by Jon Krakauer
Make no mistake: Gill's ascents may be diminutive, but by no stretch of the imagination are they easy. The boulders he climbs tend to be overhanging and lacking in fissures or rugosities substantial enough for lesser climbers even to see, let alone stand on or cling to. In effect, Gill's climbs distill the cumulative challenges of an entire mountain into a compact chunk of granite or sandstone the size of a garbage truck or modest suburban house. It is no exaggeration to say that the summit of Mt. Everest could sooner be reached by most climbers than could the summit of any one of a score of Gill's boulders.
Actually, to Gill's mind, summits aren't even very important. The real pleasure of "bouldering" lies more in the doing than in attaining the goal. "The boulderer is concerned with form almost as much as with success," says Gill. "Bouldering isn't really a sport. It's a climbing activity with metaphysical, mystical, and philosophical overtones."
Gill is in his early fifties, a tall, trim man, with sad eyes and smooth, careful movements. He speaks the same way he movesslowly, deliberately, with meticulously chosen words uttered in grammatically perfect sentences. With his wife Dorothy and a num ber of well-fed pets that he pretends to disdain, Gill lives in a plain two-story home in Pueblo, a steel town on the sun-baked southern Colorado plains that has seen better days. Except, perhaps, for somewhat oversize arms and shoulders, when Gill is standing on horizontal ground there is nothing about his demeanor or physical presence to suggest that he is a mythic figure, a man whose activities on ridiculously steep rock have led people to suggest that he has uncovered some major loophole in the laws of gravity. With his thinning hair and neatly trimmed goatee, Gill looks a lot like a mildmannered professor of mathematics-which, it turns out, he is.
That Gill is both master boulderer and mathematician is no coincidence; he sees significant parallels between these two seemingly unrelated activities. "When I first started climbing I met several other climbers who were research mathematicians," Gill muses. "I wondered, `Why is it that out of the few people I meet climbing, so many of them turn out to be research mathematicians?' Even though one activity is almost completely cerebral and the other is mainly physical, there is something common to bouldering and mathematical research. I think it has something to do with pattern recognition, a natural instinct to analyze a pattern."
Impossible-looking mathematical proofs, Gill says, are solved by "quantum jumps of intuition, and the same thing is true in bouldering." It is no accident that in the jargon of climbers, boulder climbs are termed "problems" (as in, "Did you hear that Kauk finally bagged that way heinous problem across the river, the one that had thrashed all the Eurodogs?").
Whether a block of overhanging sandstone or the proof of an unlikely theorem, the problems Gill relishes the most are those that have not yet been solved. "I enjoy finding a piece of rock that has never been climbed, visualizing some pattern of holds on the surface of that rock, and then climbing it. And, of course, the more obscure the pattern, the more difficult the appearance of the rock, the greater the satisfaction. There is something there that can be created, possibly, if one uses insight and intuition to make this quantum jump. One discovers that a bouldering route can be accomplished not by looking at each minute hold, foot by foot, but by looking at the overall problem."
For both ambitious boulderers and ambitious mathematicians, Gill emphasizes, it's not enough merely to solve a particular problem: "One of the objectives for both is to achieve an interesting result-ideally an unexpected result-in an elegant fashion, with a smooth flow, using some unexpected simplicity. There is the question of style." But beyond this, he adds, "to be a boulderer or a research mathematician you have to have this natural inclination to dig for something, a strong, completely inner motivation to be on the frontier, to discover things. The reward, in both activities, is almost continual enlightenment, and that's a great feeling."
An only child of a college professor who moved from town to town every few years, Gill describes his childhood as being "a little lonely at times. I was never athletic, I never went out for any organized sports." He spent a lot of time wandering around by himself in the woods, and enjoyed climbing trees. On family vacations when he was seven or eight, his parents tell him that he used to ask them to stop whenever the car would pass a road cut so he could scramble up it.
"In junior and senior high school," Gill continues, "I sang in the choir. I was really a pretty boring person at times." In high school in Atlanta, however, Gill met a girl who had done some climbing in the West. One weekend she invited him to accompany a group of students on a rock-climbing excursion in north Georgia. Gill watched for a while, and then gave it a try. "I was fairly klutzy," he recounts, "but I found the whole business terribly intriguing. It was the most intense thing that I'd ever done. It offered a change of perspective. Something about the rock really beckoned to me."
In 1954, after graduating from high school, he drove out to Colorado with a friend to climb for the summer. Gill may have been klutzy, but he was also bold: One day he soloed most of the way up the sheer east face of Longs Peak before a local mountain guide, thinking Gill to be some lunatic tourist, set out to rescue him. After catching up with Gill on the upper reaches of the mountain and talking things over, the guide, says Gill, "decided that I wasn't as big a nut as he had assumed I was from below, and we continued on to the top together." Other similarly exciting climbs followed, and by the end of the summer Gill knew he had found his calling.
The following fall, while a freshman at Georgia Tech, Gill was required to take a gymnastics course. The class was shown a film of Olympic gymnasts performing on the still rings, and Gill, never having seen the sport before, was "amazed at the poise with which those gymnasts accomplished their routines. They did enormously difficult things while appearing to be very relaxed and controlled." The film made a strong impression on him; it was epiphanic. Wasn't rock climbing, Gill mused, really nothing more than a kind of freeform gymnastics? Immediately, he began to use the tools of gymnastics-the scientific training regimen, the mental discipline, powdered chalk for the hands to enhance grip-to assault the traditional bounds of mountaineering.
Gill combed the hill country of Georgia and Alabama looking for crags to climb. There being a dearth of large cliffs to scale in these states, he naturally turned his attention to small outcrops and boulders. To keep from becoming bored, he used his newly acquired gymnastic skills to milk every last drop of challenge from his miniature alps. And thus was the sport of bouldering born. (Mountaineers had been practicing on boulders long before Gill appeared, but they generally regarded bouldering as nothing more than a training adjunct for "real" mountain climbing; Gill was the first person to pursue boulder climbing as a worthwhile end in itself.)
During his college years Gill often spent his summer vacations in the Tetons and other corners of the Rockies. On his first trips to the West he did climb a number of major peaks such as the Grand Teton, but he found himself devoting more of his attention to smaller and smaller (and harder and harder) pieces of rock. In Pat Ament's Master of Rock, a monograph about Gill, Yvon Chouinard recalls the days he and Gill shared in the Tetons in the late 1950s. According to Chouinard, Gill was one of a handful of eccentric climbers who resided in the Tetons during the summer months, living to climb, "scrounging on fifty cents a day, eating oatmeal." Gill had by then taken to eschewing summits, says Chouinard, and was "doing things just for the sake of pure climbing, going nowhere. These were absurd climbs as far as the American Alpine Club was concerned."
Before long, Gill gave up conventional roped climbing altogether and concentrated solely on climbing low boulders of extraordinary difficulty, in solitude, a practice that caused him to suffer no small amount of derision from tradition-bound climbers. Among those who paid Gill any heed at all, it was widely assumed that he had lost his nerve and become too acrophobic to climb more than twenty feet off the deck. In reality Gill was on an intense personal quest -poking and probing at the limits of gravity, stone, muscl
e, and mind to see where, beyond topographical heights, climbing might lead him.
The sport of mountain climbing is notably lacking in formal governing bodies and official rules. In spite of this-or perhaps because of this-the tight-knit community of established American climbers has always projected a very strong sense of how the game ought to be played, and an insidious kind of peer pressure is exerted to persuade climbers to conform to this sense.
"As early as 1957," Gill notes, "I recognized that mainstream philosophy is a very binding force that can keep you locked into a certain perspective, and I didn't like that. Most of all, I like the freedom of climbing. I grew up in the Deep South, where you're surrounded by thick, soft trees, and it's hard to see the sky because of the humidity. The landscape, by and large, is flat. Nature doesn't confront you there. It was a tremendous transition for me to come out West for the first time. I was overwhelmed by the rocks, by the scale, by the wide-open space. The marvelous thing about climbing to me, having grown up in a rather cloistered existence, was the exhilaration of being out in this natural state, where there were these great environmental challenges and all this freedom to maneuver.
"When I first recognized the tremendous force of a mainstream perspective," Gill continues, "the tremendous force that a climbing community can exert upon your climbing experience, I realized that I wanted to experiment with climbing, that I wasn't interested in making my climbing fall into a category, walking in someone else's footsteps, or obeying a set of informal rules, even if unwritten rules. I decided that an easy way to avoid the restrictive mainstream perspective was to climb in solitude. I simply found it to be very, very difficult to experiment while climbing with other people, or even while staying at a climbers' campground. When I climbed in solitude I discovered that I had marvelous inner adventures."
These days, it's not unusual to see teenagers who once would have spent their free time on a softball field or basketball court instead grab rock shoes and chalk bags and make for the boulders. Thanks to the activity's accessibility, uncomplicated format, and instant intensity, bouldering is currently very much in vogue. It's easy to forget that Gill was alone in bucking a powerful tide when he specialized in minimalist climbing three decades ago. Now he warns other boulderers that they should be wary of getting overly caught up in the established practices of bouldering; he continually urges would-be rock stars to look for direction from within.
In an article titled "Notes on Bouldering-The Vertical Path," Gill wrote,
Continually question climbing pursuits. Do they draw one back to the climbing community? Or do they lead along the [inner-directed] path? This questioning generates a tension that is heightened by disillusionment. Ultimately, one reaches an emptiness, and this is where our basic spontaneous nature leads to the beginning of the path . . . Thereafter one can continually stand apart from the outer world of climbing, yet at times be fiercely involved in it. Philosophical and mystical dimensions emerge when the two worlds are brought together.
At times Gill's prose can be as dense and recondite as one of his mathematical proofs, but it rings clear and true to those who share his obsession with vertical ground. It's not unusual to hear buzzcut adolescent rock prodigies quoting Gill verbatim from one of the articles about bouldering he's written for mountaineering journals. The gentlemanly middle-aged mathematics scholar has become a guru of the boulder fields, a role model for a generation of young men and women who dress in chartreuse tights, sport gold studs in their nostrils, and climb with the apocalyptic rhythms of Jane's Addiction or the Fine Young Cannibals rumbling through the headphones of their Walkmen.
No one, it is worth pointing out, would have paid any attention to Gill or his innovative ideas if he had simply been a boulderer, and not a brilliant boulderer. Gill is regarded as a hero instead of a crank because on occasion he has stepped off his private mystical path and become "fiercely involved" in the conventional climbing paradigm, where he has demonstrated that he can play the game according to the traditional rules as well as anyone ever has.
Climbing can be a ruthlessly competitive sport. The lack of formal competitive outlets makes it hard to establish a precise hierarchy of ascensionists, but a surprisingly accurate, if arcane, system for rating the difficulty of rock climbs was developed in Southern California in the 1950s that gives climbers some sense of how they stack up. The method is called the Yosemite Decimal System, and it rates the difficulty of technical climbs on a scale that originally ran from 5.0 to 5.9.
Within a few years of starting to climb, Gill was pioneering conventional roped climbs of 5.9 difficulty, the top of the scale, on Disappointment Peak and other Teton cliffs. At the end of the 1950s, when he began to really concentrate on bouldering, almost all of the problems he "put up" were much too hard to even register on the existing YDS scale. Gill was climbing at a 5.12 standard a good twenty years before such a rating came into existence (The standards in climbing, as in other athletic activities, have been raised considerably in the last thirty years: The 5. 10 rating was added to the scale in the sixties; the 5.11 rating in the seventies; 5.12, 5.13, and 5.14 ratings thus far in the eighties).
In 1961, Gill put up a boulder problem that is still talked about in hushed tones: the north face of the Thimble, a thirty-foot overhanging spire in the Needles of South Dakota. Gill's route on the Thimble demands everything an ultimate boulder problem should-unlikely sequences of simultaneously delicate and strenuous moves on fingertip holds-and more: The climb is positioned directly above a parking-lot guardrail, and a fall from high up would likely result in death, or worse. At the time of this writing, nearly thirty years later, Gill's ropeless ascent of the problem has yet to be repeated.
Gill isn't entirely sure what moved him to climb the Thimble. The rock formation, he says, "was aesthetic and very clean. There were very few holds on it. I was a lot less concerned with safety in those days than I am now. Nowadays I'll put a rope on to cross the street or step off the curb. I felt as though I had to do something with an element of risk in it, something difficult."
After looking the climb over very carefully and determining "what sorts of moves I would be responsible for, if I were willing to commit myself to the climb," Gill trained for an entire winter in the gym at the Air Force base in Montana where he was then stationed. "I did squeeze-type exercises," he says, "because I noticed there were some little nubbins up there that I would have to squeeze when the horizontal holds ran out. They run out pretty fast. I devised little climbs on nuts and bolts sticking out of the wall of the gymnasium. I would squeeze the bolts and pull myself up. The Thimble was on my mind for much of that winter."
The following spring, Gill returned to the Black Hills, where the Needles are located, to attempt the climb. He climbed up and down the lower half of the rock over and over, memorizing the moves and building confidence, "getting it wired." He says that "going up and down, up and down, eventually I worked myself into such a fevered pitch that I committed myself to the top portion and very fortunately made it. It's like a lot of other sporting activities. You not only get psyched up but almost become hypnotized or mesmerized to the point where your mind goes blank, and you climb by well-cultivated instinct."
Climbing the Thimble marked a turning point in Gill's life. Soon after that he got married and stopped doing climbs that he considered risky. "I think risk can be addictive," he explains, "and I didn't want to become addicted. The intensity not only increases but changes in character when you climb things that you simply cannot afford to fall off of. It's difficult to put into words, but I found myself going into almost a different state of consciousness when I was climbing unroped in a dangerous situation. My limbs became very light, my breathing altered very subtly, and I'm sure there were vascular changes that I wasn't really aware of at the time. I noticed that I went into this different physiological configuration on life-threatening climbs. It was exhilarating and very intense, but almost in a relaxed way. There might be gripping moments, but there would sti
ll be this thread of relaxation throughout the whole climb. It was fascinating, but I didn't want to get hooked on it."
That Gill was so much better than the other rock climbers of the day can be attributed to his experimental, open-minded approach. He trained intensively on gymnastic apparatus when he wasn't on the rocks, building strength to the point where he could chin himself while hanging from a single finger. A longtime student of Zen, he prepared his mind as thoroughly as he prepared his musculature. He had an affinity for meditation, and found that by focusing all his attention on, say, a blade of grass or a mountain landscape before a climb, it would clear his mind, prime his body, and give him the calm assurance necessary to get him over sketchy terrain. To Gill, maintaining an inner calm during moments of extreme stress is one of the ultimate goals in climbing. "When you reach such an advanced state of technical skill that you don't really notice exertion," he explains, "only then do you really begin to feel the climbing. You'll never feel the joy of movement if you're struggling. You've got to get good enough and strong enough to reach the point where you can feel this quintessential lightness. It's an illusion of course, but it's nice to be able to dwell upon that illusion. I don't feel as though I'm entirely successful on a boulder problem if I don't achieve that feeling of lightness."
Although at fifty-four Gill can still make it up a few boulder problems that repel "totally honed" twenty-two-year-old rock jocks, in the last twenty years he has increasingly been seeking out other things besides pure difficulty in his bouldering, trying, as he puts it, "to find ways of getting more and more out of less and less." His reputation for never climbing higher than thirty feet to the contrary, Gill does in fact regularly ascend-alone and without a rope-what he considers to be easy routes on eight-hundred-foothigh cliffs near his home, as an exercise in "kinesthetic meditation."