Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(51)
By the following year she was climbing in Eldorado Canyon. She did the Bastille Crack, Ruper, the Grand Giraffe. She didn’t realize that her ability to protect—to put in pitons at the proper places—was very poor. One day, reaching up with the rope held in her mouth, she slipped and took a thirty-foot fall. She nearly lost four teeth. She was badly scared but somehow brushed it off. At Longs Peak that autumn it happened again, this time more seriously. She was climbing Stettners Ledges, a classic route on the lower East Face. The smooth, glacial granite, the altitude, the exposure. “I was scared out of my tree,” she remembers.
Just below the crux pitch she fell. She hadn’t been putting in enough protection—down she went for eighty-five feet, hitting various ledges. Fortunately she was wearing a helmet. It was a terrifying fall. The boyfriend with whom she was climbing was so unnerved that he gave up the sport, and because he was her only partner, she had to give it up too. It was three years before she tried again.
In the summer of 1973 she was working for Outward Bound near Gunnison and one day she grabbed a girlfriend and went up to climb.
“I started all over again. We began on 5.0s. Nuts had come out then and we were using them for protection. There was no one to rely on but ourselves—I’d always leaned on a man, depended on him completely, but the minute we began this I was suddenly a different kind of climber. I could climb my own way. It was very significant.”
The following spring she went to Yosemite and that summer to the Pamirs in the U.S.S.R. as part of the American contingent of an international gathering. This was the summer when eight Russian women were caught in a fierce storm as they were attempting to traverse Lenin Peak. There was no chance of rescue. They died one by one, in radio contact with the base camp until the end. “Please forgive us. We love you. Goodbye.”
Molly herself survived an avalanche, high altitude, snow, and ice. She had been unhappy all during the expedition, desperately lonely, and when she came back to the States extremely depressed, she turned to a friend for advice. He was a climber, a real heavy, in her words. What he told her was simple. “If there’s something you really want to do, do it, and do it as well as you possibly can. You need no other justification. If you want to climb well, spend every spring and fall in Yosemite.”
Her partner in Yosemite has usually been another woman, Barbara Eastman. In 1977 they climbed the 3,000-foot Nose of El Capitan together. The Nose is 5.10 and A3, which refers to the difficulty of placing aid where it is called for.
“It was a magnificent climb,” Molly says. “We were so close by then, we were good buddies. We knew each other’s weaknesses. We knew when the other got scared and how to nurse her. We didn’t get scared on the Nose, though.” Molly’s not bothered by the height. If she has a good anchor, she likes to look down. She’s happy there. “We were very sisterly. I’d be tired and have to do a hard pitch and begin to whimper. And she’d just clean my glasses and say. ‘Go ahead, Molly, you can do it.’”
Other women climbers she rates with herself include Beth Bennett and Coral Bowman, her Boulder rivals. They’re both better face climbers, she concedes—she gives them Eldorado. They’re slimmer than she is, stronger. Coral, who is a schoolteacher, last year had the start of what would have been a legendary fall. She was on the Naked Edge. At the top of the second pitch, perhaps 500 feet in the air, she had to rappel down to free a haul rope that had gotten fouled. She untied from her partner, Sue Giller, made a figure eight knot in the rope, and clipped into a carabiner. Then she leaned out over nothing and started down. Somehow the carabiner was forced sideways, oddly tilted. The gate opened and the rope came out. She was falling. For a horrified moment her eyes met Sue’s. “I knew I was going to die and I didn’t want to die.” She had gone about twenty feet when with incredible alertness she managed to reach out and grab the haul rope. She knew she wouldn’t be able to hold on but somehow she did, getting third-degree burns as the rope sang through her hands and gradually slowed her. She came to a stop and found a foothold. “Sue! Help me!” she called.
Her hands were in a cast for five days. Three weeks later she was climbing again.
In the 1950s there were a few, isolated climbers in the area, perhaps twenty altogether. Now they are everywhere. The bulletin boards at Boulder Mountaineer and Neptune Mountaineering are filled with notices of skis, sleeping bags, and bicycle parts for sale and also requests for climbing partners (Lead 5.9. Will need warm-up as it’s spring. Leave number. I live in a van).
Climbing is more than a sport. It is entry into myth. For those irresistibly drawn to it, it becomes a life, and there is always a pack of dazzling new climbers biting at the tails of those who have gone before. The important routes have all been climbed. Many of them have now been climbed free; in some cases they are being done solo. Charlie Fowler, who is celebrated for being so far out that what he does is almost unimaginable, last year soloed the Diamond, eight vertical pitches in an hour and a half, without a rope. This doesn’t discourage young climbers, rather it seems to draw them on. Only a few, in any case, will have the talent and intensity to make themselves known. For most of them there is joy enough in the feeling of working their way upward.
Jim Erickson, on the other hand, has seen the darkness that lies at the end of ambition satisfied. He works as the manager of a small factory and climbs occasionally. He studied music and is married to a violinist. They have a son. Erickson’s name, together with a few others like Pat Ament’s and Roger Briggs’s, will always be linked with a certain period of Colorado climbing, but for the veterans, those who have given everything, there is an emptiness afterward. Life is not the same.