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climber bob
Social climber
maine
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Jun 29, 2015 - 05:03am PT
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I cant seem to get to the correct link to buy the book..any help appreciated
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Prezwoodz
climber
Anchorage
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Jun 29, 2015 - 06:07am PT
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Yeah try Amazon or Chesslers but good luck. This book is gold now! I'm super happy to have gotten mine at the recent fundraiser!
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Roger Breedlove
climber
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
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Jun 29, 2015 - 06:31am PT
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Kevin, back to leading Valhalla, apparently #4 didn't make the cut either. I thought Bud was cool, but that probably meant automatic disqualification for membership.
Since Roper's histories, most Valley history is focused on personalities and stories, rather than who climbed what. Most of the real history is inculded in posts here on Supertopo, but it is getting harder to dig it out. It took me 1/2 an hour to find the thread below--I couldn't remember any detials to search for.
The graphs I posted up-thread were part of the thread I wrote titled Ebs & Flows: Booms & Busts: Valley FAs 1954-1980
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climber bob
Social climber
maine
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Jun 29, 2015 - 06:47am PT
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got it..looking forward to it..thanks
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Bullwinkle
Boulder climber
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Jun 29, 2015 - 11:05am PT
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The StoneMasters Book was never meant to be a History of Yosemite Climbing in the 70's. In fact The StoneMasters themselves are a creation of John Long, an expanding circle of Friends that all shared a rope or reefer together in the Valley and beyond.
This Book is one of Largos best works, he put together a Beautiful narrative from many voices not just his. We asked a number of People to Contribute to this Book, many answered with essays and photographs, some choose not to respond.
Personally it's more Art than History, feeling than Fact, a Dream I shared with my Friends, a Journey we took Together. . .df
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Jun 29, 2015 - 12:21pm PT
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The Stonemaster book was fashioned around Dean's photos and was his vision from the start. I didn't write anything exclusively for the project but just chunked in stories I'd done over the years. And included anything from others that was relevant and good enough. Because Dean was part of the small, So Cal hard core, most of his photos were about that group, and the stories revoled around same. In this regards the Stonemaster book served as a kind of artistic dumpster for both Dean's pics and our stories. We were never attempting a definitive history - I have never been drawn to journalism (imparting facts, figures and information). I do narratives, which focus on people and encounters.
A historical, journalist project (like Roper's Camp 4, but about the 1970s) is needed to build an accurate picture because our book was just a window into a small group and what they did and how they lived. I showed and mentioned that eventually we had no exclusive "Stonemaster" lore or history but I never attempted to tell stories that were not my own.
There are dozen's of possible Stonemaster books told from dozens of angles and perspectives. We did one told from our experience and POV, and the mojo of the project was wrought through its personal delivery.
I would encourage anyone who has anythng to say to have at doing your own Stonemaster book. I'll buy the first copy off the press.
JL
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jun 29, 2015 - 12:36pm PT
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our book was just a window into a small group and what they did and how they lived.
I regret you weren't able to make it to Oakdale two years ago, Largo. You were missed by those who know you. Mebbe next time.
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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Jun 29, 2015 - 04:08pm PT
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This book is gold now!
Guess I should stop using it as a coaster....
edit: will this go into reprint or is it done?
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Roger Breedlove
climber
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
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Jun 29, 2015 - 04:47pm PT
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John, I agree that your and Dean's fine book is about the Stonemasters as we know them and not a history of 70's California climbing. But if most people think that 70s climbing is the climbing of the Stonemasters, then Stonemasters climbing becomes 70s climbing.
You are feeding that fire when you urge anyone to write your own Stonemaster book.
Here is the marketing blurb that opens this thread: The Stonemasters: California Climbers in the Seventies, chronicles the meteoric rise of a small band of Southern Californians who, beginning in the early 1970s, radically altered the course of world rock climbing, and virtually invented the gonzo culture of modern adventure sports. With over one hundred thirty historical photos, along with the landmark essays and stories of John Long (and others), The Stonemasters bring to life the legendary personalities, the victories and the tragedies that set the adventure revolution in motion.
I know it is marketing but apparently a small group of So Cal climbers radically altered the course of world rock climbing and set the adventure revolution in motion.
I think that it makes more sense to tell everyone that you own the trademark rights to "Stonemasters" (even if you don't) and that they have to come up with their own catch phrase.
If I every write the history of early 70s valley climbing, I am going to call it "Camp 4a."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Jun 29, 2015 - 05:34pm PT
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Roger, I think the only reason that Stonemaster climbing became 70s climbing is that few people from that era bothered to write narratives about their experiences back then. And merely running down a laundry list of facts and figures and trip reports will never be remembered like narratives. No matter how accurately you quantify history, readers keep flipping ahead, looking for the people. The solution to fleshing out the historical record is not in doing a book report (info) on the good old days, but IMO, can only happen once others write up their personal stories.
JL
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 29, 2015 - 06:24pm PT
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once others write up their personal stories.
The modern politically correct climbers here can't handle most of the stories.
Except for true hard men like Russ Walling etc ...
Their feeble little overly sensitive brains would explode.
They'd piss in their pants.
OMFG !!!!! WTF !!!! they'd cry
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Prezwoodz
climber
Anchorage
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Jun 29, 2015 - 06:28pm PT
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I've really enjoyed reading the Stonemaster book and all the history during those days. I wasn't around then. Also the book is one of the best designed and most aesthetic I've seen. I'd love to do one similar on Alaska.
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rmuir
Social climber
From the Time Before the Rocks Cooled.
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Jun 29, 2015 - 07:16pm PT
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If a spectacle is going to be particularly imposing I prefer to see it through somebody else's eyes, because that man will always exaggerate. Then I can exaggerate his exaggeration, and my account of the thing will be the most impressive.
— "O'Shah," Europe and Elsewhere, Mark Twain
Privileged to have started climbing in Berkeley only to move to Riverside in 1970, I straddled the climbing scenes in both Northern and Southern California. Talented climbers such as the Bards, Haan, Vandever, Clevenger, Rowell, Harding, et al., had f*ck-all little to climb locally; Yosemite was their local crag—four hours away. Down south, our local crags were Tahquitz and Suicide Rocks, and Josh. We each developed our respective areas as we, ourselves, developed.
It is only to be expected that locals were principally responsible for new route activity in the Valley, and Tahquitz/Suicide/Josh, respectively. The Valley locals were understandably more prolific there in FAs during this period. It is noteworthy, however, that many SoCal climbers had a significant impact on route development in Yosemite throughout the sixties and seventies. The Stonemasters were among them. The Valley was a unique draw. The Stonemasters migrated, enlarged, and were assimilated into the Valley scene, and their circle expanded to include others of like mind. Who were the Stonemasters then?
John and Dean's book is set of stories and images of a circle of lads who, jokingly, called themselves Stonemasters. While it is true that Mike maintained a book listing the first ten continuous ascents of Valhalla, Graham was never serious about the exclusivity of Stonemaster membership. A fellow Ski Mart employee threw out the term one night in my Costa Mesa apartment, and Mike drew up the lightning bolt overnight. It was a beach thing. One time over breakfast at the Baker in the Forest, a friend of mine bemoaned the fact that he wasn't a Stonemaster. I grabbed a joker from a deck of cards and used it to create a membership card for him to carry henceforth. We were just that serious!
The Stonemasters didn't exclude members of the Malibu crowd, Stoney Pointers, the West Ridge boys, or even the San Diego and Woodson folks. In many respects, the Stonemasters didn't exist except as a marketing construct that Johnny (and others) help promulgate until it got far beyond their control. (If you want to adhere strictly to historicity, you can write off Largo's pipe dream about "The Visitation by The Stonemaster" in Richard's basement… Psychedelics of many sorts can facilitate these near-religious phantasms. )
Ivan "Bud" Couch, whom we deeply respected, wasn't part of the "Stonemasters" primarily because he chose not to want to associate with us. Same with Dent, Reynolds, Powell, Higgins… Different generations; different circles of friends.
In some sense, the Stonemaster moniker is about as meaningful as today's Stone Monkeys. It's all hype, bluster, and puffery. But that doesn't negate the usefulness of the construct.
Much of the Stonemasters book is a snapshot of a relatively small group of associates who accomplished so much in such a meaningless, and ultimately trivial endeavor. We loved every minute of it. I'm glad that Dean and John got up the gumption to land that sucker on my coffee table!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 29, 2015 - 08:48pm PT
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Just to remind Kevin that I have offered to scan your old climbing negatives and slides to digital files for free...
I've done a bunch for Roger Breedlove, Ken Boche, Dave Yerian, Dave Rearick, Bonnie Kamps, Clint Cummins, Lynne Leichtfuss, and I'd do more (as long as my scanner holds up).
just send me an email to my STForum account and I'll reply with the details.
As for the data v. narrative... it is true that we like to hear stories, but some voices can dominate. I think the story on Sacherer that evolved on the STForum was indicative of a rather strong point-of-view. Learning about Sacherer I also learned about many climbers that were not so central to the prevailing history of Yosemite climbing in the late 50s and early 60s. However, when I look at modern climbing in the Valley I see the routes pioneered by those climbers have continued relevance.
Roger took the data that I burned out on creating and used it to fashion a narrative, and make a point about important contributions. I had a similar idea when I started but by the time I got to the end I had decided it would be wonderful if people used the data and create new stuff from it...
Also, getting the history "right" is important to people whose contributions were misreported in previous guidebooks, some famous eastern European climbers FA's were unattributed because of some font changes from one version to the next, making their names nearly unrecognizable. It is a loss to the story of climbing in Yosemite.
So while rote data collection might lack the ability to "tell a story" the objectiveness of that data provides a place to start to find bits of history that were not told, for some reason or another.
As far as the Stonemasters are concerned, it was a wonderful story and a fabulous book. We are still too close to the time to write a very good history devoid of our own personal points of view, though we all might have bits of the story that would be important for writing that history, if it ever gets written. Climbing is not so important a topic to most, though it is very important to us.
as far as getting a copy of the book, I saw one in the SF Patagonia store just a couple of weeks ago...
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Todd Eastman
climber
Bellingham, WA
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Jun 29, 2015 - 10:27pm PT
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The gusto of the Stonemasters seems akin to that of the Vulgarians in the Gunks a decade earlier. Lots of other fine climbers, but their stories of a small band of climbers became legendary.
American climbing is richer because of these stories...
... Duke, Duke, Duke!
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bvb
Social climber
flagstaff arizona
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Jun 30, 2015 - 01:04am PT
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Well, I'm no valley historian, but if anyone wants to know more about The Scumbags, I got you covered. We'll go trip to trip, bong to bong, hit to hit, and tab to tab with anybody anytime. F*#kin' purple microdot and sh#t.
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Phantom X
Trad climber
Honeycomb Hideout
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Jun 30, 2015 - 10:17am PT
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Didn't the scumbags smoke pot and boulder at the beach at one time?
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looking sketchy there...
Social climber
Lassitude 33
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Jun 30, 2015 - 02:23pm PT
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More Scumbag history! Were they like the Sheep Buggers?
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jun 30, 2015 - 03:09pm PT
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Tom Wolfe Looks Over His Notes
by Andrea Denhoed
“They’re calling it an archive,” Tom Wolfe points out. “It makes me feel very important.” Wolfe is standing next to an exhibit of his papers at the New York Public Library. In 2013, the library paid just over two million dollars for a hundred and ninety boxes of notebooks, manuscripts, and letters that belonged to Wolfe, a handful of which are on display in the pop-up exhibit “Becoming the Man in the White Suit,” which runs through Sunday, March 1st.
Up close, the suit appears ever so slightly yellowed around the buttons and the cuffs, like a newspaper clipping. Wolfe, who turns eighty-four on March 2nd, talks slowly but walks briskly. He pauses over various objects before offering exclamations of recognition and tentative identifications. “I don’t remember that at all,” he says, peering at one item. He takes in an old sketch, done in bold black pen, peppered with the words “Tom Wolfe” in various scripts. He points out a particularly tidy version as the one most like his current “serious signature.” Later, approached by a young man whose face flushes when they shake hands, Wolfe gives a fully calligraphic version of his autograph, with a large, vigorous swirl underneath, like a hurricane viewed from above and a bit to the side.
The stories that Wolfe tells about his career are well crafted by now, and some have become journalistic legend, but he delivers them as if for the first time. His first magazine assignment, for instance, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” (Wolfe says the title quickly and effortlessly, like one long, krazy word.) He was in his thirties, “too old to have gone through this,” and he “had total writer’s block.”* His editors finally told him to send his notes, “ ‘and we’ll give them to a real writer’—they didn’t say ‘real’—‘to put into proper form.’ And with a very heavy heart, I said O.K. and I sat down to write out the notes.” Within a couple of hours, he says, he thought, “Hey, I can make something out of this.” The anecdote comes to mind after he sees a picture of himself in 1965, striking the confident pose of a dandy and holding a copy of his first essay collection. He credits the fallout of his piece “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!”—a high-kicking takedown of The New Yorker under William Shawn—for sending the book to the best-seller list; “an unanticipated dividend,” he calls it.
A draft of a Phil Spector profile recalls his editors’ initial disbelief at that one: they thought the story too far-fetched to publish, until “they checked it out with Phil and he authenticated all of it.” A handwritten page of his most recent book, the 2012 novel “Back to Blood,” is marked with colored lines and has a few big blocks of text blacked out as if by a C.I.A. censor. “I have never gotten the hang of computers,” he says. “There’s all these steps you go through—you don’t just slip in the paper. You go to ‘TEXT’—no, no, you go to something with a ‘W,’ and finally you get to the page.” A letter from John Glenn sits next to a book of notes that Wolfe took while reporting “The Right Stuff.” He leans in to decipher his penmanship but can make out only a few words: “synergistically to attain, uh, astronaut status.” He straightens up and groans. “The things you go through to write a book.”
Wolfe is currently working on his next book, a history of the theory of evolution from the nineteenth century to the present. He calls the big bang “the nuttiest theory I’ve ever heard” and invokes the Spanish Inquisition when discussing how academics have cast out proponents of intelligent design for “not believing in evolution the right way.” Writing has not gotten easier over the years, he says. “It’s always, to me, very hard. And the only thing that sustains me is the fact that I did it before, and there must be some way I can do it this time.”
Nearly all those previous successes are documented in the hundred and ninety boxes; he hardly ever threw anything away. But Wolfe says that he had nothing like this—the archive—in mind. He likes looking back at old notes, reliving his reporting and writing, though he shrugs off the suggestion that visitors might learn something about him from the notes, “unless they like some of the sketches.”
Hunter S. Thompson once said of Wolfe that “the people who seem to fascinate him as a writer are so weird they make him nervous.” Wolfe doesn’t so much reject this idea as seem baffled by it. He didn’t enjoy being around the Hells Angels, he admits, but Ken Kesey and his Pranksters, on the other hand, were nothing but interesting. While reporting “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” he says, he saw a man in the throes of a drug-fuelled religious experience sit in the middle of a street in San Francisco in the lotus position and yell, “I’m in the pudding, and I’ve met the manager!” Wolfe throws his arms to the sides and tosses his head back as he recounts the scene, revealing a finely turned pair of cuffs and Tiffany-blue suspenders beneath his suit.
(This is from the NEW YORKER, Feb. 28, 2015. Presented by the R. Chive Press)
I am enjoying your rant, Kevin.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Jun 30, 2015 - 06:12pm PT
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At this point I'm assuming this wording is not Roger's, but in fact John's :
"They climbed extreme stuff, they were loud, and clearly differentiated themselves from the old fuddy duddies who were climbing at the time. They smoked dope and shattered boundaries, took the light stuff seriously, and the serious stuff lightly, and they really and truly went for it. An aspect of the surf culture had hit the crag and the Stonemasters brought it to greater, almost holier heights. Those who stand so honorably accused include Rick Accomazzo, Richard Harrison, Mike Graham, Robs Muir, Gib Lewis, Bill Antel, Jim Hoagland, Tobin Sorenson, John Bachar, and of course John Long - "Largo".
As more climbers navigated their way to the Valley (Mark Chapman, Kevin Worrall, Ron Kauk, Werner Braun, Billy Westbay, Ed Barry, Jim Orey, Rik Reider, Dale Bard, and others), the myth and character of the robust Syonemaster began to apply to a wider group of climbers. The term caught on like wildfire, from coast to coast, from shore to shore, and across the Big Pond, and it changed the face of climbing forever"
At this point I would like either John or Roger to take credit for the two paragraphs quoted above.
Kevin, please. I have never written about my own self in the 3rd person. So those words are not mine.
And what questions am I "avoiding" of yours. If you feel that the "real" history is not wrought through people and experiences - which is all that ever interested me - and that a laundry list of facts and figures gets it done, then C. Cummings has pretty much already done this for you. I've seen lists that he and Ed have compiled that have most all the raw data right there - if that's what you are looking for.
At this point, more than ever, I don't much care about appearing in the next all-inclusive list. What I go back to is always the same two things: The direct experiences I had, and the people I climbed with.
And if you were to ever write up your experiences, I wouldn't do so to simply revisit and revise our effort, but rather to put your own self out there with all your might. And write it right across the sky.
JL
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