Don't Save Anything

by James Salter

  Ingemar Stenmark, from Sweden, is the attraction here. He is a phenomenon, the sort that appears only once or twice in a generation. Tall, intelligent, aloof, like a great reddish dog, he reportedly earns well over half a million dollars a year. He has been at the top since winning the World Cup in 1976, 1977, and 1978, when they changed the rules to keep him from making it boring. He is twenty-six. He may not be back. “You can be in the top ten for ten years,” he says, “no more, and I have eight. I don’t think you get physically tired, but mentally you’re spent.”

  As he competes now in these final months against Phil Mahre and his twin brother, Steve, there is really no one like him. He has that best-loved element of greatness: an unmistakable style. The possibilities in the event are limited—there is a steep hill with sixty gates the racer must flash through faster than the others; that’s all there is to it. Nevertheless, Stenmark makes himself different. Immensely smooth and powerful, he is whacking the hinged poles aside as if he were batting balls, this confident champion who disdains the downhill and the “paper” World Cup points he might win by entering it and is content to be absolute king of his domain (though Phil Mahre will surpass him in both of his specialties before the season is over). He is skiing with unforgettable authority, not sitting on the comfortable lead of his first run but risking everything anew on the second, courting disaster. Across the finish line and the time flashes on the scoreboard, almost two seconds faster than Mahre. A slight smile—less than a smile, something within—crosses his fine features as he looks up and sees it. The day is his. His long-limbed Swedish fiancée is smiling. This is probably his final season. The crowd has a last glimpse of him there in the winter sunlight. A line of Auden drifts through the head. The white Alps glittered. He was very great.

  Geo

  December 1982

  Getting High

  Far up, on top, there is still some sun. The canyon is almost empty. Swallows are darting across it in the dusk. A lone figure wearing a pair of loose white pants walks to the Bastille, a rock that rises almost vertically from the road, touches it with both hands as if it were the side of a horse, and after a moment begins to climb. It seems a frivolous attempt, an act that will shortly be abandoned. There is no way up. There are some irregularities, a crack, a niche or two, nothing more. The climber moves smoothly, almost mysteriously. He pauses only to look, deduce, and continue upward. He has neither rope nor equipment. He appears to be, he is, in another world. Never glancing down, he sometimes stops to shake out his hand, then climbs on. Higher and higher. The rock is even more sheer. He is climbing toward the sun, the last touch of which lingers far above.

  Boulder is a city of 83,000 at the foot of the Rockies. It is the kind of provincial city that foreigners would love—handsome inhabitants, beautiful streets, and a marvelous old relic of a hotel in the middle of town. The hotel is the Boulderado, built in 1906. It has three lively bars, two restaurants, and a lobby from mining days, where young men in Levis indolently polish the brass. There are 20,000 students at the University of Colorado, and the median age in the city is only twenty-four. To the east side of town are large shopping centers and motels. To the west are the mountains. Boulder is the last city of the plains.

  It is also the capital of American climbing, if a capital must have theaters and paved streets. No climber on the way from the East to Yosemite would pass up Boulder and a try at Eldorado Canyon or the East Face of Longs Peak. The Gunks (the Shawangunks in New York), they say, are roofs; Yosemite is cracks; Colorado is steep, hard, face climbs.

  No one knows how many climbers there are in Boulder, probably thousands—students, doctors, university professors. Though long popular in Europe, climbing until recently had few enthusiasts in the U.S. In the past decade there has been a tremendous surge of interest. Now it is on television, there are magazines devoted to it, and soon there may even be speed competitions—climbing races. The Russians have had them for years.

  For those who live far from the mountains, the whole idea of rock climbing must seem special and exotic. One must be near the mountains to understand it, one must be thrilled by them. The perils of climbing are overrated, but they have at their core one of the deepest of human fears, that of great heights and falling. For some climbers these fears are insignificant. For others they are something to be overcome.

  Turn off the main highway south of Boulder and head west. Open country. There are houses scattered along the road, distant foothills with patches of forest, excavations, horses grazing in the fields. After a mile or two the entrance to a canyon appears, guarded by a buttress of rock. There is a shantytown of summer houses, shacks, and trailers strewn along the creek—Eldorado Springs, population about 225, climbers, car guys, and old-timers. It used to be a resort on land bought from the Union Pacific Railroad: “Finest natural warm springs in the state.” There is still a swimming pool; there were once stables, a big hotel, and a dance hall. A stairway of 1,350 steps went up one side of the canyon, and a wire-walker named Ivy Baldwin thrilled the crowds by crossing 600 feet in the air. Eisenhower spent his honeymoon here in 1916. Excursion trains ran from Denver. The steep canyon walls that seem ageless were objects of natural beauty, nothing more. In fifty years they were to bring Eldorado Springs to life again.

  The cliffs are formed of an extremely hard sandstone with surface irregularities, which provide holds. These are often very small. In the most difficult climbing there are holds no thicker than the edge of a shirt button. Farther north, in Boulder Canyon and Rocky Mountain National Park, the rock is mainly granite marked by vertical cracks. This is the same rock found in Yosemite. Climbers usually excel at crack climbing or face climbing, one or the other. A few are equally adept at both.

  Hard Times, Trail’s End, Romeo—the houses in Eldorado all have names. In the middle of town is a green cottage with a sign: International Alpine School. Some of its letters are missing. A flight of stairs leads up to the door. The porch is a small office—some photos on the wall, a desk, typewriter, and a box in the corner marked “Inactive Files.” In the main room hang coils of rope and slings of climbing hardware. In back are a small pantry and toilet. The water comes from an irrigation ditch, the heat from a stove. There is no insulation. The rent is $70 a month. There are two lofts, one filled with sleeping bags, the other with a mattress. In this kingdom reigns Kevin Donald, director of the school. He is thirty-one, tall, slim, naked to the waist. He knows every person and every dog in town, “Hi, Czar. Hi, Chinook. Hi, P.P.” That last stands for Perpetual Pup, he explains. He knows many of the visitors as well. He’s taught a lot of them to climb.

  There are at least four climbing schools in Boulder plus the underground. At the International Alpine School, for around $400 in the summer and $500 in the winter, you can spend up to seven days learning to climb. Food, tentage, and equipment are included. Kevin also hires out as a private guide for $100 a day.

  Rock climbing has a scale by which it is graded, a decimal scale starting with 5. A climb of 5.1 or 5.2 is easy. 5.6 can give pause. It was intended that 5.9 be the ultimate, but things have gone so far past the earlier limits that there are now grades of 5.11 and 5.12. Kevin is a solid 5.11 climber. In practical terms this means he can climb almost anything, including buildings, a tradition at the University of Colorado, where the library and Macky Auditorium, especially the latter, are among the favorites. There is a basement entrance to Macky with a large wall where stones protrude slightly from the mortar. They are covered with chalk marks—gymnast’s chalk is used to give climbers a better grip—and students, as well as ex-students and some who have never even registered, can be found clinging to the stones like lizards. Sometimes in the late afternoon the organ is playing inside the auditorium and great, Wagnerian chords flow over the figures working their way upward.

  There are climbs off campus as well. There’s a well-known layback on the Colorado Bookstore and good hand jams on the Public Service Building.
“They’re about 5.9,” Kevin estimates. Climbers also practice on large rocks and the lower parts of the faces themselves. This is called bouldering and is a separate art. In the canyon many of the boulder problems are named: Green Hornet, Slap in the Face, Turok’s Mantle. Kevin, who studied modern dance to give himself more grace in his climbing movements, is a resident expert.

  “There are some real nice moves,” he comments genially to a couple of visiting climbers. He is barefoot and wearing his white pants. “You guys are strong, you’ll be able to do this without any trouble.”

  He’s sandbagging. The nice moves turn out to be excruciatingly difficult: two finger pull-ups to reach an overhang, horizontal levers, abrupt swings from one half-inch hold to another like an orangutan.

  “Hey, neat! You almost got it,” Kevin cries. “Now bend back more.”

  The visitors are barely holding on. “Your weight is entirely on your right leg, see?”

  They can’t do it. They drop off like dead flies.

  “Aren’t there any good finger cracks?” one of the climbers keeps moaning.

  Extreme, acrobatic moves are not the sort of thing one does on a real climb—they’re too risky. There is a radical school that believes in the concept “No shoot, no loot,” that is, if you don’t take chances, you don’t win, and its adepts are willing to take ten or twenty short falls in a row, hundreds of feet up, attempting something hard. Of course, they are protected by the rope, but there is something impure about these repeated attempts, at least in the view of many climbers.

  Technical climbing is done with a rope. The theory is faultless. One climber secures himself to the rock. The other climbs, protected against too long a fall by the rope, which is paid out to him as he goes and which, further, passes through carabiners clipped to loops on pieces of metal, called nuts, that are wedged into small cracks. The rope will not break. The danger usually occurs when the belayer is not well enough situated to hold a fall, when he has been obliged to stay in a place that is unsuitable. “If you come off now, we’re both going,” is a chilling warning. Accidents also take place during the descent when the danger seems past. Rappels are particularly risky. There are the dangers of “easy” places where one doesn’t bother with regular procedures. Finally there are the so-called objective dangers of rockfall, avalanche, and the like. In the U.S. last year there were forty-two climbing fatalities.

  Kevin doesn’t take falls. He has fallen forty or fifty times, but that was over a sixteen-year period. Usually he expects it—when he’s overextending himself or trying for something too difficult. If he thinks he may fall, he goes down and comes back another time. The big change that has taken place during the time he’s been climbing has been the freeing of routes. Many of the climbs in the canyon and elsewhere were first done with what is called aid—pitons were driven into cracks in the rock and climbers clipped into them and stood in a kind of nylon sling. Gradually the idea became to do the climbs without aid, to do them free. The climber may use only his hands and feet, even when the rock is past vertical. To so much as hook a finger through a piton already in place is forbidden.

  One of the main figures in making routes go free was Jim Erickson, a contemporary of Kevin’s. There is one particularly intimidating climb called the Naked Edge, located in what the guidebook describes as a superb position, 400 feet up on Redgarden Wall. It is a long, exterior corner high in the air and at one point must be crossed where it is said that a fall will cut the rope. It was Erickson who first climbed the Naked Edge free. A purist, he has never gone back to do it again. The climb is 5.11 and is now a classic. Kevin had been away from climbing for several years. As soon as he arrived back in Boulder, he called a friend.

  “Hi, Ron, this is Kevin.”

  The reply was simple. It bridged a decade. “The Naked Edge went free.”

  It was a turning point in his life, Kevin says. “I couldn’t believe it. I was just blown away.”

  He can do forty-five chins. Erickson can do fifty. Kevin is the more natural climber of the two, with the torso and thin legs of a gymnast. Erickson is shorter and chunkier—he has more of a mountaineer’s build. He had to work harder to become a climber and it was this extra effort, Kevin believes, that made him great. Climbing is superb exercise but it is not like other sports, not even boxing. There is more at stake. Kevin used to box—he was knocked down three times in the first round by Sandy Cisneros.

  “Finally I just decided to stay down. It was all over. You can’t do that in climbing. You’ve got to go to the end. You can’t walk away from it when you’re up there. You’re responsible for yourself and you’ve got to do it.”

  There is always something you cannot or are afraid you cannot do. Like everyone else, there is a point at which Kevin feels the anguish. It is usually on difficult climbs when the point of no return is passed and the only way remaining is up. Not all climbs have this, of course, but when they do he can feel it, the voltage, the adrenaline rush. It’s the adrenaline that makes your legs tremble. Too big a rush finishes you, you can’t go on.

  “The thing is not to burn out, to control it. Don’t freak out, keep your head. You have to save your strength to the end.” The psychological element in the sport is immense. The space beneath one, the implacability of the rock, the move that must be made. Somehow you do it: on top at last. On top of Psycho with its frightening overhang, Rosy Crucifixion, or the Grand Giraffe. Across the way the Bastille is dotted with climbers. To the east as far as one can see are the plains. The scene is ravishing, the feeling of comradeship and victory, supreme.

  Steve Komito has a climbing boot shop in the town of Estes Park. From his porch the summit of Longs Peak is visible. Komito is thirty-eight years old, short, and good-natured. He is, he says, the classic bad-luck guy, the victim. His father was in the furniture business in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Komito had never so much as seen a mountain when he came upon a copy of Annapurna by Maurice Herzog. He read it and was overwhelmed. For the first time in his life he was in the presence of something that really took hold of his spirit. He began to devour books about climbing, and in the last year of high school went on a YMCA trip to Wyoming. The group spent one day in climbing school and then climbed Grand Teton. He was hooked.

  His parents wanted him to live in Florida so he would be there when they retired, but he left the University of Miami and moved to Colorado. That was in 1960. Soon after he fell in with a legendary figure of the era, a six-foot-five giant named Layton Kor, a man of demonic energy who sped from one climb to another in a bald-tired Ford. For a decade Kor was the leading climber in Colorado and constantly in search of new partners. One night he ran into Komito at a party and immediately latched onto him. They went on their first climb the next morning at dawn. It was an ascent of something called Outer Space. It was 5.8 with aid, a high rating for those days.

  “Don’t worry, Komito,” Kor was fond of saying as they clung to a face. “The worst that can happen to us is we’ll fall off and get killed.”

  “He got me doing hard climbs,” Komito says. “I’m not athletic. I’m not brave. To me every accomplishment is a major breakthrough, and every failure I’ve expected anyway. With Kor I was afraid all the time, but it gave me what I needed. It was something I could do and be proud of. And I had the friendship of someone I respected. What it gave me was a breakthrough to something many of my contemporaries don’t acknowledge: manhood.”

  By his own admission Komito is a perpetually mediocre climber. He climbs twenty or twenty-five times a year. He still has certain ambitions, however: the principal one is to continue climbing to a very old age. On trips to Europe he has been moved by the sight, which is common, of men and women in their sixties and seventies hiking and sometimes climbing in the mountains. They represent to him something admirable in a society that has become more and more artificial and throwaway.

  Fifteen miles from the shop is the great, glacier-shattered Ea
st Face of Longs. It is 2,000 feet of vertical and more-than-vertical rock interrupted only by one wide ledge. The top portion because of its shape is called the Diamond. By any standard it is a great wall climb with the traditional hazards of storm and rockfall. The Diamond was first climbed in 1960. The first winter ascent was in 1967 (by Layton Kor). A first solo ascent came three years later.

  There is a hiker’s route that goes up the back. It’s a long trek of ten or eleven hours up and down, but it is very popular during the summer and has been for nearly a century. From the top one can see a hundred miles—to Pikes Peak, the Mountain of the Holy Cross, as far as the Medicine Bows in Wyoming. Little children have made the climb, people on crutches, and even an eighty-five-year-old minister, an example to warm Komito’s heart. Longs Peak is 14,255 feet, well up among the fifty-three mountains in the state that are over 14,000. All of the Fourteeners, as they are called, can be climbed without a rope, and a surprising number of people have climbed them all. Some are members of the Colorado Mountain Club and send in notices of their having completed the circuit to the club’s magazine. Colorado governor Dick Lamm has climbed fourteen of the mountains, including Pikes Peak on New Year’s Eve, probably one of the safest ways of spending it.

  In Boulder anyone can turn out to be a climber. The waitress at the Goode Taste Crepe Shoppe is a pretty girl in a long dress. She hands us some menus.

  “Were you up climbing today, Jennifer?”

  “Yeah, it was great.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “We did the Great Zot.”

  “Out of sight.”

  Many women are climbing in Eldorado these days and at least three of them are outstanding. Women tend to have less upper-body strength than men, but climbing is done mainly with the legs, and balance, intelligence, and deftness of footwork are extremely important.