The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

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  YEARS LATER, I took an interest in learning more about Yosemite’s early history. The story the park service peddles at the visitor center hides some unpleasant facts. Before the tourist hotels and the guided nature walks led by the famous naturalist John Muir in the 1870s, Yosemite Valley was home to a polyglot tribe of Native Americans (mostly Miwoks, Paiutes, and Monos) who called the place Ahwahnee (which means “Gaping Mouth”) and themselves Ahwahneechee (“those who live in the Gaping Mouth”). The troubles began when a carpenter named James W. Marshall found flakes of gold in the American River in 1848. This discovery set off the California gold rush, which drove tens of thousands of fortune hunters into the Sierra Nevada. Conflicts between the prospectors and the indigenous tribes who lived in these mountains soon followed.

  By 1850, the natives living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada were becoming increasingly concerned about how many white settlers were moving into the region. In hopes of driving the white men out of the area, they began raiding settlements. In December of that year, a war party attacked a trading post owned by a man named James Savage, killing three of his men. Local settlers had been looking for an excuse to go to war with the Indians, so they petitioned the governor, who approved the formation of a volunteer militia called the Mariposa Battalion. Savage was given the command. In March of 1851, the federal Indian commission signed treaties with six tribes. The treaties stipulated that the tribes would be relocated to a reservation in the San Joaquin Valley. The Ahwahneechee’s chief, Tenaya, hadn’t showed up for the meeting. A few days later, Savage and his army of 518 men found Tenaya at a village called Wawona. Tenaya tried to persuade Savage against continuing north, where it was rumored there were more villages.

  In 1851, San Francisco was a quintessential boomtown, having been transformed, practically overnight, into one of the most important cities in the American West. In the three years since the gold rush began, the city’s population had grown from 1,000 to nearly 30,000. Its harbor was bustling with ships that were arriving by the day from all over the world, including the Far East. The forty-niners and their wagon trains were streaming east into the Sierra Nevada, but there still wasn’t a single non-native on the continent who knew about the existence of Yosemite Valley. And Tenaya was trying to keep it that way.

  Savage and his men had been hired by the US government to root out every single Ahwahneechee, so they continued their march through the foothills, taking turns breaking trail in waist-deep snow. On March 21, they crested a ridge and descended into Yosemite Valley.

  One of the soldiers in the battalion was a physician named Lafayette Bunnell. Four decades later, in 1892, he would publish a classic book about the campaign called Discovery of the Yosemite and the Indian War of 1851. In it, Bunnell writes about seeing the “frightful rock chief” from a spot that is probably not far from Tunnel View.

  None but those who have visited this most wonderful valley, can even imagine the feelings with which I looked upon the view that was there presented. The grandeur of the scene was but softened by the haze that hung over the valley,—light as gossamer—and by the clouds which partially dimmed the higher cliffs and mountains. This obscurity of vision but increased the awe with which I beheld it, and as I looked, a peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears with emotion.

  Bunnell was so enthralled by the majestic view that he was still gazing into the distance, in a sort of reverie, while the rest of the battalion continued its descent into the valley. Savage called to him to get his head out of the clouds if he didn’t want to be scalped by Indians who might be hiding in the woods hoping to pick off stragglers. In his book, Bunnell recounts his reply: “If my hair is now required, I can depart in peace, for I have here seen the power and glory of a Supreme being: the majesty of His handy-work is in that ‘Testimony of the Rocks.’ That mute appeal—pointing to El Capitan—illustrates it, with more convincing eloquence than can the most powerful arguments of surpliced priests.”

  His book recounts the effort he made to record the names the Ahwahneechee had ascribed to virtually every feature in the valley. Then, without apology, Bunnell renames everything. The valley’s biggest cliff seems to have more than one native name. Tul-tuk-a-nú-la is a Miwok word meaning “Measuring Worm.” The name comes from a creation story about El Capitan. Two bear cubs, their bellies full of berries, fall asleep on a rock, which grows up underneath them into a towering cliff. All the animals in the valley try to climb the wall to save them, but they find it impossible. Finally, an inchworm, the least likely of all the valley’s creatures, offers to help. Inch by inch, it scales the wall and saves the bear cubs.

  The other native name for El Capitan is To-to-kon-oo-lah, which means “Rock Chief.” Bunnell writes that when he asked Tenaya about the origin of the name, the chief took him to an overlook with a view of the cliff and “triumphantly pointed to the perfect image of a man’s head and face, with side whiskers, and with an expression of the sturdy English type.” Translating Tenaya’s “Tote-ack-ah-noo-la” into Spanish, Bunnell named the wall El Capitan. Most important, he also named the valley itself (with input from the other soldiers), “Yosemity.” The name probably comes from the Miwok word yohhe’meti, which, according to Bunnell’s book, means “grizzly bear.” It was the name other tribes called the Ahwahneechee because of their renown as hunters of these bears. Bunnell writes that in the valley “their [grizzly] trails were as large and numerous, almost, as cow-paths in a western settlement.”

  The Mariposa Battalion would lead three sorties that spring, two of them into Yosemite Valley. What the soldiers did to the Ahwahneechee is the part that’s been edited out of the story at the visitor center’s replica Native American village. Apparently, the park service has decided that people would rather not know that the US government–sanctioned Mariposa Battalion torched the Ahwahneechee’s villages, looted their food stores, and killed Tenaya’s favorite son in cold blood—then brought the great chief to see the body. “In no fewer than seven separate incidents [in Yosemite Valley] they killed at least twenty-four to thirty Ahwahnees, and perhaps many more,” says Benjamin Madley, a historian at UCLA and the author of An American Genocide. This number was a fraction of the total number of Native Americans killed during the six-month campaign. The battalion, which would be well paid for its service, disbanded on July 1, 1851. In the end, it succeeded in driving the Ahwahneechee out of their ancestral home to a reservation on the Fresno River, where they would face death and starvation.

  Over the next few years, Ahwahneechee survivors trickled back into the valley, including Tenaya, who was allowed to leave the reservation. (The US Senate never ratified the treaty that Tenaya had signed.) By 1860, hotels had sprung up and tourists began to outnumber the natives. The hotel owners hired the Ahwahneechee to pose for photos with their guests. But they asked them to dress like Plains Indians, in tasseled buckskins and feathered headdresses, because this better fit the stereotype of what an American Indian should look like.

  By the 1950s, the park service decided that the Ahwahneechee Village was an eyesore and a new rule was established, whereby only employees of the park service and its concessionaire would be allowed to live in the park. The last dwelling was destroyed in 1969. Today, in addition to the faux village at the visitor center, a project is under way to rebuild one of the original Ahwahneechee villages, called Wahhoga, on its former site. It currently has on display a few conical bark dwellings called umachas.

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  BY THE DAWN of the new millennium, a modern version of the Stonemasters had taken over the Yosemite climbing scene, and with a tip of their hat to the previous generation, they called themselves the Stone Monkeys. The Monkeys, like their predecessors, broke new ground on the valley walls, establishing some of the world’s most important long free climbs, such as Freerider, El Corazon, and the Quantum Mechanic. They also took s
eriously their responsibility to carry on the feral, rebellious antics their predecessors had enshrined into valley climbing lore. When the Monkeys weren’t practicing their craft on the valley’s towering cathedrals, they were generally making a nuisance of themselves, loitering around a slackline (a tightrope of nylon webbing strung between two trees), staging drunken bicycle demolition derbies in parking lots, making a ruckus in Camp 4 with all-night parties, and stalking tourist picnic tables in search of unfinished meals they could scavenge. At night, the Monkeys retreated to their various illegal bivouacs, where they hid from the park rangers like chimpanzees roosting in the jungle canopy, safe and secure from predators.

  Most Monkeys had at least one nickname, many of which were created by Brian “Coiler” Kay, who lived in the same cave for so many years that it is still known to this day as the Coiler Cave. Coiler was the troop’s bard, and he’d entertain the Monkeys around the campfire at night with his singing and strumming. If he wrote a song about you, there was no chance it would be complimentary.

  “Clear out the parking lot, here comes Mr. Way. Do you have a tissue, because he’s got an issue.”

  “Swills McGills got a plan now, he’s gonna swill, swill, swill, swill, then he’s gonna drill, drill, drill, drill.”

  Aaron Jones once climbed twenty-one Yosemite big walls in a single season. This meant climbing on El Capitan in August, when it can be one hundred degrees for days on end. Most of the Monkeys had moved up to Tuolumne Meadows or were spending their days hiding in the shade by the side of the river, drinking malt liquor. Jones kept at it until he literally roasted himself alive on a route called Tempest. The third-degree burns earned him the nickname “Burn-Face Boy.”

  Dean Fidelman, aka “Bullwinkle,” bore the distinction of being both a Stonemaster and a Stone Monkey. Fidelman is an award-winning photographer who has been chronicling Yosemite climbing since the 1970s. He still shoots in black and white and processes his film in the dark room at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Valley. One of his best pieces of work is an annual calendar called Stone Nudes, each month of which is a photo of a beautiful woman bouldering in the buff. (He tried a Stone Dudes version, which is filled with pictures of the Monkeys, but it wasn’t a big seller.)

  Ivo Ninov, a Bulgarian climber and BASE jumper, didn’t have a nickname but was as core a Monkey as there ever was. Ivo couldn’t leave, or get busted by the rangers, because he had overstayed a tourist visa and was in the country illegally. Ivo never referred to himself in the singular, even if he was alone. Instead of saying “I,” he would always say “the Monkeys.” His favorite saying was “The Monkeys are sending.”

  For some Monkeys, it seemed, the rock climbing served more as a means to inebriate themselves in the most outlandish ways than an end in itself. Ammon McNeely, “the El Cap Pirate,” held the record for the most different routes on El Capitan (sixty-one). He was so fond of malt liquor he attached beer koozies, like gun holsters, to the sides of his harness so he could fortify himself with liquid courage while leading hard aid routes. Once, while rope soloing a route called Eagles Way, he took a huge fall and ended up hanging unconscious, covered in blood, on the end of his rope. Yosemite Search and Rescue (YOSAR) soon arrived at the base of the cliff with a bullhorn.

  “Do you need a rescue?” they yelled up the wall.

  The loudspeaker woke McNeely from his drunken, concussed stupor. He sat up, looked around, and then yelled, “Fuck you,” so loudly that supposedly people in Camp 4, two miles upvalley, heard his answer. Then he climbed back up the rope and kept going.

  The biggest character by far, though, was Charles Tucker III, known to all as “Chongo Chuck.” Chongo was a holdover from the nineties, post Stonemasters and pre Stone Monkeys. Valley climbers in those days called themselves the Chongo Nation, in homage to their spiritual leader, who symbolized the never-ending battle with the park service, aka “the Tool.” The maximum stay in the park was thirty days, so a climber had to get creative if he or she wanted to stay for the entire season, which lasts about six months. Most just flew under the radar, camping clandestinely or anonymously by various schemes, but Chongo was too big a freak to keep a low profile. He dressed like a gypsy in multiple blowsy layers of cotton shirts and loose-fitting hospital-style pants. His skin was leathery and wrinkled. His blond hair, flecked with gray, was long and stringy. He was handsome nonetheless, with sparkling blue eyes set in a face that told the tale of someone who had lived hard. He claimed to have spent ten years in Mexico City and had no recollection of what he did there.

  Chongo played a constant cat-and-mouse game with the park rangers, and his preferred method of evasion was to spend as much time on El Cap as possible. He loved nothing more than to sit in his portaledge high off the deck, smoking reefer and contemplating life’s great existential questions. The problem was that he didn’t quite have the fitness to climb El Cap under his own steam, so he invented a new sport called big-wall hitchhiking. He’d choose a route, hang his portaledge on it five or six feet above the ground, and wait for a climbing party to come along.

  “Hey, do you mind fixing a couple ropes for me?” he’d ask.

  Then he’d draft for as long as he could, often bartering cheap Mexican brick weed for more rope fixing, until the team would realize that it literally had a monkey on its back.

  “This is cool and all, but we’re gonna have to cut you loose, sorry, man.”

  Chongo would set up his portaledge, smoke a fat bowl, and wait, like a trapdoor spider, for the next unsuspecting party. In this manner he usually set the record for the slowest ascent on every wall he climbed.

  One time, when he was between walls and holding court in the cafeteria, he told a story about getting stranded for days on the side of El Cap. No one was coming up the wall and the route was too steep to rappel, so he settled in and embarked on a vision quest to unravel a vexing philosophical dilemma. It took him three days, but he eventually figured it out, and it was heavy.

  “What was it?” I asked, leaning in, hungry for Chongo’s hard-won wisdom.

  “I forget,” he replied.

  To be a Stone Monkey was indeed to stay stoned much if not most of your waking moments. There was, after all, no other way to claim legitimate lineage to the original Stonemasters—the crew that famously set themselves up with a lifetime supply of pot in 1977. In January of that year, word trickled into Camp 4 that a plane filled with 6,000 pounds of red-haired sensimilla had crashed into a remote lake in the Yosemite backcountry. The DEA knew about the wreck but was able to remove only a small amount of the contraband before getting shut down by a blizzard. Luckily for the Stonemasters, the DEA decided to leave the plane and finish the job in the spring. Several of the Stonemasters, including Bachar, hoofed it more than ten miles through the snow to the crash site, where a hobo camp had formed in the woods on the edge of the lake. The scene was a veritable melee, with drug-crazed climbers hacking and sawing through the ice and sometimes fighting over the bales of weed that littered the lake. Bachar chopped a hole through the ice and snagged a forty-pound bale printed with a pot leaf, which he later sold in allotments as small as a quarter ounce. With the 8,000 dollars he netted, he bought a 1968 Volkswagen bus. Rumor has it that nearly a ton of weed was procured from “Dope Lake” before the rangers finally figured out that their little secret was known by virtually every climber in California. For the next year or so, the aviation-fuel-laced joints making the rounds in Camp 4 and El Cap Meadow burned extra-bright and crackly.

  But amid the destruction of brain cells, the hard-core Monkeys got after the valley walls with a vengeance. And none more savagely than “the Dark Wizard,” Dean Potter. More of an ape than a monkey, Potter stood six feet five inches tall and had the build of a boxer, with a barrel chest; wild, unruly brown hair; and a large aquiline nose. When he wasn’t climbing or illegally BASE jumping off the valley’s lofty walls, he could usually be found in El Cap Meadow, shirtles
s and barefoot, walking a Monkey slackline.

  He was known as much for his moody temperament as he was for his prowess as an athlete. The Monkeys loved Potter like a brother, but that didn’t stop them from at times calling him “Mean Dean.” When he was up, Potter was an unstoppable force of nature, and his energy was the best drug of all for the other Stone Monkeys. When he was down, he would often channel whatever angst or emotional turmoil he was going through into free soloing. He distinguished himself in 2000 with the second free solo of Astroman. A few days later he reclimbed some of the key pitches for a camera crew. The full-page photos splashed across the climbing magazines made Potter a household name among climbers the world over. He went on to set numerous speed-climbing records, such as his solo linkup (accomplished partly with a rope) of Half Dome and El Cap in 1999 and his on-sight solo of the California route on Patagonia’s Fitzroy in 2003. In 2006 he pulled off the hardest graded free solo ever done in Yosemite, a 5.12d crack called Heaven. What was perhaps most impressive about the climb—or disturbing, depending on whom you talk to—was that Potter’s maximum grade at the time was about 5.13b, only two ticks higher on the scale. He wasn’t preternaturally lithe, all tendons and sinewy muscle with a freakish strength-to-weight ratio, like Adam Ondra. Hauling his 180-pound frame up the wildly overhanging Heaven with no rope, treading so close to the line between life and death, displayed a disturbing compulsion to risk it all. It worried some of his closest friends.

  And that was just the climbing. The Dark Wizard also took slacklining into the realm of extreme sport by stringing lines between cliffs, sometimes thousands of feet in the air. He called it highlining. Unlike tightrope walking, which is done on a taut steel cable with a balance pole, slacklining uses nylon webbing or rope, which still has some stretch no matter how taut it’s pulled, so it sways and bounces under a person’s weight. The slackliner undulates his body, snakelike, while waving his arms overhead from one side to the other in order to keep his center of mass above the line. When he was feeling inspired, Potter would highline without a tether.