Next morning Harding managed to nail ninety feet up the crack to the top of what became known as the Dolt Tower where they found a commodious bivouac site. They experienced another near miss as Harding heaved on a huge chockstone in that awkward transition from aid climbing to free. The boulder started to roll outwards and Harding instinctively let go to fall on to his top piton. Fortunately the chockstone rebedded itself, since it could have wiped them all out had it come away. Harding had now climbed a third of the Nose. Early the following spring he and Dolt Feuerer replaced all the manila fixed rope with nylon. Prusiking up the manila ropes after six months of winter storms and the consequent abrasion of the ropes must have been a nerve-wracking experience. By April the team was ready once again. Steck had had enough, but Mark Powell, even though his ankle hadn’t healed, decided to come along to act as a belayer. Feuerer, the engineer, had designed a two-wheel cart to make the chore of load-hauling a little easier. It wasn’t. It required four people and thousands of feet of rope to run the thing. With just a weekend to spare, it took them most of their time to get themselves and their gear to the high point and they only managed sixty feet of fresh ascent.
They returned a month later, had a little more time and made better progress, reaching and establishing Camp 3, a dump of gear, food and water on a large ledge on top of El Cap Tower. They even made quick progress above up an easy chimney behind Texas flake and then bolted up a blank stretch to the foot of the infamous Boot Flake, a wide crack up a slab. Being behind a flake, there is always the possibility of the crack expanding as each angle piton is hammered in, with the risk of the pitons below becoming loose or even falling out. Harding was in his element as he hammered his way cautiously up the precarious crack. It was a fine bold lead, but once again time had run out and they had to return to the ground. The Park authorities were getting restive and the siege had to be put on hold for the summer tourist season.
They returned again in early September, after the Labor Day weekend. They were now a team of six. Powell had relented and was back yet again, to be joined by Wally Reed and a relative novice, Rick Calderwood. Wayne Merry, a summer ranger, and John Whitmore, who had made the first ascent of the North Buttress of Middle Cathedral with Harding, made up the team. This was to be a nine-day push. Just reaching the high point with the hardware and provisions was a major undertaking. They were soaked and frightened by thunderstorms. The newcomers were intimidated by the ferocious unrelenting exposure, but slowly progress was made.
The most challenging section of the entire climb was at the top of Boot Flake. There were no more crack lines above and the next line of weakness was a long way to the left across smooth blank walls. They had already used the pendulum technique, but this one was going to be bigger and longer than anything before attempted. Merry took a belay on the ledge above the flake and lowered Harding off about fifty feet, level with the foot of the flake. It took him live swings to grab the edge of a crack which was out of sight behind a shallow corner. He managed somehow to hang on, tap in a piton and then take stock. He was disappointed. The crack petered out after only a few feet but there was another crack system that did seem continuous another twenty feet or so further to the left. He passed the rope through a karabiner, clipped in to the piton, yelled to Merry to lower him once again so that he could make another pendulum. They were out of sight of each other, could barely hear each other’s yells, yet Harding kept going, managing the final pendulum to reach the elusive crack line.
Merry then had to join him by a series of terrifying prusiks and abseils, in their way both more frightening and exacting than the initial pendulum. So many things can go wrong with the possibility of frayed ropes, faulty knots or clipping. At the end of nine days’ hard and nerve-jangling work they had only increased their vertical height by a few feet. It was time to retreat yet again. There were two more attempts in October, but they were hindered by storms and the sheer distance that had to be covered each time on the fixed ropes. Consequently they made no more upward progress. The Park authorities were becoming impatient and issued an ultimatum that the climb had to be finished by Thanksgiving Day.
Warren set out on one last push. The team was now down to four, Harding, Calderwood, Merry and a newcomer, George Whitmore. They had at least fully stocked their top camp, called Camp 4, in their two previous forays. This meant it took just a day to prusik the 1,900 feet to their high point. The Great Roof, a huge overhang, loomed above them but it went surprisingly easily up a perfect peg crack that slid round it. Above, the difficulties relented. Steve Roper memorably describes the upper third of the Nose: ‘Planes of marble-smooth granite shoot upwards towards infinity. The various dihedral walls, dead vertical at this stage, converge in broad angular facets, and climbing through this magical place is like living inside a cut diamond.’
Harding and Merry were sharing the leads. It was straightforward aid climbing with good cracks into which they just had to pound their pitons, clip in a karabiner and stirrup, step into the top loop and hammer in another piton. But it all took a long time and they were making little more than a hundred feet a day, dropping back to their top bivouac, Camp 6, each night. It demanded constant concentration, checking and rechecking every knot and interlinked sling in an environment more daunting then ever before experienced by climbers.
Calderwood and Whitmore were acting as Sherpas, ferrying the supplies up the fixed ropes behind the assault team. In many ways theirs was the more exacting role, for there was none of the excitement of making the route, just the grinding hard work of hauling heavy loads and endless terrifying prusiks when every moment the rope gave a few inches they felt it was their last. They were running out of gear, particularly bolts and drills. Calderwood abseiled all the way down to the ground to phone the Ski Hut in Berkeley for more gear to be sent to Yosemite by special delivery and then prusiked all the way back up to Camp 6, where he had a narrow escape. Camp 6 was a fairly commodious ledge, so he hadn’t bothered to tie himself into a safety line as he moved around, and very nearly tumbled over the edge. It was all too much. He packed his sack and headed for home.
This just left three of them, Merry and Harding out in front and Whitmore leading a solitary existence, often on a lower bivouac, relaying supplies up the face. The days were getting shorter, the nights longer and colder. On 10 November they were hit by a blizzard and made no progress at all, but they knew they were close to the top and could even hear the shouts of friends waiting to greet them. Harding worked through the next night by the light of a head torch, drilling his way up a blank wall above the black void. To save time and effort he only drilled every third hole deep enough for the bolt to go all the way in. He drilled twenty-seven bolts through the night and in the dawn of 12 November pulled over the lip of the wall to scramble up the summit slabs and be greeted by a crowd of friends and representatives of the media. He looked even more than usually the wildest of wild men, with his unkempt black hair, hands torn and bloody, as, with a wolfish smile, he accepted a swig of red wine.
They had lived for twelve days on the wall on that final attempt, longer than anyone had been on such a face before. He had spent altogether forty-five days spread over eighteen months on the wall – a tribute to his dogged tenacity. He had always been the driving force, for the most part climbing with people of less experience. It was the longest, steepest, hardest climb in technical terms to have been completed anywhere in the world. At the same time, within the American climbing community, it was also the most controversial on a number of fronts. The purists had reservations, not only about the siege tactics employed, but also about the publicity that they felt Harding had sought. It was claimed that his girlfriend made regular calls to the media, keeping them up to date on the progress of the climb.
Steve Roper commented: ‘Climbing publicity is not intrinsically sinister. Yet for those who regarded climbing as a type of pure sport, as many in those halcyon days were wont to do, publicity was something to be shunned. Outsiders couldn’t
possibly understand our motives, so you climbed for yourself. You wanted peer recognition of course, but you never went outside the immediate group for acceptance.’
It was Robbins who made the second ascent, just two years later, with three of the leading climbers of the day, Tom Frost, who would join me on the South Face of Annapurna in 1970, Joe Fitschen and Chuck Pratt. They were determined to climb it alpine style, in a single push, and took just seven days. But it must be remembered that all 125 bolts were in place and, more important, that intangible barrier of the unknown had been removed. A year later, in 1961, Robbins, Frost and Pratt turned their attention to the huge face to the left of the Nose, to make the first ascent of the Salathé Wall. The challenge was so enormous they can be forgiven making an initial three-and-a-half-day sortie on a long diagonal traverse towards a natural line of weakness leading straight to the top. They then abseiled straight down, leaving the ropes in place. A few days later, on the climb proper, they removed the ropes as they ascended and threw three of them to the ground, keeping just three for the climb. Thus they cut the umbilical cord safeguarding their retreat in order to commit themselves totally to the climb. They topped out in six days after some of the most difficult free and aid climbing ever done on a big wall at that time. Robbins expressed his approach to the climb and his attitude to adventure in the American Alpine Journal: ‘It was perfectly clear to us that given sufficient time, fixed ropes, bolts and determination, any section of any rock wall could be climbed.’
Should Warren Harding have left the Nose to his climbing betters? I don’t think so. Climbing needed the catalyst, the irritant, that he provided with such flare. Harding’s contempt for rules, for the ‘Valley Christians’ as he described the purists, is typical of the individualism of so many adventurers and innovators. He struck out at them in his 1975 book, Downward Bound: A Mad! Guide to Rock Climbing. Part light-hearted instruction, part spoof, part story of his climbs, part self-justification, he had this to say to Steve Roper, author of a new guide to Yosemite climbing, which contained a section on ethics: ‘This material reads like a religious catechism. (I’ve often wondered about what sort of uh- religious training these fellows enjoyed during their formative years.) I found this quite amusing, for Roper and the others as well, seemed to project an image of rebelliousness toward society and all its mores. So now, in great logic, these fellows exhibited a strong desire for something to be righteous and moral about, something to conform to, a longing to proselytise.’
Harding went on to confound the purists in 1970 with his ascent of the Dawn Wall, a huge stretch of blank rock to the east of the Nose. He tackled it alpine style with Dean Caldwell, spending three weeks on the wall, itself a record, battered by storms, running out of food, but keeping going. Even so, they were criticised because they weren’t following a natural line. There being few cracks, they used a huge number of bolts, drilling 330 holes in all, though many of these were used for bat hooks, a precarious means of ascent, whereby a hook is placed in a shallow hole to allow the climber to stand in the sling attached to it. You could do several moves like this before needing to drill a deeper hole and hammer in a bolt.
Initially Robbins was magnanimous, stating: ‘Good to have a man around who doesn’t give a damn what the establishment thinks. As our sport becomes rapidly more institutionalised, Harding stands out as a magnificent maverick.’ In making the second ascent with Don Lauria, however, he could not resist the urge to eradicate the route, hammering out the offending bolts. In doing this he was defying climbing etiquette which holds that one is only justified in removing a bolt if one has managed to lead that particular stretch of rock without using it. They became so impressed, however, by the extreme difficulty of some of the aid climbing using natural features in the rock, that they relented and in the upper part left the offending bolts alone.
Asked recently about Robbins’ action, Harding replied, ‘That whole thing was blown up. Everyone thought that I’d be all bummed out about the bolt chopping. Nothing could have been further from the truth! I thought it was funny!’
This was his last major climb, though he made a couple of lesser new routes in 1975 and, in 1989 at the age of sixty-five, he repeated his route on the Nose, climbing with Mike Corbett and Ken Yager. Today, in his mid-seventies, he still lives in California with his partner Alice, enjoys his red wine and on occasion acts as ground crew for a ballooning friend. Within a few years the Nose was to change from being the impossible to being a classic test piece for any competent big wall climber. It was also to act as a yardstick for extreme climbing development. There were three challenges – trying to climb it in an ever-faster time, climbing it solo and climbing it entirely free without pulling on any pegs or bolts, an aspiration which seemed impossible until very recently. Speed and advances in climbing technique were undoubtedly helped by improvements in climbing gear, particularly the adoption of ever more sophisticated metal wedges and camming devices, originally introduced in Britain, and footwear with ever stickier rubber soles.
In 1967 Jim Bridwell, a brilliant and colourful climber, treed the notorious Stoveleg Crack. Henry Barber, who came from New Hampshire, climbed the route in three days, saving a lot of time by doing much of it tree and using hand-inserted protection. In 1975 Bridwell returned with Billy Westbay and John Long to become the first to climb the Nose in a day. In 1990 Peter Croft and Dave Schultz climbed the Nose and Salathé Wall within an incredible eighteen hours, while in the previous year Steve Schneider had soloed the Nose in 21 hours 22 minutes.
The greatest challenge of all was to climb the Nose free. The 1980s, with rising rock-climbing standards around the world, saw many routes going free that had originally been climbed using extensive aid, and 1980 saw the first serious free attempt on the Nose by Ray Jardine. He was the inventor of the Friend, an adjustable camming device which revolutionised protection in wide parallel cracks. The main crux was the completely blank section above the top of El Cap Tower. Jardine chiselled a sparse line of holds to link the two lines of weakness, but the Great Roof defeated him. Repeated insertion and removal of chrome molybdenum pegs in the thin crack snaking up the side of the huge overhang had left widened pockets into which fingers that were not too large could just fit, but it was too much for Jardine.
It was another thirteen years before the Nose was climbed free in its entirety, although there were plenty of attempts. It was a trip not so much into the geographical, as into the athletic and personal unknown and in many ways epitomises the challenge and dilemma of the modern adventurer when all the obvious geographical firsts have been attained. It was Lynn Hill who found the solution and in doing so not only established herself as the best woman rock climber in the world, but broke through the sex barrier, emerging as one of the best, if not the best, all round rock climbers in history.
At only five foot one, she made up for lack of height with a superb power to weight ratio, gymnastic ability and, most important, focus of mind. Born in 1961 her apprenticeship was very much a traditional one that inevitably took her to Yosemite with an ascent of the Nose and other test pieces. One of her climbing partners was John Long who had made the first ascent of the Nose in a day.
She visited Europe for the first time in 1986 at the invitation of French climbers and was impressed by the standards that had been developed on the limestone walls of southern France. Sport climbing, as it has come to be known, using bolts for protection but climbing the rock without using any aid, had progressed to a high level. In a way it was a retreat from adventure for the element of risk had been minimised to allow the climber to develop his or her athletic skill to the ultimate. It also marked the birth of formalised competition climbing. Lynn Hill was invited to Bardonecchia in Italy for one of the early competitions. She was the only American there, it was all strange to her, but she ended up very nearly winning, being runner up to Catherine Destivelle from France.
These two women dominated the burgeoning competition climbing circuit for the next few years.
It gave them the means of earning a very good living around the activity they loved, enabled them to stretch their skills to the limit and reach the clearly defined summit of that sport. Both, however, grew tired of the limitations of competition climbing, always indoors on artificial walls with the pressure of intensive training. Each returned to traditional adventure climbing, Destivelle making a series of remarkable ascents in the high mountains, which included a solo new route on the South-West Pillar of the Dru and an ascent, with Jeff Lowe, of a new route on the Trango Tower in the Karakoram. Lynn Hill, meanwhile, returned to Yosemite and the challenge of the Nose of El Capitan.
While climbing at Cave Rock near Lake Tahoe she happened to meet up with Simon Nadin, a British climber who had also been on the competition circuit, becoming first ever world champion at the 1989 finals in Leeds. He, like Lynn, came from a traditional climbing background and like her had returned to it. When they discovered that they were both intrigued by the challenge of climbing the Nose free, Simon postponed his return flight to Britain and three days later they were in Yosemite.
They reached the foot of the Great Roof on their third day without incident, but were beginning to feel the fatigue of not only free climbing 2,000 feet but also of hauling their provisions and carrying a heavy rack of nuts and camming devices. Lynn commented: ‘After climbing from 5.30 a.m. until midnight the previous day, I had gained a great respect for the amount of time and energy the route demanded. The force of gravity seemed to multiply the higher we climbed.’
They were sharing the lead and Simon had first try on the Great Roof pitch, but quickly backed off. It was now Lynn’s turn She laybacked up the sheer open corner, the tips of her fingers barely fitting into the thin crack, to where the roof thrust out above her. This was the crux, with a series of tenuous undercut holds in the back of the bulging overhang and even more tenuous smears on the granite wall for her feet. She was nearly at the end, when she miscalculated a move, her foot slipped and she was off, hurtling head first towards the ground 2,000 feet below. Ironically, the very steepness and smoothness of the wall was her protection and she ended dangling, unhurt, at the end of the rope. Her running belay had held and Simon lowered her to the ledge.
Quest for Adventure Page 29