All that day he was pinned down in the tent, but the next morning the cloud around him cleared, although the sky was still overcast with a high scum of grey. He realised that he had to get down that day and so abandoned tent, sleeping bag and food, knowing that if he failed to escape from the face before dark he would have little chance of survival. He set out, heading down the long snow slopes towards the ice runnel running down the centre of the face between the Mummery Rib and the great ice wall – his only hope of descent, for the rocks on the rib were plastered with a thin layer of ice. But it was also the natural avalanche line. Messner had no choice – he just had to hope for the best. He slipped on the way down, knew that once he fell he would be out of control and so raced down the slope in a series of giant strides, crampons biting into the ice as he tried to regain his balance and get back control. Lungs heaving, trembling with shock, he managed to do it. And so it went on through the day, the whole time at the edge between extinction and survival, of accepting exhaustion and forcing himself on, each step on the hard ice needing all his concentration as he teetered down, seeming to go little faster than he had on the way up.
And then he was down; almost without realising it, the angle had eased. He was on the dry glacier at the foot of the face and just had to put one foot in front of the other. Ursula came out to meet him. The climb was over.
‘Somehow I have overstepped my limitations; my strength, the loneliness. A year ago feeling I was alone was my weakness. I am not saying that now I have got over it, no, I was only totally alone for a few days. But it was beautiful. I don’t know everything about loneliness yet – that too is reassuring.’
The following year Messner climbed K2, this time as part of an expedition and then, in 1980, he climbed Everest solo, once again without oxygen, from the Chinese side. The pattern, in many ways, was very similar to that of Nanga Parbat. A girlfriend, this time Nena Ritchie, from Canada, accompanied him to Base Camp and, like Ursula in 1978, went with him to his advanced camp. Once again he took the mountain by storm, climbing it in just three days by the North Ridge, the route attempted by the British before the war and first climbed by the Chinese in 1960. It was an amazing feat. To put it into perspective, there had been twenty-five successful expeditions to Everest between 1953 and 1980, none of them with fewer than thirty climbers and Sherpas, none of them without oxygen and not one of these expeditions had taken less than a month to climb the mountain. Since Messner’s solo ascent there has been an explosion of activity, due both to the Nepalis and Chinese allowing any number of expeditions on to Everest at the same time, and the growth of commercial expeditions. Messner showed what can be done.
He went on to climb all fourteen of the 8,000-metre peaks, finishing with Lhotse in 1986. In doing this he gave birth to a sub-sport in mountaineering – that of 8,000-metre peak bagging – before giving up serious mountaineering and turning to what he describes as ‘ice walking’ in Antarctica and in the Arctic. But in the mountains there are still infinite opportunities. Climbers, using alpine-style tactics have tackled ever steeper and technically more difficult climbs on the highest peaks, not only in the summer season, but in winter as well. One of the most impressive in this genre was the first ascent of the West Face of Gasherbrum IV (7,925 metres) by Voytek Kurtyka and Robert Schauer in 1985. Today no face or line can be dismissed as impossible but it was Messner who opened up the possibilities of climbing the highest peaks solo and in alpine style.
– Chapter 11 –
A Vertical Desert
The challenge of El Capitan
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 an
d 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.
Quest for Adventure Page 28
