Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(43)
The first of his big routes was a second ascent of the north face of Sentinel in Yosemite. It had taken the original party four and a half days. Robbins and his companions did it in two. Climbing it again and again over the years, he eventually reduced the time to just over three hours. It’s now been done in two.
By 1958, the ascent of Half Dome behind him, he was in the army, a clerk in Officers Records at Fort Bliss, Texas. For a year and a half he forged passes and caught an airplane ride north almost every weekend to climb in one place or another, hitchhiking back on Sunday, sometimes arriving only in time to shave, change clothes, and report to work. It was during this period that Tom Frost, an aeronautical engineer who had taken up climbing and was later to accompany Robbins on three of his major ascents, met his future companion. Frost was working at North American Aviation and had fallen in with a group of Los Angeles climbers.
“We’d go out to Tahquitz all the time,” Frost says. “I heard frequent mention of Royal, Royal, Royal who did this, who said that. It turned out he was a friend of theirs in the army. One time we were climbing at Mount Pacifico; they were small rock cliffs, about twenty feet high. Someone pointed out a thin, diagonal crack big enough only for your fingers in places, with thin footholds and the wall overhanging slightly. It was called the ‘Robbins Eliminate.’ It had only been climbed twice, by Robbins and someone else. Well, I figured out a way, but couldn’t do it. I went back to Los Angeles and dieted for a month and exercised. On our next trip to Pacifico, Robbins happened to be there. I tried the lower part, then asked for a belay and climbed it. Robbins was sitting there on a rock. He didn’t say anything.”
The next time they met, however, Robbins took Frost aside and confided his plans for an ascent of the Nose of El Cap—in Frost’s words, “an exceptionally serious undertaking.” Warren Harding, a famous siege climber, had taken a total of forty-five inconsecutive days and thirty nights to do it the first time, two years earlier. Harding used methods that opened a debate which still continues. The climb was up such blank rock that he pounded holes in it with a drill and then fixed small expansion bolts in these holes, hanging from them as he proceeded upward, step by step. Bolts had been known since before the war, but the excessive use of them went against the feelings of many, Robbins among them. Robbins’s plan was to do it in one push, without coming down and going back up again on fixed ropes. Frost thinks that he had been asked to go along because more qualified climbers had turned it down, not believing it could be done. “They thought they would perish,” he says.
The climb was made in September 1960. Robbins, Frost, Chuck Pratt, and Joe Fitschen made up the team. “Robbins had tremendous confidence,” Frost says. “He’s an exceptional leader. At bivouacs he’d cut off an inch of salami and pass it over, an inch of cheese and pass it over, an inch of bread, let you have three swigs out of the water bottle, and then go to sleep. He’s a very strict disciplinarian. One of his great assets as a climber is the control he has over himself, his mind and his body. You didn’t have to worry about anything when you were climbing with him. If you did what he said, you’d be all right.”
They had taken enough water for ten days, one quart per man per day. They made it to the top in seven.
The following spring Robbins and Frost were gazing dreamily at the unclimbed southwestern, the left-hand, face of El Cap. The face had a number of weaknesses but there had never seemed a way to link them. Suddenly they saw a possibility, roundabout, but it might go: it was what became known as the Salathé Wall, for a great Yosemite figure of the ’40s, and it is now considered the finest rock climb in the world.
There were thirty-four leads, or rope lengths, on the climb, many 5.8 or 5.9 with A3 and A4 nailing. Artificial climbing—hanging directly from pitons, bolts, or whatever—is designated Al through A5 in order of difficulty. Much of Yosemite big-wall climbing is artificial—on this climb more than half.
Robbins himself concedes it was his drive and determination that were the reason for his success. Many people surpassed him in talent, he says. “I did the first 5.9, but Pratt did the first 5.10. If I’d had Pratt’s talent and he had my drive . . .” His voice trails off. One thing he has always gotten from climbing is battle. Not just challenge—he needs to strive. It is so much a part of him that in games, of which he is fond, if he cannot find someone to play against, he will play against himself. For more than twenty years the greatest influence on his life has been Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose “Self-Reliance” I reread when I learned this. It begins with a verse of Beaumont and Fletcher:
Man is his own star, and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate . . .
But of all that is in the essay, one sentence struck me: “The force of character is cumulative.” It seemed to me that this helped to explain the particular course Robbins’s climbing has taken in the last eight or nine years. Following other climbs of major importance, both in Yosemite and in the Alps in the years 1962–67, Robbins climbed El Cap solo in 1968. He was on it for ten days. We already have some idea of the difficulties of such an attempt under normal circumstances; to do it alone implies an exceptional person.
Solo climbing has a long history. Hermann Buhl went to the top of Nanga Parbat alone, and Darbellay did the north face of the Eiger by himself, but “for me,” Robbins says, “Bonatti is the great example. His solo of the Dru [a 3,000-foot granite pinnacle near Chamonix that Robbins put up two routes on himself] is one of the great achievements in mountaineering. It took six days. Escape was very difficult.”