by James Salter
Molly Higgins is a lab technician in a hospital. She has blond hair and the decent, American face of a girl in the emergency room who is there when your eyes open and you love her from then on. She is very together. She has climbed the Diamond and Yosemite’s El Capitan. She comes from a town near Philadelphia, on the Main Line. Her mother works in a bookstore—her father died when she was thirteen.
Molly was always attracted by mountains. One day her mother brought home some literature from Colorado College, tossed it on the table, and said, “How’d you like to go there?” A pamphlet from the college mountain club was pinned up in her room all that summer.
Two weeks after she arrived in the fall of 1968 she was climbing in the Garden of the Gods. She loved it, but the club was as much social as athletic and she liked the hiking even more. One day she and a boyfriend found a rope on the floor of a storage room and went out to try a climb. It was sixty feet high. For two hours she watched while her boyfriend attempted to do it. Finally she asked to try. She was wearing lug-soled boots and after a fearful struggle managed to get to the top. She was so grateful that she fell on her knees and kissed it. The boyfriend never did follow. “It really turned me on,” she says. “I could feel things in myself I couldn’t feel other places. I was frightened, but on reaching the top and overcoming that fear I felt an incredible self-esteem.”
By the following year she was climbing in Eldorado Canyon. She did the Bastille Crack, Ruper, the Grand Giraffe. She didn’t realize that her ability to protect—to put in pitons at the proper places—was very poor. One day, reaching up with the rope held in her mouth, she slipped and took a thirty-foot fall. She nearly lost four teeth. She was badly scared but somehow brushed it off. At Longs Peak that autumn it happened again, this time more seriously. She was climbing Stettners Ledges, a classic route on the lower East Face. The smooth, glacial granite, the altitude, the exposure. “I was scared out of my tree,” she remembers.
Just below the crux pitch she fell. She hadn’t been putting in enough protection—down she went for eighty-five feet, hitting various ledges. Fortunately she was wearing a helmet. It was a terrifying fall. The boyfriend with whom she was climbing was so unnerved that he gave up the sport, and because he was her only partner, she had to give it up too. It was three years before she tried again.
In the summer of 1973 she was working for Outward Bound near Gunnison and one day she grabbed a girlfriend and went up to climb.
“I started all over again. We began on 5.0s. Nuts had come out then and we were using them for protection. There was no one to rely on but ourselves—I’d always leaned on a man, depended on him completely, but the minute we began this I was suddenly a different kind of climber. I could climb my own way. It was very significant.”
The following spring she went to Yosemite and that summer to the Pamirs in the U.S.S.R. as part of the American contingent of an international gathering. This was the summer when eight Russian women were caught in a fierce storm as they were attempting to traverse Lenin Peak. There was no chance of rescue. They died one by one, in radio contact with the base camp until the end. “Please forgive us. We love you. Goodbye.”
Molly herself survived an avalanche, high altitude, snow, and ice. She had been unhappy all during the expedition, desperately lonely, and when she came back to the States extremely depressed, she turned to a friend for advice. He was a climber, a real heavy, in her words. What he told her was simple. “If there’s something you really want to do, do it, and do it as well as you possibly can. You need no other justification. If you want to climb well, spend every spring and fall in Yosemite.”
Her partner in Yosemite has usually been another woman, Barbara Eastman. In 1977 they climbed the 3,000-foot Nose of El Capitan together. The Nose is 5.10 and A3, which refers to the difficulty of placing aid where it is called for.
“It was a magnificent climb,” Molly says. “We were so close by then, we were good buddies. We knew each other’s weaknesses. We knew when the other got scared and how to nurse her. We didn’t get scared on the Nose, though.” Molly’s not bothered by the height. If she has a good anchor, she likes to look down. She’s happy there. “We were very sisterly. I’d be tired and have to do a hard pitch and begin to whimper. And she’d just clean my glasses and say. ‘Go ahead, Molly, you can do it.’”
Other women climbers she rates with herself include Beth Bennett and Coral Bowman, her Boulder rivals. They’re both better face climbers, she concedes—she gives them Eldorado. They’re slimmer than she is, stronger. Coral, who is a schoolteacher, last year had the start of what would have been a legendary fall. She was on the Naked Edge. At the top of the second pitch, perhaps 500 feet in the air, she had to rappel down to free a haul rope that had gotten fouled. She untied from her partner, Sue Giller, made a figure eight knot in the rope, and clipped into a carabiner. Then she leaned out over nothing and started down. Somehow the carabiner was forced sideways, oddly tilted. The gate opened and the rope came out. She was falling. For a horrified moment her eyes met Sue’s. “I knew I was going to die and I didn’t want to die.” She had gone about twenty feet when with incredible alertness she managed to reach out and grab the haul rope. She knew she wouldn’t be able to hold on but somehow she did, getting third-degree burns as the rope sang through her hands and gradually slowed her. She came to a stop and found a foothold. “Sue! Help me!” she called.
Her hands were in a cast for five days. Three weeks later she was climbing again.
In the 1950s there were a few, isolated climbers in the area, perhaps twenty altogether. Now they are everywhere. The bulletin boards at Boulder Mountaineer and Neptune Mountaineering are filled with notices of skis, sleeping bags, and bicycle parts for sale and also requests for climbing partners (Lead 5.9. Will need warm-up as it’s spring. Leave number. I live in a van).
Climbing is more than a sport. It is entry into myth. For those irresistibly drawn to it, it becomes a life, and there is always a pack of dazzling new climbers biting at the tails of those who have gone before. The important routes have all been climbed. Many of them have now been climbed free; in some cases they are being done solo. Charlie Fowler, who is celebrated for being so far out that what he does is almost unimaginable, last year soloed the Diamond, eight vertical pitches in an hour and a half, without a rope. This doesn’t discourage young climbers, rather it seems to draw them on. Only a few, in any case, will have the talent and intensity to make themselves known. For most of them there is joy enough in the feeling of working their way upward.
Jim Erickson, on the other hand, has seen the darkness that lies at the end of ambition satisfied. He works as the manager of a small factory and climbs occasionally. He studied music and is married to a violinist. They have a son. Erickson’s name, together with a few others like Pat Ament’s and Roger Briggs’s, will always be linked with a certain period of Colorado climbing, but for the veterans, those who have given everything, there is an emptiness afterward. Life is not the same.
Climbing has no referees, no arena, no titles. It has a certain ethic that, in recent years, has been veering toward the extreme. The hard climbs in Eldorado are visible because of the chalk marks on them, evidence of where crucial handholds are. Erickson will not use chalk—the white bag of courage, it has been called. Further, he will not continue a first ascent on which he takes a fall. If that happens, he goes down and abandons the attempt permanently. His feeling is that no climb should be done in a way that differs from how it would be done solo without a rope. Even the retreat, if one must be made, can have nothing artificial about it such as lowering off a piece of protection.
Not everyone conforms to such standards, of course—not everyone can. Climbing has its champions, and they are chosen in what is perhaps the only way. They are singled out in the hearts of others in a confusion of envy and love. They are champions for reasons that are in part clear—their accomplishments, their personalities—but also
for things that are not so easy to define. A brilliant climb in itself is not enough to elevate someone into the pantheon. Mountains cannot be assassinated nor the heights won in a single day. The glory belongs only to those who have earned it and usually over a period of time. In this regard, the morality is absolute. There are no upsets, no undeserved triumphs. In one sense, there is no luck. This severity gives the sport its strength. There is a paradise and a final judgment. Above all, climbing is honest. Honor is its essence.
Still, at the end, there may be a question. “People like to do climbs with big numbers on them,” Erickson says. It’s like a drug. For many this means doses of increasing strength until even these begin to lose their effect. “The thing about it is that it is self-indulgent, it has no purpose. It accomplishes nothing except for personal pleasure.” Sometimes, he says, he’s ashamed to admit that he is still climbing at his age. He is thirty.
Logan Construction is on the second floor of a small shopping center. There are two rooms, some drafting tables, plans tacked on the wall and a blackboard with “I love you Daddy” scrawled near the bottom. Jim Logan is divorced. He has twin boys. “I raise them half the time,” he says. “I have them every Wednesday through Saturday.”
Logan is slight, with light brown hair and a reddish beard. He’s thirty-two, wears glasses, and has a quiet, easy manner. A few years ago he went out and taught himself to ice climb. That summer he did the North Face of the Eiger. It was his first real ice climb and one of the few American ascents. “I put my first ice screw in on the Eiger,” he says. “The mountains have always interested me. I was a good climber when I was a little kid. My mother says I could always climb trees and buildings better than anyone. I liked being up in the air.”
Born in Texas, he came to prep school in Colorado when he was sixteen and entered the university two years later. He was already a fair climber. One day in Boulder Canyon he saw two young men—one of them was Ament—struggling to do a climb called Final Exam. They weren’t getting very far. Logan walked up in his cowboy boots and asked if he could try. They laughed but he changed shoes and did it first crack. The next day Ament introduced him to his friends in the college cafeteria, “This is Jim Logan and he’s a 5.10 climber.”
He stayed in the background, however: he did very few first ascents. The big shots then were Kor, Ament, Larry Dalke, Bob Culp, Wayne Goss—he was in awe of them, he didn’t think he was in their class. Nevertheless he entered the world of climbing. He dropped out of school and went to Yosemite. He climbed every chance he got. He found a job as an apprentice in a machine shop. His parents disapproved strongly. “You’re going to grow up to be a ditch digger,” his mother would say. He reached a certain high point in his life when he and Dalke climbed the Diamond in one day. That was in 1968. Then he was drafted.
Climbers as a group were opposed to the war and not ready to serve. The usual thing was to get a mental deferment. They went in for the examination stoned, incoherent, and unkempt. Logan was a Texan, he played it straight. He was sent to El Paso for basic training.
“I was devastated by it,” he says. “I lost all sense of value as a human being. I was in the army for two years. I spent a year in Vietnam, at Camranh Bay. I was a personnel clerk attached to Headquarters, U.S. Army Vietnam. I hated it. It was like being in prison.
“I used to go to a village and spend the night with a Vietnamese girl. She had two or three other boyfriends. I used to work the Ouija board for her friends, girls who had GI boyfriends who’d been killed. One guy had been killed by a tiger. They’d ask me questions. ‘Are you still there? Do you still love me?’
“When I got out of the army I flew to San Francisco. Wayne Goss picked me up and we went to Yosemite. I couldn’t climb. For the first time in my life I was afraid. I was a physical and mental wreck. In the army they destroy your self-confidence and then give it back to you a little at a time. In climbing, self-confidence is very important, knowing the next move is going to go, the next pitch is going to go. I’d fought on the wrong side in the war. I was very bitter.”
Logan got married, bought some land in Boulder with the money he had saved in Vietnam, and built a house. He learned carpentry and became a small contractor. He and his two partners design and build three or four houses a year.
Slowly he returned to climbing. He went every couple of weeks or so. By 1974 he was more or less back to normal. He was climbing 5.11. The next summer he spread his wings and climbed the Diamond free with his friend Wayne Goss. It was the first free ascent of any route on the Diamond. It crushed Roger Briggs, he remarks innocently. “Roger really wanted to do it.”
There is a pleasure in outdistancing one’s companions. It would be a saintly nature that did not feel this. Logan, like others, began to feel that the future was the big mountains—that was where climbing had to go. The days of significant achievement in rock climbing were over. The need for something conceptually interesting took him to what has been called the most difficult climb on the continent. In 1978 he did the Emperor Face of Mt. Robson in Canada.
“It was something everybody wanted to climb,” he says. “Yvon Chouinard wanted to do it—he said it was the hardest climb there was. And Jeff Lowe—it was his life’s ambition.” Logan says it without malice. He did it, they didn’t—it could have been the other way around. He’s like a great jockey who explains matter-of-factly that he merely had the best horse. It was some horse. Five or six thousand feet of extreme climbing. The last pitch alone, at the top, took them eight hours.
His business requires only eight months a year; the rest of the time he can do as he likes. “I feel like I’m on top again of the world of climbing. I’m very excited that there’s an activity I can be on the leading edge and push the limits of—that’s very appealing to me.
“There was a time.” Logan says, “when I climbed in Eldorado and knew every car that drove in, when every good climber in the country knew every other good climber. I can remember when I went into the Hiking Club looking for a partner, I was leading 5.7s and 5.8s, even some 5.9s. They said, ‘Get out of here, kid. If you could climb that well, we’d have heard of you.’”
He sits silent for a while.
“Wayne Goss is a commodities broker in Chicago now. Dalke is a drapery hanger in Boulder. Layton Kor is a bricklayer and a Jehovah’s Witness.” He pauses. “All of them finished with climbing,” he says.
Life
August 1979
The Alps
The great Alps link one in some way to one’s immortality.
—Hilaire Belloc
I once spent a night sleeping, more or less, beneath a huge boulder that formed a kind of cave in the mountains above Chamonix. It was at the base of the Dru, a legendary towering granite spire 1,500 feet high. I was alone, paying tribute. Sometime after midnight there was a distant sound: thunder. Slowly it grew closer and soon a tremendous storm began. The very rock above me seemed to tremble in the thunderclaps. I almost imagined it would be split by a bolt of lightning to reveal me, insectlike, at the foot of a towering, angry mountain god. The storm finally passed, but I lay awake until dawn. The Alps are famous for swift changes of weather. In the middle of summer climbers can be caught in blizzards, occasionally with tragic results.
It was in Chamonix that I first climbed, and learned to ski in St. Anton, famed places both, one in France and the other in Austria but each in the Alps, the great upper story of Europe. From the mountains, in all directions, flow mighty rivers, the Rhine, Rhône, Po, and Danube; a necklace of immortal cities lies in the surrounding foothills and plains: Nice, Grenoble, Geneva, Turin, Milan, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, and, stretching a bit, Venice. You are simultaneously in the center of civilization and the most majestic, thrilling wilderness.
It is essentially a geologic wilderness: fierce, jagged peaks in parallel series. The timberline is relatively low; above the trees typically are meadows that for centuries have
been used for summer grazing. There are few wild animals.
The civilization of this rugged area is found in the many towns and mountain inns and huts. In the Alps, as in most of Europe, you eat well—it is part of the culture. Bread is still handmade, the butter is fresh, many things come from farms nearby.
Much has changed in this tumultuous century—the population has flowed into cities, with their hectic and somewhat artificial life—removed from the forests, streams, silence. But like a great island the mountains stand, safe from development, useless in the most noble sense.
These are the Alps. High up, near the sky. Walking a path far from anything made by man, the sudden sound one hears is that of a cowbell. A farmer’s small herd, here in the clouds, is just beyond the bend.
National Geographic Traveler
October 1999
Offering Oneself to the Fat Boys
I can’t remember when I started to ski powder—when I had to, probably. Like all hard lessons it left its imprint, a word that is a symbol, since the track of skis in untouched snow, their pure, solitary signature, is not the least of pleasures.
Among innumerable times, one that stands out in memory was when a doctor I knew from New York came out for a week to ski and said, Why don’t we meet on the top in the morning? That night it snowed. In the morning there was at least a foot and a half of fresh powder covering everything. The ride up was cold. Snow was blowing from the crest.
The doctor had an instructor, Dennis, lean and good-natured. The three of us stood on the Shoulder of Bell in Aspen. The run dropped like a stone through the trees below. Dennis smiled. It looked great, he said. He offered some advice, “Always start with your skis pointing straight down,” and pushed off.
They say that all men are subject to feelings of doubt at one time or another, but I remember thinking, Is he? He was going down like a leaf in a stream, bouncing from side to side over bumps, stumps, who knew what, snow flying from his legs. There’s no choice: he goes, you go. It was one of the runs of my life.