Oh Those Dog Days, Yosemite Valley, 1983

It was a fingerless glove, mesh back, the sort you wear on big El Cap nail ups. The glove was on the trail at the base of Tangerine Trip. Eyes down, buckling under a fully loaded haul bag, I stooped over, picked it up. The palm had a black groove with a sheen. Rope burn, I thought. The glove was small, tight on my hand. A woman’s glove.

I looked around, didn’t see anyone, didn’t hear anyone. The only sound was the granite getting hot in the late summer sun. Most people couldn’t hear that, but after a while in this place you tune in to new frequencies, evolve into a different animal. 

I needed new wall gloves, but, broke, had to make do. My gloves had holes in the palms I’d wrapped with duct tape that had holes in it, too. I was approaching Zenyatta Mondatta, a line on the far right side of El Cap by the Circle, and the only other team who’d been within shouting distance was a couple fixing pitches on Tangerine Trip. I looked up, craning to see their ropes in the big roofs that make the Trip a real trip. No one there, just their lines swaying in the draft, tied off out of sight way somewhere, maybe where that guy died a few years back when his rope cut on a sharp flake. I’ll be taping over sharp edges with duct tape, count on that.

I’d expected to see the couple on The Trip. She was confident, nice, probably late 20s, carried a bible. Her partner was Slovakian and that’s all I knew and I didn’t even know that until I read it somewhere later. 

Probably her glove, dropped, I thought. I put the glove in my pack to give to her, and pressed along the base of the wall, working through talus to the start of ZM where I had the first and second pitches fixed. Today was pitch three. I’d fix that one, go back to the SAR site, rest for a few days, carry up a final load for the remaining dozen pitches, then blast off as they say.

“ZM” was the brainchild of Jim “The Bird” Bridwell, done in ’81 with Peter Mayfield and Charlie Row. Bridwell had worked on it, another one of his masterpieces, for several years, and his fixed ropes had hung so long they had pissed off someone enough to stretch the bottom rope down tight and slice it off as high as they could reach. The cut tail rebounded dozens of feet into the air, out of reach on the overhanging wall. 

But nothing was out of reach for The Bird. He taped a jug to a long pole, stretched up, clamped the jumar onto the fluttering rope end, and pulled it down. Hah!

In 1982 I’d tried to make the route’s second ascent with Tom Cosgriff, but on the thin second pitch, a shallow groove in a corner, he ripped a small RP and fell about 40 feet zippering a string of RPs, breaking the cables, until he factor two’ed onto the belay. He went back up, fell again and broke the cables on our second set of RPs. 

“Had to bail, ran out of RPs,” would be our answer if anyone asked.

In the two years since the FA, the route had had a second ascent by Todd Bibler, famous now for his Bibler Tents, and Katherine Freer who, with alpine legend Dave Cheesmond, would disappear five years later on Mount Logan’s Hummingbird Ridge. 

That year, or maybe the next, ZM got its third ascent by Randy Leavitt and Rob Slater. Randy was on his way to becoming one of climbing’s most prolific all arounders, making an early ascent of Sea of Dreams and soon climbing 5.14 when almost nobody did that. He was one of climbing’s brightest, smart enough to not make a living of it, becoming a real estate broker in San Diego.

Rob had a shag of curly blond hair, a slightly lisping voice and spoke with such enthusiasm you had to wipe the spit off your face when he was done talking. “Summit or death, either way I win,” he would famously say as he headed to K2 in 1995. He reached the summit, but perished with five others, including Alison Hargreaves, in a violent storm on the descent.

I had returned to Zenyatta alone to solo it, or try. After that summer with Cosgriff the year before, I’d returned to art school, but painting and drawing seemed pointless; climbing less so, and I spent more time climbing buildings on OU’s campus than in class. Unbelievably, the school’s athletic director gave us permission to climb a long expansion crack, a shallow, thin-hands job, on the underside of the football stadium, a shrine in that part of the country, and we made the first and likely last ascent after what we’d actually done sank in with school management, who probably thought “climbing” involved a few laps up the bleachers.

*****

Stopping by my parents’ house in western Oklahoma near the beginning of the spring semester I told them I wouldn’t be going back to school. “Going to Yosemite,” I said and that was it.

They weren’t too upset, figuring everyone had to go west at some point and at least I wasn’t heading out there to pick cotton like they had had to do when they were kids. 

Yosemite in the early 1980s was nearly carefree living, but with an undercurrent that could pull you under, suffocate you from not knowing what you were doing or where you were headed.

There were lots of scams to get you by. You could poach a campsite after hours or curl up farther in the woods. If you had a mug that looked like the ones they used in the cafeteria you could get coffee “refills” in the morning, and scarf eggs and sausages and hotcakes left on plates by tourists. But you had to be quick, stake out a spot and stalk, and get the action before the trays were bussed or someone beat you to it.

Fifty dollars a week would cover everything, even beer, and you were in relative riches if you got on the SAR team and pulled down about $5 an hour searching for lost hikers or hoisting the occasional climber off some wall.

Sometimes we’d carpool to a café in Mariposa, or maybe it was somewhere else, where $2 would get you all the fried liver you could eat. 

Camp 4 was plastic draped over sagging tents, smoldering fires, people laying on the ground, leaves in their hair, sleeping during the day. At night it was pitch black and nameless voices relived climbs or slagged people outside the righteous circle who didn’t climb hard enough. 

Nearly everyone in the site had a nickname, a military sort of rank that shuffled the pecking order. The Fish was a machinist with forearms as solid as baseball bats. The Smoochfink drove a rusted van that seemed to require an hour of repairs for every minute of flight time. Some days we’d push his rig into a new parking spot to keep the rangers from towing it. Mortimer was a former aerospace engineer, freshly retired in his mid 20s. “Couldn’t stand doing nothing at work, pushing a pencil,” he said. He once had bought a BMW motorcycle, took it completely apart down to the nuts, tweaked it for higher performance, and reassembled it all in his living room. Out on the road on his tuned-up bike a CHIP had pulled him over back when he was still employed.

The cop ran the plates and noticed that Mortimer had had a bucket full of speeding tickets.  

“Why are you always in such a hurry, Mr. Shipley?”

“No hurry,” Mortimer said. “I just like to go fast.”

Mortimer also talked fast, like a speeded up recording, and was the boldest climber I knew and would ever know. When I climbed with him I felt as if I was getting away with something, and that I’d be better doing anything else.

*****

I jugged the lines to the start of the third pitch, a weaving job with head and hooks and flakes you didn’t want to pull on. When the rock was sharp I put a strip of duct tape to pad the cord. About a dozen years later a soloist would have his rope cut here and he’d go 300 feet to the deck.

I had this song stuck in my head, Let’s Have a War by Fear, and every time I got back on the wall that song would fill me up again even though I didn’t really like it—Let’s have a war so you can go die! The music didn’t leave until the last pitch a week later when I heard people yelling down to me from the top, saying they’d brought up water. But when I pulled over the top there was no one there.  

Tying the rope off at the end of the third pitch, I rapped and headed back to camp. 

The mood was somber. 

“You know that girl with the bible,” someone said. “She fell cleaning roof pitch on The Trip. Didn’t tie in to the rope and her jugs popped off the rope. Went 300, 400 feet into a tree.”

They had had to go get her, and it didn’t sound pleasant.

“You must have walked by that tree. You didn’t see her?”

Nope, and was I glad I hadn’t.

*****

I sat around for about a week. Thought about bailing, then decided to go back up because pulling the ropes and humping down all the gear would be a lot of work, and besides, I had nothing else to do, nowhere to be, no one to report to.

You have to try hard today to find that place of nothingness, cut off from nearly everything, no phone, no email, no texts. 

I carried the last load up to Zenyatta, wobbling along the base of El Cap where big routes line up like monuments to old wars. Mescalito. PO. The Sea. The NA. 

Sometimes you’d find dropped booty, a wired nut or pin, on the trail. That would be a good day and some people would spend days scouring the trail to fatten their racks. Does anyone still do that?

When I got to Iron Hawk I could see ropes still on The Trip. When I got to the start of The Trip I dropped my pack and unzipped the top pocket.

The glove was still there. I took it out, set it on the ground, and headed for my fixed lines.

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