whole controversy is that nobody will understand that, because everyone believes that it was a personal attack.
Robbins: Maybe, but it's a misconception. I wasn't attacking Harding, I was defending a point of view about Yosemite climbing. The difficulty was to decide what to do. I spent a lot of time thinking about that. I had already said something in my book about technique - that one shouldn't remove bolts from established routes. Clearly, people were going to say that this was inconsistent with what I was going to do on Dawn Wall, and they would damn me for it. I had to put up with that. I also had to put up with the fact that many people would say that my Tis-sa-ack route on Half Dome was simply a scaled-down version of Dawn Wall, and again I would be condemned for being self-contradictory. Obviously, I was going to have a lot of explaining to do. And even then many would think that I had done the wrong thing, either because they couldn't - or because they wouldn't - understand my reasoning. I was, as Ken Wilson said, "laying my reputation on the line". I had enjoyed a number of good things from this reputation - it does make life a little easier, so long as you don't have too much fame - and I had to consider that I might be giving all that up. The safest thing would have been to do nothing - level a bit of criticism perhaps, but no more. But after thinking about it I decided to go ahead with it anyway.
Rowell: If you had to do it all over again, would you do the climb in the same way - taking out the same number of anchors, that is?
Robbins: That's a really good question, Galen. It's so obvious I hadn't really thought about it. No, I wouldn't do the same thing again; I'd - boy, I don't know what I'd do. I guess I'd either climb the route without interfering with it, or not climb it at all.
Rowell: Do you have any basic objection to bat-hooks or rivets? And if so, why?
Robbins: I object to anything that makes bolting easy, because by making it easy you make it more likely. The good thing about bolting in the past was that you had to work to do it. But if placing a bolt or a bat-hook becomes easier than placing a piton - and Caldwell himself has admitted that it was easier to place rivets than A3 pitons on the climb - then automatically there will be a tendency to reduce the level of climbing: as soon as people get in difficulty they will take the easy way out and place a rivet instead of working at the problem.
Steck: Don't you have to work to-place a rivet?
Robbins: Not very hard. It's about one-third harder to place an A3 pin than a rivet, and two-thirds harder to place a bolt.
Steck: What exactly is a rivet?
Rowell: What Caldwell used were very thin swaged metal cable loops hung over lumps of metal he had hammered into the rock. He would drill a shallow hole - perhaps ⅜ inch deep - and then hammer in the rivet until the entire thing swelled. The cable loop is just draped over the head of the rivet while it is being hammered. If you hammer it properly, you can take the loop off afterwards and use it again.
Robbins: Anything like that is semipermanent. Bat-hooks are, too, because eventually the holes get filled with bolts. Rivets are the same. Placing a bolt should be a conscious act of transgression; and that should minimize the number used. If you put a bolt in, it's there for eternity. That's a statement. But if you move that statement towards more and more indefinable limits - well, doubtless we'll have suction pads soon. All of this goes to make up the difference between what I consider the essential spirit of climbing and just 'getting up'. Making bolting easier, with bat-hooks, rivets, pneumatic bolt guns and the like, leads to what are merely technological victories over routes.
Steck: Surely the Salathé piton was a means to technological victory in its time, wasn't it?
Robbins: Placing it still required skill, but it requires little or no skill to place a bolt.
Rowell: There I would disagree. Harding once said that the only way he got up Mt. Watkins was by taking over the drilling, because Chouinard and Pratt were incapable of doing it fast enough. Placing A1 and A2 pins is certainly easier than drilling bolt holes, I think.
Robbins: It's easier, but there's nothing to that either. The main point is that pitons don't violate the rock.
Rowell: ls that really true? A while ago I heard a couple of climbers discussing this point, and they were of the opinion that only nuts and bolts should be carried on new routes: they felt that new climbs should be done as far as possible on nuts and, when that was impossible, bolts should be placed. That way, they said, they would have a permanent anchor point and avoid all the piton scarring of repeated placements. At first I was horrified with the idea, but after thinking about it I see that it has some merit.
Robbins: That sounds good, but it doesn't work out in practice. I would certainly like to see more chocks and even bolts used to eliminate pitons, but people won't do that, of course. There are lots of climbs that could be improved like that. I'm not totally against bolts: I've used enough of them myself. I'm just against anything that encourages pure technology. I deplore the idle drilling of holes in rock just to get up, and the way this is justified as part of the climb. Placing bolts should be a conscious outrage that you unwillingly accept because it is necessary. I think it's important to stress that bolting is raping: you want to avoid it wherever you can.
Rowell: But would it be rape in the situation I have just described?
Robbins: I don't know. I'm not saying my way is the answer in every case; different situations demand different answers.
Steck: Let's get back to the climb. How did you come to ask Lauria to climb it with you?
Robbins: T. M. Herbert had told me that Don was keen, so I gave him a ring. He's about my age - sort of older generation - and he was fun to do it with. Once he gets on a climb he'll stay there and keep working on it: he doesn't psyche out. He's a very hard man really. Since the climb. Don has really been put on the hot seat down south in L.A.; as he wasn't so passionate about the thing as I was, he doesn't quite know what to say. His position is that it was my scene.
Steck: Well, you probably have to accept that.
Robbins: Sure, I'm willing to accept responsibility for the whole thing.
Rowell: There was a lot of sympathy for that route down south. At a party at Chouinard's, a few weeks after the first ascent, I happened to ask if anyone wanted to go and climb it with me the following spring. Almost everyone in the room was keen to do the second ascent.
Robbins: To leave it up - not to erase it.
Rowell: That wasn't discussed there, but it was in the newspapers. In the San Francisco Chronicle I read : "a young, moustachioed climber said, 'we will do it next spring and cut all the bolts"'. So others had certainly thought of the same thing.
Robbins: Yes, I knew that. But I felt that although it was being talked about by a lot of people it wouldn't actually get done, because it would be such a grossly outrageous act. I felt that if it was going to be done it would have to be me who did it.
Steck: At what point on the climb did you change your mind and decide not to chop any more bolts ?
Robbins: We started up with the intention of eradicating the entire route, because we thought it invalid. Harding and Caldwell had strong enough views about their action to spend twenty-seven days on the rock proving their route had merit, and they got a lot of currency for that, because the climb was hailed as a triumph here and there. But we felt that regardless of the human qualities involved - the toughness and the doggedness they showed - the climb did more harm than good to Yosemite.
Rowell: You seem to be returning to the publicity angle again.
Robbins: I'm not saying that we didn't react to the publicity - just that it wasn't the motivating factor in our actions.
Rowell: But it did have something to do with it.
Robbins: Not with what we did, no. It was their action on the rock that counted. Here was a route with 330 bolts. It had been forced up what we felt to be a very unnatural line, sandwiched between other routes, merely to get another route on El Capitan and bring credit to the people who climbed it. We felt that this could be done anywhere; instead of 330 bolts, the next route might involve 600 bolts, or even double that. We thought it was an outrage and that if a distinction between what is acceptable and what is not acceptable had to be made. then this was the time to make it. They had put their beliefs on the line by doing the route, and we put ours on the line by removing it - by saying just as strongly that we disagreed with them. There was only one way to answer their action, and that was by an even stronger reaction, so we started climbing, using and then chopping the bolts. Then Don went the wrong way and got strung out on a really hard crack system. When he came down, he said: "I wonder if we're doing the right thing". It was this hard climbing that made him reflect. In other words, he felt that if the route had first-rate climbing, regardless of bolts, it was questionable whether our action was right. Well, the route does have first rate climbing, and when we reached the point of our first bivouac, about four pitches up, I realized this, and also realized that there was going to be more of it. That night I lay awake in my hammock thinking about it, and I finally decided that I no longer felt right about destroying the route. My inner feelings weren't going along with it, and I would be crossing myself if I kept on doing it. So the right thing at that point seemed to be to stop the bolt chopping and just concentrate on climbing the route. At that stage, too. I thought about what the hell people were going to think. We'd started out doing something and now, through weakness or whatever, we'd changed our minds. Everyone was going to feel that we'd started something we didn't have the strength to continue. So I was faced with this existential problem which I could see quite clearly: should I act for the sake of consistency, which would certainly bring me harsh criticism, or should I stop something I now felt was wrong - and by doing so look like a fool? I decided I had to stop, because if my actions were going to be motivated solely by consideration of what people would think, I was finished anyway. So I talked to Don in the morning, and that's what we did.
Steck: And you found very challenging climbing ?
Robbins: We found some of the hardest nailing I have ever done, until we got near the top, and there we found a few ridiculous things like rivets placed next to good nailing cracks.
Steck: But imagine what state they were in after being on the wall for so long.
Robbins: Right. For the most part the climbing was of high calibre, and I didn't expect that. There was one good lead after another; both Caldwell and Harding must have been climbing at a really inspired level. And that, of course, complicated the whole thing enormously - how could one continue to judge it so simply? Essentially it means that Harding won. The main point now is that the thing should be explained, not that somebody should be made to appear right or wrong. It's a contest between attitudes and ways of doing things. We acted on theory, and it seems clear now that we would have been better not doing it that way. But it looked right at the time, and the iron was hot, so we took the risk that we might turn out to be doing the wrong thing. But everyone makes mistakes. I'm happy to admit that this was one.
Rowell: My impression of this controversy when it first came up was that there was a tremendous lack of communication between you and Harding, and between climbers and the public. Are you sure that your decisions weren't warped by the tremendous amount of publicity generated by the climb, by the fact that it was hailed as the greatest climb ever done and so on?
Robbins: There have been a lot of ascents of El Cap - like the Kroger/Davis Heart Direct, for example - which no climber could question. Nobody could have anything but admiration for that. It was done in supremely fine style; and, to take a more recent example, so was Pete Haan's solo ascent of the Salathé Wall. [See Yosemite Notes in Mountain 19.] He hadn't even done a grade 5 or a grade 6 route before, yet he used no new bolts and no new techniques; the whole climb turned on a question of the human spirit. It was marvellous: no climber could find any way of disputing that. I just think that, despite all the fine things that characterize the Dawn Wall ascent, the fact that they had to do it in that way left it open to criticism. It was a half-and-half thing: half admirable and half unfortunately damnable, because it led towards the rape of Yosemite. My point of view was that El Capitan had been raped, and that this would encourage other climbers to perform further heartless rapes, instead of taking the rock with love. This was what I objected to, and this was the threat I have been trying to explain here.
Rowell: I played devil's advocate for about four hours the other day in an argument between T. M. Herbert and Harding. I can't recall their exact words, but I can remember that the discussion got absolutely nowhere because it was as if there was a glass plate between them. Warren kept on saying things like: "I am an individual... I don't give a damn what you think, I'll do what I want to do because I want to do it and you can't stop me... Climbing is not a sport that's institutionalized... it's not organized and nobody can tell me what to do".
Robbins: Trouble is, he does give a damn.
Rowell: I agree with you there. Then Herbert's view of it was all tied up with tradition, what's been done before, what we have to look forward to in the future, and how we as a group of climbers have to look at our sport, and so on. They had two completely different sets of values. One of them couldn't convince the other because they weren't talking about the same values.
Robbins: That's one of the things I admire about climbing: there are all these ways of self-expression. You can appreciate all the different climbers for the different contributions they make. But the guys who work in the higher levels of climbing are doing their things particularly well. Harding is doing his thing well, but the trouble is that his 'thing' - his great genius - involves a change in something that affects everybody else directly. His great quality is that fantastic doggedness - but the only way you can express doggedness in Yosemite is to find a route that takes a lot of bolting, because there aren't any 6,000ft. routes. If there were, Harding would be doing the finest climbs around. He could stay up there and fight - just with pitons. But he has to create 6,000 and 9,000ft. routes by finding rock that's so blank that climbing it is just like doing a 9,000ft. route - and we say that's O.K. for Harding, but it's going to lead to bad things for Yosemite. Of course I may be totally wrong to get so up-tight about this. Allen here takes a really good view, a relaxed view: "things are what they are"... but when I ask him about this, he doesn't have a real answer.
Steck: One of the things one has to consider is that every generation that comes along wants to be original and have new avenues to explore. So there are people who are keen for new lines, but find that there isn't much scope.
Robbins: The irony there is that good lines are being done - Davis' and Kroger's route, for example. Yet it is Harding, who has been around for quite a long time, who is doing the things we are critical of. I think there are three avenues of progress. The first is to put up ever more questionable routes on blanker and blanker rock; the second is to accept the challenge of doing climbs in finer style; and the third is to go elsewhere to find new routes. If it's accepted that anything anywhere is valid, then anything is going to be put up anywhere. It degrades the rock - no question about that - and it may lead to a point where there are 100 routes on El Capitan, instead of 20, which would be about right. We don't want endless routes everywhere, because that, as I say. degrades the rock. But, more important, it degrades the meaning of the routes that already exist. So I feel that while one can accept routes like Leaning Tower and the South Face of Half Dome - single routes up blank, virgin faces - the searching on El Cap was searching too far, and that made the difference.
Rowell: That brings up a point that Ken Wilson made: wasn't the Tis-sa-ack route on Half Dome just a scaled-down version of Dawn Wall?
Robbins: Well, there are several things I could point out here, such as the fact that we used proportionally less bolts, and the fact that any route that uses a bolt could be called a scaled-down version of Dawn Wall - but that isn't important. What is important is that I felt it was valid. The route on Half Dome was going to be done because it was a natural line - a broad area of rock that was bound to have a route sooner or later. I knew it would be done and I also knew that there were enough connecting cracks, so that we wouldn't need an excessive number of bolts. In the event we placed thirty more than we expected, and that was twenty more than we actually took on the climb.
Rowell: How many drilled anchors altogether ?
Robbins: One hundred and ten. But the determination of a route's validity according to the number of bolts placed has to be totally arbitrary. There is no logical line to be drawn - or if there is I haven't heard of it. If you agree with the proposition that one bolt on an El Cap route is O.K., but 1,000 are not, then somewhere between you have to draw a line. And that line is totally arbitrary, based solely on your sense of proportion. My sense of proportion tells me that Tis-sa-ack was all right, but Dawn Wall was going too far. Here was a big new climb on El Cap that violated my feeling of what is right in Yosemite climbing. And a lot of other people thought the same. But the point is that if somebody feels as strongly about Tis-sa-ack as we did about Dawn Wall, then they are certainly welcome to erase that. And they would be right to do so. Jones mentioned this in his letter to Mountain - and I say: O.K., if he feels that way then he ought to do it, even if it means starting from the top (which incidentally would be rather difficult). I would not object at all. I would rather give up a few routes and retain good values in the Valley.
Rowell: But what does taking bolts out of a route really do?
Robbins: It eliminates the route.
Rowell: But it doesn't take away the first ascent.
Robbins: No, it certainly doesn't.
Rowell: So it's really just a symbolic act to show people that somebody objected?
Robbins: Yes, it's symbolic, but it's also going to make a very real impression.
Rowell: And what does it do to the person who made the first ascent?
Robbins: Well, a friend of mine told me that while we were on Dawn Wall Harding was really worried about us, because he knew that with 150ft. ropes we would find it difficult - there are some really long leads. My friend said : "There was Harding feeling sorry for you while you were up there chopping his route all to hell." So I told him: "Don't you worry about Harding; he can take care of himself. He can give out as good as anyone else, and he doesn't need pity."
Steck: Do you think this controversy has much relevance to climbers in Britain?
Robbins: Some of the guys over there are almost obsessed with matters of ethics and pure lines and so on. And I think it's a good thing. From my own point of view, I love Yosemite : it means a lot to me and I've been climbing there for twenty years. I've grown up with certain values and I believe in certain things, and I hate to see something I love raped. But I got all my values about climbing from Great Britain. After all, Britain produced Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who said it's not getting to the top that counts, but how you do it - and it strikes me that the lads over there wouldn't put up with a bolt ladder right next to Cenotaph Corner. It just wouldn't be allowed to remain there.
Rowell: But that's a totally different situation. There's no tradition of bolt-placing on that type of cliff, whereas the first route on El Capitan had bolts in it.
Robbins: That's not the point. The fact is that they would feel it was an outrage, and they'd act on that feeling - and that justifies my feeling and my action.
Rowell: Well, it doesn't quite work like that. I think lots of people will go on talking about being anti-bolt, but they'll still keep packing a bolt kit when they go off on a climb.
Steck: Oh! I don't know - there may be a new trend coming in Yosemite climbing - removing routes.
Rowell: We figured this, and you started the trend, Robbins.
Robbins: Oh, come on!
Rowell: No, it's right. We figured that every route on El Cap had offended somebody, somehow, and that the end result would be that every route would be chopped and we would end up back at square one with no routes at all!
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Mar 18, 2017 - 01:32pm PT
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Fine and timely posts, Ed. Nice work!
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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Mar 19, 2017 - 01:25pm PT
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A Sunday evening re-read,
thnx Robbins:
I object to anything that makes bolting easy, because by making it easy you make it more likely. The good thing about bolting in the past was that you had to work to do it.
But if placing a bolt or a bat-hook becomes easier than placing a piton - and Caldwell himself has admitted that it was easier to place rivets than A3 pitons on the climb -
then automatically there will be a tendency to reduce the level of climbing: as soon as people get in difficulty they will take the easy way out and place a rivet instead of working at the problem.
Robbins:
That sounds good, but it doesn't work out in practice.
I would certainly like to see more chocks and even bolts used to eliminate pitons, but people won't do that, of course. There are lots of climbs that could be improved like that. I'm not totally against bolts: I've used enough of them myself.
I'm just against anything that encourages pure technology. I deplore the idle drilling of holes in rock just to get up, and the way this is justified as part of the climb. Placing bolts should be a conscious outrage that you unwillingly accept because it is necessary. I think it's important to stress that bolting is raping: you want to avoid it wherever you can. , ,
I think I'd just gone, or would go to climb in NH, one of my first non-family trips. Stayed at the Dartmouth hut, Boot Spur, lions Head, The Old Man Route, By the spring of '72 weekends in the Gunks had started to be every week...
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Mar 19, 2017 - 03:47pm PT
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"Oh, come on!"
Every word is a gem.
Thanks, Professor.
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Mar 23, 2017 - 08:22am PT
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Really enjoying that you present these interviews in text format, Ed!
.....................................................................
Some points of interest I found in the first interview:
Robbins on Sherrick:
So we got a young climber named Mike Sherrick to join us. He was brilliant. There are few people who have seemed to me to have as much natural ability as Mike - Chuck Pratt, certainly, but I can't think of any others. As a matter of fact I was really jealous of him because he was one of the few climbers at that time who I felt had more natural ability than I. That was really when I first started being competitive and started pushing myself in a way that I haven't stopped doing since. I suppose I've done this in some ways in order to maintain the pleasant aura of success that made me feel so good in the early days. I liked that so much that I determined to keep it coming, no matter what I had to do to get it.
Robbins on Mark Powell:
At that time Powell was one of the top American climbers. He was a sort of Hermann Buhl figure, with great intensity, drive and determination. He would starve himself to keep his weight down and would make some very bold leads for those days.
Robbins on Gary Hemming:
He [Hemming] wanted an answer, a way of dampening the suffering he was going through most of the time. Climbing was a way of doing this. He thought - obviously we all do - that if he did a certain climb things were going to be better.
Robbins, echoing the last sentence of the previous quote on Hemming. I saw him give a talk where he reiterated this idea of a climber feeling more squared with the world after completing a goal. Essentially describing the self-satisfaction from a job well done, and finding deeper meaning in doing so, perhaps in an act of self reconciliation, self-validation or self re-creation. Very interesting and very human.
I'm still going in the direction I started off in... trying to find some sort of peace of mind in doing the ultimate climb that will make everything else all right.
And then, in the context of applying big wall experience to the alpine regions, he goes on to describe the manner in which that goal (of making things better or making everything else all right) is best achieved:
... but some time ago I realized that the ultimate challenge in mountaineering is the one that makes the greatest demands on the maximum number of human qualities. The Eiger has always been the epitome of this. But in bad weather, when you put self-control up against all kinds of things that you haven't been through before - well, that's a much stiffer game, and a more lifelike one. I think that the more you can approximate the rigours of climbing to the rigours of life, the more complete a game it is.
In the talk I saw a Royal give in the 90s, he tied all this in with his personal ethos of coming to the mountain on its own terms as much as possible, and the inherent value of risk acceptance.
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Mungeclimber
Trad climber
Nothing creative to say
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Mar 23, 2017 - 02:10pm PT
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I descended a few hundred feet to help them out. You must remember that it was all done on prussik knots with conventional shoulder abseils
Would you do a shoulder abseil like that today?
hell no. I'm too inured with the mechanical braking devices I grew up on.
#CMIFigure8s!
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Darwin
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Mar 23, 2017 - 07:35pm PT
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Ed,
Thanks for posting this.
Darwin
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 18, 2017 - 06:12pm PT
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Bump.
When I cursorily read through the first interview, a couple of instances stood out as having been used almost verbatim in RR's autobiography, such as his description on climbing with Harding at Tahquitz, for example.
Economy of effort is a valuable trait in climbing.
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Fossil climber
Trad climber
Atlin, B. C.
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Nov 18, 2017 - 07:46pm PT
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Really enjoyed that. I missed the first publications. Thanks!
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