Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(44)
To climb dangerous faces alone takes an immense amount of inner strength. Even Bonatti felt that eventually the solo climber must run out of luck. I asked Robbins about this, and what there was to insure his safety under such conditions.
“Externally, nothing,” he said. His protection came from within, from not committing himself to a move unless he was certain of three out of four points of support, so that if anything slipped, a foot for instance, he would still have the other foot and two hands. “There have been times,” he added, “when my life was absolutely in the balance.”
The El Cap climb, he admits, was “a bit inspired, separate from what others were doing. It required a bit of vision and an aptitude for climbing alone.”
He has done a great amount of solo climbing since, mostly “free” solos where he carries absolutely nothing except for a rope if he is going to rappel down, which is the normal method of descending a face—the rope is doubled through a piton or around an outcropping, and the climber walks down backward, feet against the rock, the rope supporting him and being played out as he goes. Of this recent climbing he has said very little. He has mixed feelings about it as well as a long-established disdain for publicity, that of a man who is famous despite attempts to elude fame, as if the exposure of things somehow diminished their value, or, as Emerson said, “My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.”
One of his best-known acts took place in 1970. Harding had put up another route on El Cap, spending twenty-seven straight days and nights on the wall, the longest ever in this country, and placing more than 300 bolts in the process. In the middle of winter Robbins and Don Lauria made the second ascent, cutting off Harding’s bolts as they went, as if they were blemishes on the sport. They cut some forty before having second thoughts, but the controversy that resulted was intense.
Robbins and Liz were married in 1963. After several seasons teaching climbing and skiing in Europe, they moved to Modesto, a prosperous agricultural town about halfway between San Francisco and Yosemite, which had been her home. Her father owned a paint and wallpaper store there and for almost a year Robbins tried to become a paint salesman, with an eye to one day taking over the business, but it didn’t work out. Instead, he and Liz began selling climbing boots in their spare time, at first shipping them from their kitchen table. They were imported boots, French-made Galibiers, and they became the backbone of what has turned into a successful outdoor equipment company. They have two shops, each called Robbins’ Mountain Shop, one in Modesto and the other in Fresno, and a substantial wholesale business. “The Merchant of Modesto,” he says of himself mockingly. Still, there is the unquenchable in him. He and Liz went to the 1974 meeting of the American Alpine Club by stealing into the Oakland yards and hopping a freight to Portland, twenty-four hours through a blizzard, then taking a cab from the Portland yards to the motel.
In Yosemite, the snowstorm continued through the night. The next morning we walked to the base of El Cap; I wanted to see what the beginning of the big routes looked like. It was a little after nine. As we approached, El Cap towering above us through the trees, we began to hear faint shouting. Someone on the face was calling, one word repeated over and over: “Help!” Robbins stopped. He listened, then cupped his hands to his mouth.
“Where are you?” he called.
“Help!” the voice cried.
We began to walk more quickly, joined by two other climbers, while from above us the cries continued. Soon we were hurrying over the rubble at the very foot of El Cap. The granite, an immense apron, rose at a steep angle. We finally located the climbers. They were up on a place called the Ledge and visible through Robbins’s binoculars. A rope was hanging down to the left of them, a strangely idle and useless rope. It was possible to shout up from here and be heard. We lay on our backs and looked up about 700 or 800 feet. They were above a large, indented arch and could not see the wall beneath it. If they rappelled down, they thought, they would not be able to touch the face and would end up hanging in midair.
Robbins shouted up and told them to come down anyway, it was not as bad as it looked, they would find a place to set up another rappel. “Tie a big knot in the end of the rope!” he warned.
It was on this face, Robbins had told me, that Jim Madsen, an exceptionally strong climber, had rappelled down to check on two other climbers who were making slow progress. It was a sort of tentative rescue. His shoulders laden with extra coils of rope, Madsen had started down from the very top and somehow, no one will ever know exactly, had rappelled off the end of the rope and fallen to his death not far from where we were. The immense length of that fall and the helplessness of the climber, falling, remain in my imagination.
After a while a blue-clad figure began to make a very cautious descent. At the end of the rope a huge knot, clearly visible through the binoculars, was tied so it would not slip through the rappel brake. In addition, he had a separate belay line in case anything went wrong. The snow had begun again. It was swirling across the granite like the snow in a glass paperweight.
“An overhang can really spook you when it’s beneath,” Robbins commented. “These fellows were demoralized, ready to come down. Every foot you come makes you feel better,” he added. “It’s a lot better to fall from one hundred feet than seven hundred. The result is the same, but why go through all that anguish?”
An hour later, the two had made it safely down one rope length and were preparing to do the next. They would make it, Robbins said. We left them under the supervision of the two climbers who were sitting beside us, one of whom had climbed the route.