Don't Save Anything

by James Salter

  “All climbers are on dope now,” he said somewhat resignedly. “They’re smoking during ascents, even dropping acid.”

  Robbins said nothing. He and Herbert have known each other for more than twenty years. When he was first starting to climb, Robbins told me, one of the things that impressed him was the sort of men he met. They were men he admired, who were superior to anyone he knew “down there” in the city. It was one of the things that made him decide to choose climbing as his life. Marijuana as a necessity for Yosemite bivouacs was obviously something foreign to him.

  “How many times have you climbed El Cap?” Robbins asked at one point.

  “Hundreds of times,” Herbert said.

  “I don’t mean in your imagination.”

  “Three,” Herbert said.

  Light had come in Yosemite. We ate in the large restaurant in the lodge, Robbins, his wife, Liz, their young daughter, and I, together with hundreds of visitors: old couples, campers, sightseers, and, of course, a sprinkling of climbers whose very appearance set them apart. They were indifferently, even poorly, dressed: plaid shirts, old sweaters, beards, and the filthiest of pants. As they ate or sat afterward in the bar with their girlfriends, one leg was often tapping nervously up and down. It was characteristic, Robbins said.

  I climbed with Robbins the following day, a short route in an area called the Manure Pile. He had picked a climb called “After Six”; according to the Sierra Club Guidebook, it is a Grade II Class 5.7 route first climbed by Yvon Chouinard and Ruth Schneider in 1965. There are a number of systems to classify the difficulty of routes. The Yosemite system uses a Roman numeral to give the overall length and difficulty—Grade I takes a few hours, Grade III most of a day, etc.—and the Arabic number gives the level of the most demanding section. “After Six” is a moderate climb that might take two or three hours.

  We roped up near the bottom of the first pitch, which happens to be the most difficult. Two husky girls were engaged in climbing it. Liz talked to them later. They were from Wyoming: this was their first climb in Yosemite, and they were just warming up. Rather than wait, we moved twenty feet or so to the right, where there is a variant, and began there. Climbers who are equals take turns leading, but of course we did not do this. Robbins went first, wearing corduroy trousers, a shirt and sweater, and a sort of white, old-fashioned golfer’s hat. Over one shoulder he had slung the nylon loops with aluminum wedges that are often used instead of pitons in Yosemite and elsewhere. These come in a great variety of shapes; they are placed in a crack where it narrows or is irregular and jam there. They serve the same purpose as pitons, which are a kind of flat steel spike with a ring at the blunt end to attach the climbing rope to the mountain, either firmly or so it can run freely. With wedges, however, the rock is preserved from all the damage of “nailing,” as climbers call piton placement.

  From the ground, Robbins seemed to move up the rock with ease, using the toe of his shoe in a crack that was about an inch and a half wide and finding occasional holds off to the side.

  “The thing is,” Liz, who was standing beside me, commented, “you can’t tell whether it’s easy or hard from watching him. It all looks the same when he climbs it.” She’s made many climbs with her husband, including a repeat of the sensational face of Half Dome. She described the long, exposed ledge near the top to me—the wall slowly pressing her off it until she finished on one knee with the other leg dangling in space. She also climbed partway up the Nose of El Cap with him—“The most thrilling thing I’ve ever done,” she said.

  “Off belay,” a voice called down. It was Robbins, eighty feet or so above. He had finished his lead. It was my turn.

  Almost from the first moment, certainly from the time you are eight or ten feet off the ground, there is the feeling of being in another element, as distinct as diving into the sea. Robbins was in a position where he could watch me as I struggled. I had seen more or less clearly what he had done when he was on the lower portion, and I attempted to do the same thing, but before long I was moving on my own and completely involved in trying to find a way to climb it. To my inexperienced eye, there seemed to be a number of possibilities, or what could be possibilities, for holds. Most of these quickly proved inadequate. Others led to impasses. There comes the moment when one must gather oneself and try. I had done some climbing, not very much. I knew certain basic things, but sometimes, even on this easy route, it seemed as if he had taken the secret of his ascent with him. From time to time a bit of advice would be called down to me when I had come to a standstill—“Try pressing down on that place over to the right,” or “Try and get your left foot there and use your right on that little hold.” I was hand-jamming and fist-jamming; there was a period when it seemed I was clinging, legs beginning to tremble, for fully five minutes, unable to find any way of continuing until finally the smallest hold that I had first rejected, then come back to, and then rejected again, became the right one.

  I had no fear. With him belaying, I would fall a few feet at the most if, as it seemed would happen any moment, a foot slipped and my fingers slid from whatever they held to. But I did have the anguish, the intense anguish of not knowing if I could make it. That, Robbins told me, never changes—it was still the same for him as it had been in his first climbing days. Sometimes he had remained in one spot for more than an hour trying to find some way to move, trying to solve the rock as if it were the door of a bank vault.

  It took us about three hours to do “After Six.” The wind had picked up and was blowing strongly toward the end. We stood on top for a minute or two, coiled the rope, and then started down a path off to the side. In twenty minutes we were back at the bottom. There had been times when he had gone out of sight above me and I couldn’t hear his call but waited for a signal on the rope to begin—I had been alone. I was tired but happy. Robbins had the appearance of a man who has been on a leisurely stroll.

  That night we had dinner at the Ahwahnee. Outside it had begun to snow. In the great dining room, filled with people and the warmth of conversation, we sat near one of the windows while the snow went through the darkness at a flat, wintery angle. Robbins mentioned the climbers we had seen on El Cap, probably a little cold and frightened, he said; they hadn’t counted on a snowstorm in May. Many of them started big climbs surprisingly ill-equipped. There was a touch of disapproval in his comment. As we were to find out, there was considerable foresight as well.

  Fine meals in expensive hotels have not always been part of his life. He was born in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, on February 3, 1935. His parents were divorced by the time he was six. His mother moved with him to California and remarried; they lived in Redondo Beach and then Hollywood. After the war she divorced again. She worked as a cosmetics expert in a drugstore and they lived with relatives to cut down expenses.

  He had his first taste of the mountains with the Boy Scouts on a trip to the High Sierra sponsored by a local radio station, KFI. They climbed Fin Dome, a mountain near the Rae Lakes. “We used ropes. I remember it was fabulously easy for me. The others had trouble. I had none. I just wanted to climb and climb and climb. I was intoxicated with it.” When he quit school in the tenth grade—he was getting poor marks, learning nothing—he had a feeling of inferiority; he wasn’t good at sports, he wasn’t good at anything. And yet at the same time, he says, “I knew I wanted to excel. I felt different from other people. I felt either inferior or superior. I wanted to do something heroic, great.” He was going to the mountains to climb as much as he could, often alone. “I always had trouble recruiting partners.” His first appearance at a climb of the Sierra Club established his reputation. He had a cast on one arm—it was two weeks to the day from the fall he had taken when the piton pulled free—but he climbed anyway. He was soon excelling at boulder problems and nervily applying the moves from these to the airy heights of Tahquitz Rock, a favorite location not far from Palm Springs. He was the outstanding young climber in t
he area, and his ascent of “Open Book,” a 200-foot inner corner at Tahquitz, was the first 5.9 climb in the country. The route had been done before, but Robbins made it “go free”—that is, he climbed it without using pitons for direct support. It was 1952. He was seventeen.

  The first of his big routes was a second ascent of the north face of Sentinel in Yosemite. It had taken the original party four and a half days. Robbins and his companions did it in two. Climbing it again and again over the years, he eventually reduced the time to just over three hours. It’s now been done in two.

  By 1958, the ascent of Half Dome behind him, he was in the army, a clerk in Officers Records at Fort Bliss, Texas. For a year and a half he forged passes and caught an airplane ride north almost every weekend to climb in one place or another, hitchhiking back on Sunday, sometimes arriving only in time to shave, change clothes, and report to work. It was during this period that Tom Frost, an aeronautical engineer who had taken up climbing and was later to accompany Robbins on three of his major ascents, met his future companion. Frost was working at North American Aviation and had fallen in with a group of Los Angeles climbers.

  “We’d go out to Tahquitz all the time,” Frost says. “I heard frequent mention of Royal, Royal, Royal who did this, who said that. It turned out he was a friend of theirs in the army. One time we were climbing at Mount Pacifico; they were small rock cliffs, about twenty feet high. Someone pointed out a thin, diagonal crack big enough only for your fingers in places, with thin footholds and the wall overhanging slightly. It was called the ‘Robbins Eliminate.’ It had only been climbed twice, by Robbins and someone else. Well, I figured out a way, but couldn’t do it. I went back to Los Angeles and dieted for a month and exercised. On our next trip to Pacifico, Robbins happened to be there. I tried the lower part, then asked for a belay and climbed it. Robbins was sitting there on a rock. He didn’t say anything.”

  The next time they met, however, Robbins took Frost aside and confided his plans for an ascent of the Nose of El Cap—in Frost’s words, “an exceptionally serious undertaking.” Warren Harding, a famous siege climber, had taken a total of forty-five inconsecutive days and thirty nights to do it the first time, two years earlier. Harding used methods that opened a debate which still continues. The climb was up such blank rock that he pounded holes in it with a drill and then fixed small expansion bolts in these holes, hanging from them as he proceeded upward, step by step. Bolts had been known since before the war, but the excessive use of them went against the feelings of many, Robbins among them. Robbins’s plan was to do it in one push, without coming down and going back up again on fixed ropes. Frost thinks that he had been asked to go along because more qualified climbers had turned it down, not believing it could be done. “They thought they would perish,” he says.

  The climb was made in September 1960. Robbins, Frost, Chuck Pratt, and Joe Fitschen made up the team. “Robbins had tremendous confidence,” Frost says. “He’s an exceptional leader. At bivouacs he’d cut off an inch of salami and pass it over, an inch of cheese and pass it over, an inch of bread, let you have three swigs out of the water bottle, and then go to sleep. He’s a very strict disciplinarian. One of his great assets as a climber is the control he has over himself, his mind and his body. You didn’t have to worry about anything when you were climbing with him. If you did what he said, you’d be all right.”

  They had taken enough water for ten days, one quart per man per day. They made it to the top in seven.

  The following spring Robbins and Frost were gazing dreamily at the unclimbed southwestern, the left-hand, face of El Cap. The face had a number of weaknesses but there had never seemed a way to link them. Suddenly they saw a possibility, roundabout, but it might go: it was what became known as the Salathé Wall, for a great Yosemite figure of the ’40s, and it is now considered the finest rock climb in the world.

  There were thirty-four leads, or rope lengths, on the climb, many 5.8 or 5.9 with A3 and A4 nailing. Artificial climbing—hanging directly from pitons, bolts, or whatever—is designated Al through A5 in order of difficulty. Much of Yosemite big-wall climbing is artificial—on this climb more than half.

  Robbins himself concedes it was his drive and determination that were the reason for his success. Many people surpassed him in talent, he says. “I did the first 5.9, but Pratt did the first 5.10. If I’d had Pratt’s talent and he had my drive . . .” His voice trails off. One thing he has always gotten from climbing is battle. Not just challenge—he needs to strive. It is so much a part of him that in games, of which he is fond, if he cannot find someone to play against, he will play against himself. For more than twenty years the greatest influence on his life has been Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose “Self-Reliance” I reread when I learned this. It begins with a verse of Beaumont and Fletcher:

  Man is his own star, and the soul that can

  Render an honest and a perfect man,

  Commands all light, all influence, all fate . . .

  But of all that is in the essay, one sentence struck me: “The force of character is cumulative.” It seemed to me that this helped to explain the particular course Robbins’s climbing has taken in the last eight or nine years. Following other climbs of major importance, both in Yosemite and in the Alps in the years 1962–67, Robbins climbed El Cap solo in 1968. He was on it for ten days. We already have some idea of the difficulties of such an attempt under normal circumstances; to do it alone implies an exceptional person.

  Solo climbing has a long history. Hermann Buhl went to the top of Nanga Parbat alone, and Darbellay did the north face of the Eiger by himself, but “for me,” Robbins says, “Bonatti is the great example. His solo of the Dru [a 3,000-foot granite pinnacle near Chamonix that Robbins put up two routes on himself] is one of the great achievements in mountaineering. It took six days. Escape was very difficult.”

  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 a
nd 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.