This article ran in the June 1962 issue of Summit.
By Michael W. Barghoff
I can't climb. I am normally well aware of this, but sometimes am subject to an unexpected onslaught of climbing delusions. Therapy consists of taking off to California's Yosemite Valley for a proper Rectifying Humiliation. Mournful experience has taught me there is no better place in North America for deflating distended egos. Several days or weeks later I return, tanned, healthy, amiable, my tail between my legs. This has been going on for years, although just before each visit I chant, "This is going to be the year; this is Borghoff's year; this time I'm going to get up something if it kills me (it almost did once) — maybe even a complete route!"
I never do, of course.
Since I am patently incompetent to describe the climbing there, I limit myself to fringe descriptions, subject enough for volumes in itself. Yosemite has evolved many strange adjuncts to its quiet spin of seasons: bongbongs (immense angle pitons), shoplifting bears, the majestic RURP (a piece of hardware with mystic connotations), and — most importantly — a variety of anthropoid salamander. These latter are, or were, people who would rather climb than eat and are willing to starve to climb, climb incessantly. Which besides making them good, I suppose makes them socially reprehensible, although if I had talent, youth, and an ability to subsist on 300 calories a day, I would join them.
Yosemite salamanders are usually innocuous and quite unprepossessing until seen firsthand upon their native element, flickering up holdless cracks with maddening ease. I mean holdless: it's frightening. And it looks so simple until it's your turn to climb. Then nothing. No one believes me, but I tell you there is nothing there.
The rewards offered by the more difficult Yosemite climbs (which means all of them) are indubitable, but then so are those of Satori, breaking through a riff, or natural euphoria: to attain such takes infinite practice, practice of a somewhat visionary nature, verily a way of life. Which, of course, is what Valley climbing is.
I almost forgot to mention: I call seasoned Yosemite climbers "salamanders" not only because of the way they handle discouraging rock, but also because of their demonstrated constitutional lethargy in temperatures below 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Does it get hot in the summer! Hot, dusty, bloated with car-bound tourists. On the valley floor, of course. Up on the walls there has been no basic change since the days of John Salathé; objective as well as introspective exploration is the sine quo non, and it will stay that way: the glacier-polished granite will see to that.
When a climber of my vintage creaks into Yosemite and beholds the youthful inhabitants of Camp 4, the climbers' hangout, he begins to feel like an octogenarian. And after trying a few quietly recommended "boulder problems" — euphemism for extraordinarily marginal acrobatics — his has-been and never was or will be premonitions are disasterously confirmed. I refer to such monsters as Columbia Rock, on which there is reputed to be a handhold (I don't believe it), or the slithery Wine Traverse, an unkind marriage of muscle and friction, where you scrabble inadequately while your arms give out.
Camp 4's boulder problems are calculated to assure a visiting climber's complete psychological annihilation before he ties on to a rope. Many of us never venture forth from the campground to climb. We just quietly leave, at night, and complain about the heat or the bears or some such.
The whyfore is technique: they seem to have outgrown the panic-reaction clutch. I haven't. They use this thing called "friction," a sub-human deviant of the word "handhold." Handholds, of course, are what insecure climbers like myself pray for in tight situations. Well, any situation.
But, friction is what these prehensible creatures use to climb nothing. Climbing nothing consists of going on brilliant imagination fused to exceptional physical endowment, driving determination and great nerve. Plus — again — a way of life, generously spiked with brutal competition. But far be it from me to complain of such, I have been kindly treated by three generations of Yosemite climbers. (A generation lasts about two years, roughly six to a crop.)
“The Cathedral Rocks and El Capitan still remind you that life is a significant experience…” The immense slabs of El Capitan seen through the tranquility of valley floor vegetation. Photo by Michael Borghoff
Oh. Yes — the first climb — from on your bottom at the bottom of a Camp 4 boulder to the first climb. Same thing, generally: most outsiders get "smashed." "Getting smashed" is nothing more than physical and mental confirmation of one's suspected inaptitude for acrobatics. Subjects who like getting smashed should be discussed only in muted tones, only among one's own kind. But the bruised brotherhood is legion; I think I can proceed without too much prospect of a skinned ego.
"Lean out, Borghoff — this is no place for pushups!"
Said suggestion usually delivered in an exasperated tone about one millisecond before my howl for tension, up rope, divine intervention and an anti-pendulum magnet. Seems Yosemite salamanders, in a wave of sardonic enthusiasm, always try to get me up a "nice easy fifth." Woe, I always accept. A fifth is something I feel like downing in a gulp after an easy fifth. 5.7's I don't even want to hallucinate about.
Their misdirection may or may not be deliberate: motive is irrelevant. Getting smashed is a fact. An exciting one. Yosemite fifth-class climbing presupposes a native ability to adhere at rubbery angles upon holdless granite with boldness and ease as deliberate as an afterthought before it's thought. I assure you: a long reach for a conventional pull-hold inevitably precipitates an embarrassing redistribution of one's center of gravity with rather valley-oriented consequences.
I recall this happening on the Robbins Variation above the First Base on Higher Cathedral Spire. It cost me a twenty-five-foot headfirst fall (the pitch was overhanging so I never touched rock) and was the beginning of the end: of my illusions.
Luckily, the Valley is timeless, changeless: Climbers at Camp 4 are still influenced by their incomparable surroundings, preoccupied with life and thought and reality. Yes, the bears are still around — fat, tourist-fed, insolent, monstrously facile at stealing food, contemptuously impervious to indignation, rage, terrified screams, outraged threats, or supplication.
And the seasons still exert their magic, rejuvenating influence on the earth, and the earth is herself, and the Cathedral Rocks and El Capitan still remind you that life is a significant experience, and the smell of bay mixed with pine on an isolated ledge carries nostalgia from another world, yours, one which blacktops and glittering restaurants have failed to invade. Things are unchanged. There is calm.
A calm exceeding any expansion bolt, bongbong, RURP or climbing route. The old story, but can it be recalled too often? You feel it, comment on it, and sure enough: the first ones to agree are those who have lived and climbed here the hardest. You see it in their expression every time they glance toward Sentinel Rock — the thing, known or unknown, that draws them, all of us, although each differently. Quiet, certitude, refuge, intensity, color, shadow play, reality herself.
I feel this getting smashed — how could getting up something improve it? I guess it would — at least it's a ready excuse for returning to Yosemite!
*******
Buy the cover
The cover of the June 1962 issue (Volume Eight, Number Six) of Summit is presumably a nod to Allen Steck’s famous recounting of the FA of the Steck-Salathé on Sentinel Rock, “Ordeal by Piton,” which he wrote for the Sierra Club Bulletin in 1951. He may be climbing Yosemite Point Buttress, another of his FAs from 1952.
