``I will volunteer my climbing skills and some gear to help haul these fucks up the cliff. I'll help push too if needed...'' John Thornton
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Are you sure about that? I mean a lot of these guys are two hundred plus. They don't look like the kind who could jumar up El Cap even with a week of water and provisions set at the bivy ledges. Do they even make jumars anymore? Well ascenders of somesort.
Patagonia has a great catalog this month that has Ivan Choinard on the cover, sorting gear in Camp 4, back in the 60s. Then there are great photos, mostly done by Glen Denny of the period. Flipping through it, took me be back to the mid-70s when I first went to the Valley. There was just a hint of the old crew still around. I was waiting to get on the Nutcracker one afternoon and watched Choinard lead some rich client up After Six. Later in the Four Seasons, the resturant that used to be in the lodge complex, I saw Choinard and Tom Frost talking with their charges in tow.
One of the many beautiful days I spent was sitting in the dreary parking lot of Camp 4 in the rain, waiting for it to stop. It never did, so I got out of the car put on my coagule and took a hike in the light rain, wondering through the camp and back up into the climbing areas above. Very difficult to describe the scene, but it was as if I was wondering around bored with that generation, drinking tea or wine and killing time. The tourists had cleared out, and there were only the regulars standing around in their old army surplus ponchos nursing a reluctant cooking stove, sharing a joint and some wine. There's a picture of Warren Harding, Mark Powell, and Bill Feuerer in the late 50s, standing around in the rain with a jug of Red Mountain and an old seva cook stove boiling water for tea after some failed attempt on El Cap.
Sometime in the 80s they banned hang gliding off El Cap, but that would be my preferrence. Send those Wall Street puppies off the edge in a hang glider and tell them it's easy, just hold on and the air currents will guide you....
I was at the climbing gym tonight. God I miss those days, those nights lost somewhere else. In the crowded gym a few old fucks like me were standing around looking cut. All the crew that was coming up when I started are in their fifties now and the son of bitches are still better than I ever was. Oh, well. There is something great about it. Last year I was on After Six, soloing and remembered Choinard from thirty years before. I was so thrilled just climbing by myself, that I kept on after the big ledge and the finish of the climb, and went up a ridge until I couldn't go any further. I sat down and just looked out over the Valley in the early spring afternoon shimmering in the milky hazy...
CG