El Capitan soars above the fine frees of Yosemite Valley in a single sweep of light grey granite. It is difficult to get an idea of its huge scale. The lines are so clean, the rock, on first glance, so featureless. Arguably, it is the most beautiful and dramatic rock feature in the world. There are walls as big, or bigger, in Baffin Island and the Karakoram but none has the same cleanness of line. It is a place of contrasts. Long gone is the unspoilt beauty and peace of the valley bottom for it has become a tourist honey pot with a network of roads, adjacent campsites, lodges and hotels, and yet from a distance it still has that pristine beauty.
The story of the development of climbing on El Capitan mirrors the history of climbing as a whole and yet retains a unique quality of its own. Compared to Europe its development, like that of the west coast of America, is essentially young. Although the valley was discovered by white pioneers in the mid-1850s, serious climbing only began in the 1930s, inspired by a few people who had visited Europe. El Capitan and the other great blank-looking walls seemed unattainable, indeed unthinkable, and the early pioneers sought out tree-filled gullies and broken features.
It was after the Second World War, as with so many other aspects of climbing and adventure, that the breakthrough began to take place, although initially the pace was slow. There was still a tiny number of climbers, many of whom had served in the war and had seen something of climbing in Europe. They began creeping out on to the more exposed faces using the nylon ropes, alloy karabiners and soft iron pitons that were becoming available.
It was to be a European whose name is immortalised by one of the finest rock climbs in the world – the Salathé Wall. John Salathé was born in Switzerland in 1899 and settled in California in the early 1930s, setting up a blacksmith’s business making garden furniture. It was only in 1945 that he discovered climbing. After a long period of ill health he had a vision of an angel who told him to become a vegetarian and shortly afterwards, on the advice of his doctor, he moved up into the hills behind Yosemite, saw the handful of climbers in action and decided to have a go. He wasn’t a natural tree climber and was a little late in starting, but he saw the need for strong steel pitons that could be driven into the thin, often bottoming cracks of Yosemite granite. He also began developing the aid techniques which were to become so much more sophisticated than those used in Europe.
The great challenge of the 1940s was a magnificent blade of solid crackless rock, the Lost Arrow. Its summit had been reached with some clever rope trickery, but its ascent in 1947 by Salathé and Ax Nelson was the first major big wall climb executed in the valley. They took five days to complete the climb and had to carry sufficient water for the duration – a mere six quarts to give them a pint each per day – which, in the event was not enough. By modern standards they had a very small rack consisting of eighteen rock pitons of hardened steel, from thin knife blades to one-inch angle pitons, and eighteen expansion bolts for the blank tip of the Lost Arrow. This ascent opened up the huge potential for climbing on the great walls of the valley, but El Capitan still seemed impossible.
Through the 1950s the numbers of climbers increased. A new young generation emerged who realised they could earn enough in the winter with casual jobs to spend summers climbing. As a result they achieved a level of fitness and expertise that led to rapidly improving standards. With this development came the eternal debate on ethics, of how far it was justified to use expansion bolts and pitons for aid. The nature of the rock and the gear available at the time meant that there seemed to be no alternative to hammering pitons into cracks for protection. The purism of English climbing, which had always spurned the use of pitons, did not seem an option but the extensive use of bolts and siege tactics using fixed ropes was a matter for debate.
Two strong personalities had just come on to the scene. Royal Robbins, a lanky serious youngster, had had an unsettled childhood and brushed with the law. He was rescued by the Scout movement and found an outlet for his sense of adventure back-packing in the High Sierra. He then discovered climbing so dropped out of school at sixteen to get odd jobs at ski resorts and pursue the sport for which he had a natural affinity. His approach was disciplined and structured. He saw the need for a rationalised grading system as standards soared yet were only covered by one all-embracing grade. From the start he took a strong ethical stance on the style of climbing, feeling that the use of siege tactics on the big blank walls of the valley would destroy the spirit of adventure and uncertainty that is so much part of the sport.
He demonstrated his belief with the first ascent of the North-West Face of Half Dome, a magnificent towering wall that was bigger and steeper than anything before climbed. It took five days and involved the longest and wildest pendulum yet attempted to change from one crack system to another. One of the features of Yosemite granite is the way crack lines stretch up the faces and then tend to fade into holdless rock. Robbins wasn’t averse to using bolts to link natural lines but he tried to keep their use to a minimum both on aesthetic grounds and also because drilling the holes in which to hammer the expansion bolts took a long time. The pendulum was a way round this need. The lead climber would get as high as he could on one crack line, have himself lowered some feet and then start running back and forth across the sheer rock, like the weight on the end of a pendulum, until he managed to snatch a hold or crack line at the extremity of his swing – a frightening manoeuvre a thousand feet up a vertical wall.
The other person who was to dominate the Yosemite scene was very different from Robbins. Warren Batso Harding was a maverick, larger-than-life character, representing in many ways the free-spirited individualism that is so much part of climbing. He had a healthy contempt for rules, be they those of society or the ethics observed and argued over by the climbing world. Brought up in California during the depression, ironically he was turned down for military service during the war because of a heart murmur and ended up working in the Highways Department. He made his mark tackling first ascents and yet in some ways remained outside the climbing scene, very much his own man.
Steve Roper, historian of the era and long-term habitué of Camp 4, the place in the valley where all the climbers stayed, describes his first meeting with Harding. It was at a bouldering area in the suburbs of Berkeley. Roper saw a flashy Jaguar roar up and park in the nearby street.
‘“It’s Warren Harding,” someone then whispered. Outstepped a handsome devilish fellow with a young woman draped on his arm. Short and classically wiry, he strolled over to our group, a furtive gleam in his eye. I stared closely, trying to measure the man. ‘I thought I would see him swarm up our practice routes, but instead he sat down and began drinking a jug of wine and telling stories. A sociable chap, I thought, but why doesn’t he climb? Though he wore army fatigue pants, like most of us, he had dyed his black. Looking at his black flashing eyes, his wild black hair, his jet-black pants, his sultry moll by his side, his wine, and his lack of interest in what anyone was climbing, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was fascinated, mainly because the other climbers I knew were spectacled scientists, staid folk who would never have dreamed of wheeling up to a rock with a sports car and a jug and a flashy dame.’
Warren Harding had been involved in an earlier attempt on the North Face of Half Dome with Robbins and some others, but hadn’t felt comfortable with Don Wilson, the self-appointed leader who gave the impression of being in charge and called a retreat on the grounds they were going too slowly. Harding returned some time later with Mark Powell and Bill Dolt Feuerer, with whom he felt more at home and who, I suspect, were happier to concur with his views, only to find that Robbins was already part way up the coveted North Face. Harding’s reaction was: ‘Well, shit, we’re here with all this gear – might as well climb something!’ There certainly were plenty of attractive new routes to be done, but everything else seemed to represent some sort of put down compared to Half Dome. All but one, that is.
And so they went for the Nose of El Capitan, the mass of compact rock which until that moment climbers had glanced at but reckoned impossible. It was altogether bigger, steeper and smoother than anything anywhere in the world that had so far been climbed, so it was perhaps inevitable that that first attempt should have employed siege tactics, nibbling away at the wall over a period of time, slowly gaining height, but returning to ground for rests, provisions and more gear. Up to this point climbs had been made alpine-style, bivouacking on the way up. The most time Harding had ever spent on a climb was four days and the longest anyone had spent was five. It was a matter not just of carrying food and gear, but water as well. This was to be the first major siege climb and at the time was not particularly criticised. It seemed the only way of doing it. The criticism was reserved more for the extent of the media interest. Suddenly, this very private minority activity was being adopted by the national media.
They started on 4 July 1957, but could have had little idea it was going to take eighteen months to reach the top. Their first objective was a clearly defined ledge about 550 feet above the start. It was technically hard from the beginning, a sweep of smooth steep holdless slabs with vanishing unlinked crack lines that demanded pendulum tactics to swing from one line to the next. It took three days to reach the Sickle Ledge, which was to become their base of operations for the next section. Everything then became steeper and more serious with offwidth cracks (ones too wide to jam a hand in, yet not wide enough to insert one’s body). There were more pendulums and the exposure was becoming ever more frightening.
Today it is something of a trade route with a queue of climbers stretched up it through the season. It is all too easy to forget what a challenge it was in 1957-1958 both because they were reaching into the unknown and also because of the gear and techniques available at that time. Although they had hawser-laid nylon ropes, these were so expensive that they were using hemp for their fixed rope. The jumar clamp was not yet in existence, so they ascended the ropes with prusik knots, which were awkward to handle. Although they had hardened steel pitons, these were still basic in design and there were no big angle pitons for use in the wide cracks. One of their secret weapons was a set of stove legs, rescued from a rubbish dump, which acted as wide, but very heavy, angle pitons, to be immortalised in the notorious Stoveleg Crack. They only had four stove legs and the crack was 300 feet long and of uniform width. This meant that Harding had to leapfrog the devices upwards, a frightening procedure, since it entailed removing the intermediate pitons. If the four he was clipped into had pulled out, he would have had a very long fall, and falls were frequent. They used 125 expansion bolts for protection and belays over the entire climb, but even this represented a huge amount of work, drilling by hand the three-eighths of an inch diameter hole needed for the bolt. Harding was using aid practically all the way. Apart from anything else, he was not a brilliant tree climber, being steady, but without the natural genius of Robbins.
They had been on the wall for a week, were tired and had run out of food, water and gear. It was time for a break, so they abseiled to the ground. This in some ways was an easy option but even the abseils and the prospect of prusiking all the way back up were frightening, particularly on the frayed hemp ropes. Once back at ground level other problems arose. Their climb had become a tourist spectacle causing traffic jams on the road below El Capitan. The Park rangers had even tried to order them down, shouting through bullhorns, but Warren chose not to hear. After being hauled in front of the chief ranger, ‘a salty old devil who wasn’t keen on rock climbing or anything else that might disrupt the otherwise smooth operation of Yosemite National Park’, they reached an agreement with the Park authorities that they should stay away until the end of the tourist season.
They got back on to the Nose on Thanksgiving Day, when the November days were getting short and the nights were cold. Mark Powell, a key member of the team, was out of action after a bad fall so Harding invited Robbins to join them. But Robbins declined, later telling an interviewer that he felt it was Harding’s scene and that he didn’t want to use fixed ropes, even though the route probably couldn’t be completed by any other means. Bill Dolt Feuerer was still keen and Harding recruited Wally Reed, a steady climber working the season at Yosemite Lodge, and the legendary Al Steck, who had made the first ascent of Sentinel, but hadn’t climbed for some years. He had a young family and was teaching at Berkeley but couldn’t resist Harding’s persuasive tongue and the assurance that he could prusik all the way and act as a belayer and hauler.
It was a frightening re-introduction. It took them a day and a half to prusik up the fixed ropes to the previous high point. In addition the manila rope was showing serious signs of wear, as Reed was to discover when he found himself plummeting earthwards. The rope had abraded through and he was very lucky to be a short distance above a ledge on which he landed. It’s a tribute to his determination that he kept going. Henceforth all fixed ropes would be nylon and expense be damned. Once at the high point, Harding only managed to make another sixty feet and that night they had their first ever bivouac in slings. There were no ledges and the exposure was terrifying. Steck was beginning to regret being involved. Sitting in slings is hideously uncomfortable, circulation is restricted, you get cramp and it is difficult to shift position. Harding was dangling about fifteen feet above Steck, suspended from a huge homemade T-bar piton hammered in with a heavy oversize hammer. Halfway through the night it shifted, dropping a significant distance before becoming jammed once again. Steck was shaken as badly as Harding by the incident, though they all did their best to laugh it off. If that wasn’t enough, Harding had to answer a call of nature during the night and ended up peeing on Steck.
Next morning Harding managed to nail ninety feet up the crack to the top of what became known as the Dolt Tower where they found a commodious bivouac site. They experienced another near miss as Harding heaved on a huge chockstone in that awkward transition from aid climbing to free. The boulder started to roll outwards and Harding instinctively let go to fall on to his top piton. Fortunately the chockstone rebedded itself, since it could have wiped them all out had it come away. Harding had now climbed a third of the Nose. Early the following spring he and Dolt Feuerer replaced all the manila fixed rope with nylon. Prusiking up the manila ropes after six months of winter storms and the consequent abrasion of the ropes must have been a nerve-wracking experience. By April the team was ready once again. Steck had had enough, but Mark Powell, even though his ankle hadn’t healed, decided to come along to act as a belayer. Feuerer, the engineer, had designed a two-wheel cart to make the chore of load-hauling a little easier. It wasn’t. It required four people and thousands of feet of rope to run the thing. With just a weekend to spare, it took them most of their time to get themselves and their gear to the high point and they only managed sixty feet of fresh ascent.
They returned a month later, had a little more time and made better progress, reaching and establishing Camp 3, a dump of gear, food and water on a large ledge on top of El Cap Tower. They even made quick progress above up an easy chimney behind Texas flake and then bolted up a blank stretch to the foot of the infamous Boot Flake, a wide crack up a slab. Being behind a flake, there is always the possibility of the crack expanding as each angle piton is hammered in, with the risk of the pitons below becoming loose or even falling out. Harding was in his element as he hammered his way cautiously up the precarious crack. It was a fine bold lead, but once again time had run out and they had to return to the ground. The Park authorities were getting restive and the siege had to be put on hold for the summer tourist season.
They returned again in early September, after the Labor Day weekend. They were now a team of six. Powell had relented and was back yet again, to be joined by Wally Reed and a relative novice, Rick Calderwood. Wayne Merry, a summer ranger, and John Whitmore, who had made the first ascent of the North Buttress of Middle Cathedral with Harding, made up the team. This was to be a nine-day push. Just reaching the high point with the hardware and provisions was a major undertaking. They were soaked and frightened by thunderstorms. The newcomers were intimidated by the ferocious unrelenting exposure, but slowly progress was made.
The most challenging section of the entire climb was at the top of Boot Flake. There were no more crack lines above and the next line of weakness was a long way to the left across smooth blank walls. They had already used the pendulum technique, but this one was going to be bigger and longer than anything before attempted. Merry took a belay on the ledge above the flake and lowered Harding off about fifty feet, level with the foot of the flake. It took him live swings to grab the edge of a crack which was out of sight behind a shallow corner. He managed somehow to hang on, tap in a piton and then take stock. He was disappointed. The crack petered out after only a few feet but there was another crack system that did seem continuous another twenty feet or so further to the left. He passed the rope through a karabiner, clipped in to the piton, yelled to Merry to lower him once again so that he could make another pendulum. They were out of sight of each other, could barely hear each other’s yells, yet Harding kept going, managing the final pendulum to reach the elusive crack line.
Merry then had to join him by a series of terrifying prusiks and abseils, in their way both more frightening and exacting than the initial pendulum. So many things can go wrong with the possibility of frayed ropes, faulty knots or clipping. At the end of nine days’ hard and nerve-jangling work they had only increased their vertical height by a few feet. It was time to retreat yet again. There were two more attempts in October, but they were hindered by storms and the sheer distance that had to be covered each time on the fixed ropes. Consequently they made no more upward progress. The Park authorities were becoming impatient and issued an ultimatum that the climb had to be finished by Thanksgiving Day.
Warren set out on one last push. The team was now down to four, Harding, Calderwood, Merry and a newcomer, George Whitmore. They had at least fully stocked their top camp, called Camp 4, in their two previous forays. This meant it took just a day to prusik the 1,900 feet to their high point. The Great Roof, a huge overhang, loomed above them but it went surprisingly easily up a perfect peg crack that slid round it. Above, the difficulties relented. Steve Roper memorably describes the upper third of the Nose: ‘Planes of marble-smooth granite shoot upwards towards infinity. The various dihedral walls, dead vertical at this stage, converge in broad angular facets, and climbing through this magical place is like living inside a cut diamond.’
Harding and Merry were sharing the leads. It was straightforward aid climbing with good cracks into which they just had to pound their pitons, clip in a karabiner and stirrup, step into the top loop and hammer in another piton. But it all took a long time and they were making little more than a hundred feet a day, dropping back to their top bivouac, Camp 6, each night. It demanded constant concentration, checking and rechecking every knot and interlinked sling in an environment more daunting then ever before experienced by climbers.
Calderwood and Whitmore were acting as Sherpas, ferrying the supplies up the fixed ropes behind the assault team. In many ways theirs was the more exacting role, for there was none of the excitement of making the route, just the grinding hard work of hauling heavy loads and endless terrifying prusiks when every moment the rope gave a few inches they felt it was their last. They were running out of gear, particularly bolts and drills. Calderwood abseiled all the way down to the ground to phone the Ski Hut in Berkeley for more gear to be sent to Yosemite by special delivery and then prusiked all the way back up to Camp 6, where he had a narrow escape. Camp 6 was a fairly commodious ledge, so he hadn’t bothered to tie himself into a safety line as he moved around, and very nearly tumbled over the edge. It was all too much. He packed his sack and headed for home.
This just left three of them, Merry and Harding out in front and Whitmore leading a solitary existence, often on a lower bivouac, relaying supplies up the face. The days were getting shorter, the nights longer and colder. On 10 November they were hit by a blizzard and made no progress at all, but they knew they were close to the top and could even hear the shouts of friends waiting to greet them. Harding worked through the next night by the light of a head torch, drilling his way up a blank wall above the black void. To save time and effort he only drilled every third hole deep enough for the bolt to go all the way in. He drilled twenty-seven bolts through the night and in the dawn of 12 November pulled over the lip of the wall to scramble up the summit slabs and be greeted by a crowd of friends and representatives of the media. He looked even more than usually the wildest of wild men, with his unkempt black hair, hands torn and bloody, as, with a wolfish smile, he accepted a swig of red wine.
They had lived for twelve days on the wall on that final attempt, longer than anyone had been on such a face before. He had spent altogether forty-five days spread over eighteen months on the wall – a tribute to his dogged tenacity. He had always been the driving force, for the most part climbing with people of less experience. It was the longest, steepest, hardest climb in technical terms to have been completed anywhere in the world. At the same time, within the American climbing community, it was also the most controversial on a number of fronts. The purists had reservations, not only about the siege tactics employed, but also about the publicity that they felt Harding had sought. It was claimed that his girlfriend made regular calls to the media, keeping them up to date on the progress of the climb.
Steve Roper commented: ‘Climbing publicity is not intrinsically sinister. Yet for those who regarded climbing as a type of pure sport, as many in those halcyon days were wont to do, publicity was something to be shunned. Outsiders couldn’t possibly understand our motives, so you climbed for yourself. You wanted peer recognition of course, but you never went outside the immediate group for acceptance.’
It was Robbins who made the second ascent, just two years later, with three of the leading climbers of the day, Tom Frost, who would join me on the South Face of Annapurna in 1970, Joe Fitschen and Chuck Pratt. They were determined to climb it alpine style, in a single push, and took just seven days. But it must be remembered that all 125 bolts were in place and, more important, that intangible barrier of the unknown had been removed. A year later, in 1961, Robbins, Frost and Pratt turned their attention to the huge face to the left of the Nose, to make the first ascent of the Salathé Wall. The challenge was so enormous they can be forgiven making an initial three-and-a-half-day sortie on a long diagonal traverse towards a natural line of weakness leading straight to the top. They then abseiled straight down, leaving the ropes in place. A few days later, on the climb proper, they removed the ropes as they ascended and threw three of them to the ground, keeping just three for the climb. Thus they cut the umbilical cord safeguarding their retreat in order to commit themselves totally to the climb. They topped out in six days after some of the most difficult free and aid climbing ever done on a big wall at that time. Robbins expressed his approach to the climb and his attitude to adventure in the American Alpine Journal: ‘It was perfectly clear to us that given sufficient time, fixed ropes, bolts and determination, any section of any rock wall could be climbed.’
Should Warren Harding have left the Nose to his climbing betters? I don’t think so. Climbing needed the catalyst, the irritant, that he provided with such flare. Harding’s contempt for rules, for the ‘Valley Christians’ as he described the purists, is typical of the individualism of so many adventurers and innovators. He struck out at them in his 1975 book, Downward Bound: A Mad! Guide to Rock Climbing. Part light-hearted instruction, part spoof, part story of his climbs, part self-justification, he had this to say to Steve Roper, author of a new guide to Yosemite climbing, which contained a section on ethics: ‘This material reads like a religious catechism. (I’ve often wondered about what sort of uh- religious training these fellows enjoyed during their formative years.) I found this quite amusing, for Roper and the others as well, seemed to project an image of rebelliousness toward society and all its mores. So now, in great logic, these fellows exhibited a strong desire for something to be righteous and moral about, something to conform to, a longing to proselytise.’
Harding went on to confound the purists in 1970 with his ascent of the Dawn Wall, a huge stretch of blank rock to the east of the Nose. He tackled it alpine style with Dean Caldwell, spending three weeks on the wall, itself a record, battered by storms, running out of food, but keeping going. Even so, they were criticised because they weren’t following a natural line. There being few cracks, they used a huge number of bolts, drilling 330 holes in all, though many of these were used for bat hooks, a precarious means of ascent, whereby a hook is placed in a shallow hole to allow the climber to stand in the sling attached to it. You could do several moves like this before needing to drill a deeper hole and hammer in a bolt.
Initially Robbins was magnanimous, stating: ‘Good to have a man around who doesn’t give a damn what the establishment thinks. As our sport becomes rapidly more institutionalised, Harding stands out as a magnificent maverick.’ In making the second ascent with Don Lauria, however, he could not resist the urge to eradicate the route, hammering out the offending bolts. In doing this he was defying climbing etiquette which holds that one is only justified in removing a bolt if one has managed to lead that particular stretch of rock without using it. They became so impressed, however, by the extreme difficulty of some of the aid climbing using natural features in the rock, that they relented and in the upper part left the offending bolts alone.
Asked recently about Robbins’ action, Harding replied, ‘That whole thing was blown up. Everyone thought that I’d be all bummed out about the bolt chopping. Nothing could have been further from the truth! I thought it was funny!’
This was his last major climb, though he made a couple of lesser new routes in 1975 and, in 1989 at the age of sixty-five, he repeated his route on the Nose, climbing with Mike Corbett and Ken Yager. Today, in his mid-seventies, he still lives in California with his partner Alice, enjoys his red wine and on occasion acts as ground crew for a ballooning friend. Within a few years the Nose was to change from being the impossible to being a classic test piece for any competent big wall climber. It was also to act as a yardstick for extreme climbing development. There were three challenges – trying to climb it in an ever-faster time, climbing it solo and climbing it entirely free without pulling on any pegs or bolts, an aspiration which seemed impossible until very recently. Speed and advances in climbing technique were undoubtedly helped by improvements in climbing gear, particularly the adoption of ever more sophisticated metal wedges and camming devices, originally introduced in Britain, and footwear with ever stickier rubber soles.
In 1967 Jim Bridwell, a brilliant and colourful climber, treed the notorious Stoveleg Crack. Henry Barber, who came from New Hampshire, climbed the route in three days, saving a lot of time by doing much of it tree and using hand-inserted protection. In 1975 Bridwell returned with Billy Westbay and John Long to become the first to climb the Nose in a day. In 1990 Peter Croft and Dave Schultz climbed the Nose and Salathé Wall within an incredible eighteen hours, while in the previous year Steve Schneider had soloed the Nose in 21 hours 22 minutes.
The greatest challenge of all was to climb the Nose free. The 1980s, with rising rock-climbing standards around the world, saw many routes going free that had originally been climbed using extensive aid, and 1980 saw the first serious free attempt on the Nose by Ray Jardine. He was the inventor of the Friend, an adjustable camming device which revolutionised protection in wide parallel cracks. The main crux was the completely blank section above the top of El Cap Tower. Jardine chiselled a sparse line of holds to link the two lines of weakness, but the Great Roof defeated him. Repeated insertion and removal of chrome molybdenum pegs in the thin crack snaking up the side of the huge overhang had left widened pockets into which fingers that were not too large could just fit, but it was too much for Jardine.
It was another thirteen years before the Nose was climbed free in its entirety, although there were plenty of attempts. It was a trip not so much into the geographical, as into the athletic and personal unknown and in many ways epitomises the challenge and dilemma of the modern adventurer when all the obvious geographical firsts have been attained. It was Lynn Hill who found the solution and in doing so not only established herself as the best woman rock climber in the world, but broke through the sex barrier, emerging as one of the best, if not the best, all round rock climbers in history.
At only five foot one, she made up for lack of height with a superb power to weight ratio, gymnastic ability and, most important, focus of mind. Born in 1961 her apprenticeship was very much a traditional one that inevitably took her to Yosemite with an ascent of the Nose and other test pieces. One of her climbing partners was John Long who had made the first ascent of the Nose in a day.
She visited Europe for the first time in 1986 at the invitation of French climbers and was impressed by the standards that had been developed on the limestone walls of southern France. Sport climbing, as it has come to be known, using bolts for protection but climbing the rock without using any aid, had progressed to a high level. In a way it was a retreat from adventure for the element of risk had been minimised to allow the climber to develop his or her athletic skill to the ultimate. It also marked the birth of formalised competition climbing. Lynn Hill was invited to Bardonecchia in Italy for one of the early competitions. She was the only American there, it was all strange to her, but she ended up very nearly winning, being runner up to Catherine Destivelle from France.
These two women dominated the burgeoning competition climbing circuit for the next few years. It gave them the means of earning a very good living around the activity they loved, enabled them to stretch their skills to the limit and reach the clearly defined summit of that sport. Both, however, grew tired of the limitations of competition climbing, always indoors on artificial walls with the pressure of intensive training. Each returned to traditional adventure climbing, Destivelle making a series of remarkable ascents in the high mountains, which included a solo new route on the South-West Pillar of the Dru and an ascent, with Jeff Lowe, of a new route on the Trango Tower in the Karakoram. Lynn Hill, meanwhile, returned to Yosemite and the challenge of the Nose of El Capitan.
While climbing at Cave Rock near Lake Tahoe she happened to meet up with Simon Nadin, a British climber who had also been on the competition circuit, becoming first ever world champion at the 1989 finals in Leeds. He, like Lynn, came from a traditional climbing background and like her had returned to it. When they discovered that they were both intrigued by the challenge of climbing the Nose free, Simon postponed his return flight to Britain and three days later they were in Yosemite.
They reached the foot of the Great Roof on their third day without incident, but were beginning to feel the fatigue of not only free climbing 2,000 feet but also of hauling their provisions and carrying a heavy rack of nuts and camming devices. Lynn commented: ‘After climbing from 5.30 a.m. until midnight the previous day, I had gained a great respect for the amount of time and energy the route demanded. The force of gravity seemed to multiply the higher we climbed.’
They were sharing the lead and Simon had first try on the Great Roof pitch, but quickly backed off. It was now Lynn’s turn She laybacked up the sheer open corner, the tips of her fingers barely fitting into the thin crack, to where the roof thrust out above her. This was the crux, with a series of tenuous undercut holds in the back of the bulging overhang and even more tenuous smears on the granite wall for her feet. She was nearly at the end, when she miscalculated a move, her foot slipped and she was off, hurtling head first towards the ground 2,000 feet below. Ironically, the very steepness and smoothness of the wall was her protection and she ended dangling, unhurt, at the end of the rope. Her running belay had held and Simon lowered her to the ledge.
She was now very tired, realised that she had used up almost all her energy, but was determined to have just one more try, summoning what reserves she had, this time pushing beyond her previous high point, reaching for the very last hold, when her foot slid off what was no more than a smear. Miraculously, her head touched the roof just at the right moment to enable her to maintain equilibrium and she propelled herself on. She extended her arm as far as she could and reached her fingers into a small undercling lock. A few relatively straightforward moves and she was on the ledge to join some Croatian climbers who were tackling the route by conventional means.
Next morning she and Simon shared their last morsels of food, half an energy bar and a date each, and then set out on their fourth day with some hard climbing ahead. Simon led the notorious pitch round the Glowering Spot, so named by Warren Harding because he had broken his hammer therein a particularly awkward bit of aid climbing and there is a lump of rock that looks like a grumpy face.
Lynn was hoping to conserve her diminishing stock of energy for the final extreme section just above Camp 6 where others had tried and failed. It was reputed to be very blank, needing a long reach, something that Lynn most certainly did not have. A brief investigation was enough to show there were no intermediate holds. The way Harding had originally gone was up a sheer groove to the right with a hairline crack in its back. Just getting into it was desperate. At least, at its base was a pocket where she might have got a finger lock, but it was filled by the stub of an old broken-off piton. She tried everything, trying to brace herself in the smooth flared holdless corner, but she could make no upward progress and eventually admitted defeat, using aid to complete the climb and reach the top.
But she could not let it go and constantly thought of ways and means of solving this seemingly impossible problem. Sponsorship crept into the equation, but in an indirect kind of way. One of her sponsors was so impressed by her free ascent of the Great Roof, a major achievement in its own right, they wanted her to repeat it in front of a professional photographer in order to get some really good advertising shots. She could do this and try to complete the section that had defeated her as well.
She invited Brooke Sandahl, who had been exploring free climbing possibilities on the upper part of the Nose the previous year, to join her. They started by abseiling in from the top to investigate and, to a degree, prepare the critical pitch above Camp 6. Lynn removed the broken-off piton, to free up a hold to start with and then spent three days trying out various permutations of moves to climb the pitch. ‘As I became engrossed in exploring unusual techniques and body positions on this pitch, I was increasingly appreciative of its extraordinary nature. Climbing it free would involve an ingenuity and technical finesse that I rarely, if ever, encountered on any other route.’ She eventually managed to complete the pitch with only one fall, but felt that to claim the entire climb as a free ascent, she had to start at the bottom and go all the way to the top. This time they had more food, slipped into a better rhythm, enabling Lynn to lead the Great Roof in a single push. They pressed on past Camp 5, up the pitch round the Glowering Spot, which this tune she led to reach Camp 6 and get a good night’s sleep before the final challenge. She dreamt of the moves that night and the following morning it all came together as if in the dream. The final pitch casting to left and right for tenuous holds to either side of Harding’s bolt ladder, led them to the top and the completion of a climb that established Lynn Hill’s position as one of the most extraordinary rock climbers of all time.
But it still wasn’t quite enough for her. Could she complete the climb in a day? It wasn’t so much to make a speed record as to climb it in as elegant a way as possible, to travel light without the need of hauling food and water. ‘It not only represented a kind of marathon linkage of this monumental route but provided a new focus and evolution in my life.’
Her climbing partner was to be Steve Sutton, who was happy to take on the role of belayer, jumaring all the way up the route. His role was similar to that of a caddy to a top professional golfer. He was even being paid. Lynn welcomed the encouragement he gave her. On her first attempt she made the mistake of co-producing a documentary film of her ascent and, not surprisingly, found she was losing that very focus she sought. By the time she reached the Great Roof after twenty-two pitches of climbing, she had run out of chalk, nearly run out of water, was tired and flustered, and after five attempts and five and half hours’ struggle, they completed the climb using aid.
She was back again a fortnight later, this time without filming commitments and fully focused on the climb ahead. They started at 10 p.m. climbing in the ethereal light of a full moon and were at the Great Roof by 8.30 in the morning. She took a rest, dozed for what seemed no time at all but suddenly realised that the sun was creeping round the corner. It was vital to climb the Great Roof while it was still cool. This time she made the daunting pitch in a single push, laybacking the open corner to the roof with an easy rhythmic movement, placing the occasional nut and clipping into in-situ pitons. Then as she came to the overhang with its tiny undercut holds, she had a moment of self-doubt. To save on energy, she hadn’t bothered to clip a piton just below, suddenly realised that if she did fall, she’d swing hard into the corner. She thrust away the moment of doubt, focused on the rock in front of her, taking each move steadily, to pull out on to the ledge at 10.25.
It was getting ever hotter. Pitch followed pitch. The next major challenge was the Glowering Spot, which she reached at midday. She was beginning to tire and her hands were sweaty. She’d reached the hard moves, placed a Stopper (small metal wedge) in the crack, but before she had time to seat it, it slipped out. She didn’t have another of the right size. Had she fallen she would have hit the ledge some thirty feet below. She kept cool, found another placement for one of her two remaining pieces of gear, and pulled up and over the crux to easier ground.
It was only one o’clock in the afternoon when she reached Camp 6 but the hardest pitch of all was ahead. The holds in the open groove were so tenuous she needed the rock to be as cool as possible for better friction for her climbing shoes and the complex pressure holds she would be using. She tried to doze through the afternoon, waiting for the groove to go into the shade. She waited four and a half hours but, impatient to get going, started before the rock had had time to cool and, as a result, had her first fall. The moves were so complex, convoluted, and tenuous, requiring precise body balance and muscular pressure. She got it wrong and once again went hurtling down. She rested on the belay, refocusing and trying to keep the doubt from sliding into her mind, but she was getting tired. This third attempt could be her last chance. She started up the complex opening moves again but had not even got as high as on her previous attempt before her foot slipped and she was off once more. It wasn’t life threatening; she could afford to fall, but she had put in so much effort.
She went into the fourth attempt. She concentrated everything she had on those next moves. This was the concentration of the Olympic athlete going for gold but there was no audience, just the huge void below and a smooth sheer rounded arête in front which she was pinching with her fingers as she frictioned her feet precariously up its edge. This time she made it, reached a positive hold and pulled up to the belay ledge.
She still had four pitches to climb. The last two were difficult and strenuous, although nothing like as hard as the one she had just completed. The top pitch, the section on which Harding had hammered a bolt ladder, gave a last challenge with the final overhang. She knew her reserves of strength were very nearly finished. She made one last dynamic irreversible lunge for the final hold on the final roof, caught it, heaved and swung up on to the easy slabs that led to the top of the Nose. She had achieved her objective, thirty-three rope-lengths, more than 3,000 feet of supremely hard climbing in just twenty-three hours.
There have been similar free ascents on other routes on El Capitan. The Wyoming climbers Paul Piana and Todd Skinner climbed the Salathé Wall free in 1988. It was repeated by the Huber brothers from Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, who then went on in 1997 to make a remarkable new route completely free up the line of the North America Wall to the right of the Nose. This was repeated some days later by two young British climbers, Leo Houlding and Patrick Hammond on their first visit to Yosemite and their first big wall. But no one has repeated Lynn Hill’s achievement. The closest has been a local climber, Scott Burke who in 261 days of actual climbing over a three-year period , managed to lead all but the Great Overhang, which he top-roped.¹
Lynn Hill’s free ascent was nearly thirty-six years after that of Warren Harding’s first ascent. Both were extraordinary achievements in their different ways from such very different people. Warren, an anarchic individualist and free-wheeling maverick, not remotely bothered by the Puritan mores of his peers, defied ethical stances and yet was very much the climbers’ climber, the stuff of legends. Perhaps it needed all of that to get the seemingly impossible climbed in the first place. In contrast, Lynn Hill, with her finely tuned self-discipline perfected the climb, in effect making a new and fresh route, arguably the longest and most difficult free rock climb in the world.
1 Editor’s note: the Nose was free-climbed in full by Beth Rodden and Tommy Caldwell in 2005, and later the same year by Caldwell in a day. [Back]