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Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Tuesday Voice: Growing up in America

Climbing rocks

By Rolf Dumke

Reading the NY Times article of the spectacular recent climb of Yosemite's El Capitan – “Pursuing the Impossible, and Coming Out on Top,” by John Branch, January 14, 2015 – I felt certain college memories resurfacing.

Tommy Caldwell, left, and Kevin Jorgeson, after completing
their 19-day free climb of the 3,000-foot Dawn Wall
on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park

During my senior year, after having taken off the year before, I became part of the newly-founded Yale climbing club, at the instigation of a roommate, John, who had transferred from MIT, where rock climbing was a well developed sport with many good climbers.
    After training – climbing with ropes in the gym – we went climbing in the sunny warm days of that fall, on a long yellow-red sandstone escarpment in a hidden valley filled with rioting red maple leaves under a blue sky an hour and a half drive north of New Haven, where John took me up on my first climb, on a 150-foot cliff on a route that included all major climbing techniques.
    We started with a small bulging overhead; then up along a long crack with an equally long slab of stone jutting out on the other side, allowing one to “walk” up simply by leaning back and holding on with my hands in the deep crack, shifting hands going up; finally, just jamming in hands and feet alternatively going up another deep crack.
    Arriving at the top, I was relieved – I hadn’t been able to pull myself up onto a ledge in the middle of the cliff because I had already used up most of the muscle power in my arms on the first part of the climb trying to make up for bad technique, and I fell ten to fifteen feet before being saved by John, who held my rope – and immensely elated to be alive after the terror of the fall. I felt that I had really earned the magnificent view.
    Another time John and I took my future wife, Susan, up on her first climb on the same escarpment, on an easier route. But having three persons on the climb, including a complete beginner, took a lot more time. We were stranded at mid-cliff at sundown, so we had to rappel down our rope into the darkness. Incredibly, Susan remained calm and followed John’s instructions with complete faith in his (real) and my (feigned) competence.
    Later that fall, a small group of Yale climbers drove down to see a slide show at the New York Mountaineering Club of the first climb of El Capitan, by Warren Harding and team [“50th anniversary of first ascent of El Capitan” [Peter Fimrite, SFGate, November 9, 2008]. A fantastic feat. The club’s august members treated the climbers akin to Sir Edmund Hillary, after his climb of Mt. Everest.
November 12, 1958. Warren Harding (far left), George Whitmore (far right),
and Wayne Merry (just coming over the edge) complete their ascent of El Capitan
in Yosemite National Park; George Whitmer is a member of the support party

    On the way back to New Haven, we took a young woman climber home to Greenwich, to a huge brick pile of a building. Everybody hustled out of the cars and began to climb all over the face of this house, only dimly lit by lights in the park. We all had an intensely felt urge to finally move and climb after the confinement at the club. The young woman’s father was amused to see us scrambling like a bunch of kids gone wild and scolded.
    Interestingly, our daughter Sibylla is a good rock climber, in Berchtesgaden, on nearby Austrian cliffs, and in the Dolomites of Suedtirol. She has become a far better climber than I ever was.

[The first installment of “Growing up in America,” “Two years at Shaw High,” appeared on November 18, 2014.]

[July 25, 2015 Postscript: The article “The Rise of Climbing,” published in today's NY Times, by Daniel Duane, an excellent older climber on the cliffs of Yosemite National Park, reports that the new climbing halls have incredibly improved the quality of young climbers. Mr. Duane turned up his nose at the aesthetics of indoor climbing until he found out that his young daughter learned fast and improved quickly and could climb well on real rocks and cliffs. Now he wholeheartedly supports this new sport. Unfortunately, it leads to long waiting lines below good climbs in nature, destroying the original fascination of how one could overcome the challenge of a cliff in solitary nature with just a friend or two. Has climbing been reduced to technique?]


Copyright © 2015 by Rolf Dumke

6 comments:

  1. Interesting stories. Never had the experience of rock climbing. These days the stairs are enough for me.

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  2. Never thought of Yale with rock climbing. Now I may have a hard time thinking of Yale as nothing but rock climbers.

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    1. Hi Ed,
      Back then the Yale rock climbers were a new group, largely started because some climbing gurus outside the university got together with a few internal nerds, who got some jocks interested. My case was that this thin intellectual guy who had just transferred from MIT, got me interested.
      So it was an interesting group of people, largely driven by the outside gurus, who had climbing fame in New England.

      Today's climbing club at Yale shows pictures of climbing on East Rock in New Haven, something we didn't do. We went to more spectacular venues.
      The looks of this young group are more techy and intellectual than you suggest.
      Rolf

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  3. Caltech had an active climbing club at least as early as the 50's. I wasn't a member, but tagged along on a few buildering expeditions. My first rappel was a dolfersitz out a third story window.

    Colorado, of course, has a climbing tradition a few generations old. I fell into bad company, the Hiking Club. Name notwithstanding, it was a gonzo climbing club, whose leaders had far more strength and courage than knowledge or judgment. Damn near got me killed a few times, but I learned to love the life.

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    1. Hi Chuck,
      You've probably been to Colorado's Devil Canyon, a breathlesslybeautiful climbing area I visited with friends decades after my college rock climbing. See wiki.
      It's not surprising that you learned to climb at a technical university. John Parker told me that the MIT group was inspired by the climbing clubs in the Saxony Sandstone cliffs, started by enthusiasts at the Technical University Dresden around 1900.
      The Saxon clubs established sport climbing up graded routes, to make climbs of comparative difficulty.
      The firdt climb John took me up in Connecticut was graded difficulty 6.7, if that makes any sense to you.
      See wiki for an excellent article on the beginning of rock climbing.

      Rolf

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    2. I actually hadn't heard of Devil Canyon (Colorado National Monument, half a day from Boulder). Most of my rock climbing has been in Boulder Mountain Park (hundreds of spectacular sandstone slabs), or Lumpy Ridge, in Rocky Mountain National Park (steep, difficult granite.)
      I actually was mostly a mountaineer, having never developed the physique necessary for high level rock. Most of my interesting routes have been easy (5.4-5.7) alpine big walls around Colorado.
      What rating system has 6.7? The Yosemite system, most common in my circles, finely subdivides grade 5 for free climbs. Originally 5.0-5.9, it has grown, non-mathematically, to 5.14d or so, last I looked, as standards have gotten ever more fearsome. Grade 6 in this system is reserved for climbing with artificial aids (pulling on bolts and other hardware, for lack of other options.)
      The recently celebrated free ascent of the Dawn Wall on El Cap was rated 5.14. Even a single move of its thousand meters or so is utterly beyond me.

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