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Just California Boys
Pywiack, Yosemite, 1988
by Robert Walton (USA)
Immense curves of granite swell like a snowy osprey's wings to either side of me. Michelangelo, had he carved Tuolumne's cliffs and domes, would have shaped them so. I take a deep breath.
I take another. Thinking grand and extraneous thoughts is a helpful habit when one is out of breath at 8,000 feet. Tenaya Lake is a mile away and four hundred feet below me. Its waters are blue, intense, though smoky with the melt of snows. A cold wind, too, is driving lines of silver waves across its indigo deeps.
The crystals beneath my toes are comfortable, so I continue to pause. I think of children ˗ mine, those of friends and those of strangers. Tenaya has known them in many hot, burn-your-toes-in-the-sand Augusts. Their eyes get big and round from the lake's first shiver-cold touch and from the wonder of it all. Not now.
Middle of May? Sure. It's been a mild winter in Yosemite, but that old white scorpion has a sting in its tail. We had snow yesterday and the day before. A snowflake made me smile when it drifted conveniently into my cup of red wine at dinner. A storm's snow-feathered wings enfolded us on the summit of the Unicorn.
But the sun is shining now, lighting up Pywiack's pale granite. I wiggle my toes, climb on and reach a surprising place, an alcove in the mountain, a throne perhaps, but whose? It is made of hundreds of quartz crystals, each one a burning star in the sunlight. I grin and stop. This is another good reason to catch my breath.
Lincoln joins me. He's a strong, methodical man with chestnut-colored hair. He grins in appreciation of the crystal light show the morning has arranged for us. We wait for Ed.
Ed - "scaring the hell out of sixty" - moves quickly up to us. He's an attorney, a tough one, with a big Irish smile. He's also wiry and fit; the weekend's exertions have made no inroads on him.
We continue upward and eventually get out the rope, falling into the wordless communication born of many shared mountains. We gain height over excellent rock until we finally stand perhaps two hundred feet below Pywiack's summit.
Why climb? Why endure the various hardships and indignities the mountains can and do inflict? Why risk life and limb on unforgiving hunks of rock and snow? Why climb?
That's always been an easy one for me. The portentous mystery that surrounds various journalistic renderings of this question has always puzzled me. Quite simply, mountains have presence, spirit if you will. It's a great joy for humans to touch this spirit and there's no better way than climbing in which to do this. When I climb, I briefly become part of a mountain’s beauty, part of its foreverness.
A colder than usual finger of wind suddenly pokes me under my anorak. I look up. The rock has been so beautiful that I have not paid attention to anything but the physical details of climbing. My eyes focus on mountain entities in the middle distance and note a great drama unfolding rapidly in our direction
A storm cell rising above Tenaya Lake rears like a North Pacific swell, only far vaster. There's a white light glowing in its center - like a lamp in a child's room on a winter night ˗ which means snow. No problem, I think. Like the squalls earlier in the weekend, this one will dust us lightly and pass on. The lake, though, is frantic beneath its winds. Shattered lines of waves explode into diamonds on Tenaya's northern shore.
I turn to the last stretch of cliff and climb swiftly. Even so, darkness wraps around me like a closing hand before I reach the top. Wet snow pelts down as I anchor the rope. Ed comes up. He says nothing when he arrives, but I can tell he thinks we're in big trouble. Lincoln senses urgency down the length of the rope. The rope, inert and synthetic, is sometimes a far more efficient mode of communication than a telephone. He climbs quickly over holds, now running with melt-water.
We scramble a few feet up to Pywiack's huge, lumpy summit. Lake, trees, mountains of shining granite have all disappeared. Walls of snow and swirling gray mist enclose us. The temperature, never mild, has plummeted. We turn our backs to a snarling wind as blown snow piles up on our shoulders. It is time to leave.
Good idea, but how? Going back the way we came is an obvious but daunting prospect. The guidebook vaguely mentioned a rappel off the backside. Lincoln turns away from Ed and me to take a look. He walks a few steps and disappears in a wild smoke of blown snow. Ed and I descend slightly to get out of the wind.
Huddling, shivering, I ponder our situation. It is not good. We are eight hundred vertical feet above the forest. All of the rock between level ground and us is plastered with snow or running with ice water. Worst of all, Pywiack's southern face is a nearly flawless piece of granite; it has few cracks. Cracks allow stranded climbers to anchor their ropes and rappel ˗ lower themselves down the rope to safety. No cracks.
Lightning flashes above us. Before we can look up, it flashes again. There is no traditional spear of energy, only an aching whiteness in the sky. Thunder, strangely muffled by the snow, rolls over us. As if the lightning were his herald, Lincoln appears. He's a figure from Hamlet, gaunt, wild-eyed, ice-rimed ˗ until he smiles. He does this briefly and then tells Ed and me that he found no obvious descent routes.
That leaves us with one way out. He and Ed will rappel on our single rope. I will remove the anchors and down-climb, belayed from below. That will get us past the steepest section of cliff.
It begins well. Ed and Lincoln quickly reach a ledge a hundred feet below. Also, the storm is fading. There is less snow hitting me in the face, though it is colder and the wind even stronger. Best of all, Lincoln has clipped the rope to a fixed bolt about thirty-five feet below me. I am not looking at certain death if I slip. I take a deep breath.
The hardest move is the first. I give my imagination no time to present all of the bloody visions of failure it has conjured and launch into the first moves. My universe narrows to molecular width. Each edge, each flake, each crystal, each sodden leaf of lichen becomes cosmically important. My concentration is total. I am distantly aware of a shifting of the odds against me. Ice. Much of the rock over which I move is coated with verglace, transparent ice. The falling temperature is freezing things up. I extend my perceptions into Pywiack's heart and climb as I never have before.
I pass below the bolt and my tension fades a bit. The rope is protecting me from above now ˗ safe, almost safe. Abandoning the carabiner in the bolt, I nearly leap down the last meters of rock between my friends and me.
The cold stabs us like a naked blade, as Lincoln pulls our rope through the abandoned carabiner. Ed and I have the shakes; our muscles jump painfully, uncontrollably.
Our next passage is a long one, almost three hundred feet. The first part, perhaps one hundred and forty feet, is over rock sloping at an angle of ten or fifteen degrees. This would be unroped walking if only it weren't covered with ice. The following sixty feet are steep and will comprise the crux of the down-climb. The angle then eases again and fades into a big ledge in the middle of the face where an ancient cedar grows. If we can reach this tree safely, we'll be home free.
We place anchors and awkwardly tie our two ropes together. Frozen ropes and frozen fingers make this a lengthy chore. The temperature is dropping like a stone in a deep, deep well, but the snow is fading.
Lincoln, wrapped in icy coils, backs down the upper section of our joined ropes. Straightening and arranging as he moves, he quickly traverses the low, angled section. A prussic safety sling backs up his figure of eight rappel device. He stops when he reaches the steep section of cliff and surveys the scene below. He has reached the knot, which joins the ropes. Half of the usable three hundred feet of rope is gone. Will the other half reach the big tree? Perhaps.
Ed clips onto the rope next to me, smiles and says, "See you at the bottom, pal." I nod hopefully. He backs down the rope toward Lincoln. Lincoln, meanwhile, has untangled the icy lower section of rope and thrown its coils into soft, snow-gray air. Its knotted end now rests, we hope, somewhere near the tree's wide ledge.
Ed reaches Lincoln. Lincoln helps him transfer his rappel device past the rope joining knot. Ed, the lightest member of our party, has the honor of testing the knot. He disappears over the edge.
There is a good deal of waiting involved in climbing. It can be the best of times or the worst of times. The wait for Ed to reach the tree's safety is not high on my list of favorites. I am cold. I have on a tee shirt, a sweater, a gore-tex anorak, the wool cap Miguel gave me for Christmas and soaked blue jeans. The muscles in my arms and legs are shaking and jumping, trying to generate some warmth. My teeth are chattering like a Halloween toy. I'm basically functional, but hypothermia is not far down the road.
Lincoln's shout drifts up through swirls of mist. I can't understand his words, but his tone tells me enough. Ed is down and okay. He waves and turns to his rappel. He is a gray shadow against a gray infinity. He is gone.
Soon, sooner than I'd thought possible, Lincoln's voice again sounds. He has reached the tree and Ed. I remove my hands from within my jacket and slap them against my thighs. Pain indicates a return to life. I lift the anchors and tie into the rope. I am still shaking, but even this small exertion has warmed me.
I step down. Ice is an inch thick in some places, awash in rivulets of ice water in others. I aim for knobs bared by the flowing water and quickly descend the easy section.
I reach the final cliff and peer over its edge. I see Lincoln and Ed within the tree's deep shadow. Lincoln has set up a belay and is hauling in slack rope. I can tell by the tense line of his body that he is not at all sure what I plan to do. Neither am I.
I face the summit and ease over the edge onto the steep wall. My feet find edges. I trust them. I step down with my left foot. It finds an ice-covered knob and skids into air. Adrenaline fire surges through me. I muscle back onto the sloping ramp and lie panting for several moments.
Fear is a killer in the mountains. It turns skill, courage, and hope to jelly. I can think of nothing but the swinging, smashing, life ending, two hundred-foot fall, which lies just below the iced edges of rocks I must descend. I think bitter thoughts and want to shout, "Ice is not fair! It's May in Yosemite and this is a beginner's climb, for God's sake!"
The mountains never play fair. They just play ˗ by their own rules and in their own time. I know this. It's no small part of the love I have for them. This thought leads me up a little way out of my fear. I look around.
A horn of rock ˗ a chickenhead, a large, super-hard crystal of pegmatite ˗ protrudes promisingly only ten feet to my right. I can tie it off and give myself a running belay, a top rope. I move across to the horn and fear is banished into a deep corner of my consciousness. I hope it will stay there.
The horn is perfect. I take time to arrange a sling. If I do it right, the weight of the rope will cinch it down. I test it and test it again. It's good. I have no further excuses for delay. I stretch my right toe downward and descend.
It's amazing what my contrivance has done for my state of mind. I move with confidence now, mitigated confidence. Lincoln adjusts to the new plan. I can tell by his touch on the frozen rope that he no longer thinks I'm completely insane.
My path down lies over big holds, pegmatite crystals, but they're in a water chute filled with a modest waterfall, a waterfall of liquid ice. I lose the sensation in my fingers quickly and must check to see that they are gripping properly. My shoes, however, stick to the sharp crystals. Down, down, down forty feet, more, I reach a ledge. Ed and Lincoln are off to my left. I traverse the ledge and work my way down one more steep section. I reach a mildly sloping slab and hop between patches of ice to the tree. I grin at Lincoln and Ed. They grin back.
The rest of the descent is easy, though at times comical. The ice, after all, is still ice. We finally reach the forest. Six inches of snow have transformed it into a winter wonderland. The deep quiet of the snowy woods bemuses us, but we're cold and getting colder.
A long tramp through wet snow ends at our vehicles. Bonzo, Lincoln's big golden retriever, swishes snow around the bed of the truck with his tail in greeting.
* * * * *
Chartres, Notre Dame, the blood of saints frozen in ancient glass ˗ light from above passes through my wineglass and stains the table red. Ed has just told a joke and is about to tell another. Lincoln listens with wry amusement. Our friend's Irish humor winds lazily between sips of wine. The waitress arrives and sets down bowls of steaming soup, fresh bread, yellow butter. Ah.
We raise our glasses to each other.
Even as I smile in acknowledgement of the silent toast, visions of our day on Pywiack arise in my mind ˗ a cloak of luminous snow sweeping across Tenaya's blue depths, Ed's grin before the long rappel, Lincoln's touch on the black, frozen rope. Somehow, and for some reason I cannot name, I wish that I could still be up there in wind and snow.
I shake my head and laugh. Soup, fresh bread, butter and ˗ yes, I'll have another glass of wine.
I take another. Thinking grand and extraneous thoughts is a helpful habit when one is out of breath at 8,000 feet. Tenaya Lake is a mile away and four hundred feet below me. Its waters are blue, intense, though smoky with the melt of snows. A cold wind, too, is driving lines of silver waves across its indigo deeps.
The crystals beneath my toes are comfortable, so I continue to pause. I think of children ˗ mine, those of friends and those of strangers. Tenaya has known them in many hot, burn-your-toes-in-the-sand Augusts. Their eyes get big and round from the lake's first shiver-cold touch and from the wonder of it all. Not now.
Middle of May? Sure. It's been a mild winter in Yosemite, but that old white scorpion has a sting in its tail. We had snow yesterday and the day before. A snowflake made me smile when it drifted conveniently into my cup of red wine at dinner. A storm's snow-feathered wings enfolded us on the summit of the Unicorn.
But the sun is shining now, lighting up Pywiack's pale granite. I wiggle my toes, climb on and reach a surprising place, an alcove in the mountain, a throne perhaps, but whose? It is made of hundreds of quartz crystals, each one a burning star in the sunlight. I grin and stop. This is another good reason to catch my breath.
Lincoln joins me. He's a strong, methodical man with chestnut-colored hair. He grins in appreciation of the crystal light show the morning has arranged for us. We wait for Ed.
Ed - "scaring the hell out of sixty" - moves quickly up to us. He's an attorney, a tough one, with a big Irish smile. He's also wiry and fit; the weekend's exertions have made no inroads on him.
We continue upward and eventually get out the rope, falling into the wordless communication born of many shared mountains. We gain height over excellent rock until we finally stand perhaps two hundred feet below Pywiack's summit.
Why climb? Why endure the various hardships and indignities the mountains can and do inflict? Why risk life and limb on unforgiving hunks of rock and snow? Why climb?
That's always been an easy one for me. The portentous mystery that surrounds various journalistic renderings of this question has always puzzled me. Quite simply, mountains have presence, spirit if you will. It's a great joy for humans to touch this spirit and there's no better way than climbing in which to do this. When I climb, I briefly become part of a mountain’s beauty, part of its foreverness.
A colder than usual finger of wind suddenly pokes me under my anorak. I look up. The rock has been so beautiful that I have not paid attention to anything but the physical details of climbing. My eyes focus on mountain entities in the middle distance and note a great drama unfolding rapidly in our direction
A storm cell rising above Tenaya Lake rears like a North Pacific swell, only far vaster. There's a white light glowing in its center - like a lamp in a child's room on a winter night ˗ which means snow. No problem, I think. Like the squalls earlier in the weekend, this one will dust us lightly and pass on. The lake, though, is frantic beneath its winds. Shattered lines of waves explode into diamonds on Tenaya's northern shore.
I turn to the last stretch of cliff and climb swiftly. Even so, darkness wraps around me like a closing hand before I reach the top. Wet snow pelts down as I anchor the rope. Ed comes up. He says nothing when he arrives, but I can tell he thinks we're in big trouble. Lincoln senses urgency down the length of the rope. The rope, inert and synthetic, is sometimes a far more efficient mode of communication than a telephone. He climbs quickly over holds, now running with melt-water.
We scramble a few feet up to Pywiack's huge, lumpy summit. Lake, trees, mountains of shining granite have all disappeared. Walls of snow and swirling gray mist enclose us. The temperature, never mild, has plummeted. We turn our backs to a snarling wind as blown snow piles up on our shoulders. It is time to leave.
Good idea, but how? Going back the way we came is an obvious but daunting prospect. The guidebook vaguely mentioned a rappel off the backside. Lincoln turns away from Ed and me to take a look. He walks a few steps and disappears in a wild smoke of blown snow. Ed and I descend slightly to get out of the wind.
Huddling, shivering, I ponder our situation. It is not good. We are eight hundred vertical feet above the forest. All of the rock between level ground and us is plastered with snow or running with ice water. Worst of all, Pywiack's southern face is a nearly flawless piece of granite; it has few cracks. Cracks allow stranded climbers to anchor their ropes and rappel ˗ lower themselves down the rope to safety. No cracks.
Lightning flashes above us. Before we can look up, it flashes again. There is no traditional spear of energy, only an aching whiteness in the sky. Thunder, strangely muffled by the snow, rolls over us. As if the lightning were his herald, Lincoln appears. He's a figure from Hamlet, gaunt, wild-eyed, ice-rimed ˗ until he smiles. He does this briefly and then tells Ed and me that he found no obvious descent routes.
That leaves us with one way out. He and Ed will rappel on our single rope. I will remove the anchors and down-climb, belayed from below. That will get us past the steepest section of cliff.
It begins well. Ed and Lincoln quickly reach a ledge a hundred feet below. Also, the storm is fading. There is less snow hitting me in the face, though it is colder and the wind even stronger. Best of all, Lincoln has clipped the rope to a fixed bolt about thirty-five feet below me. I am not looking at certain death if I slip. I take a deep breath.
The hardest move is the first. I give my imagination no time to present all of the bloody visions of failure it has conjured and launch into the first moves. My universe narrows to molecular width. Each edge, each flake, each crystal, each sodden leaf of lichen becomes cosmically important. My concentration is total. I am distantly aware of a shifting of the odds against me. Ice. Much of the rock over which I move is coated with verglace, transparent ice. The falling temperature is freezing things up. I extend my perceptions into Pywiack's heart and climb as I never have before.
I pass below the bolt and my tension fades a bit. The rope is protecting me from above now ˗ safe, almost safe. Abandoning the carabiner in the bolt, I nearly leap down the last meters of rock between my friends and me.
The cold stabs us like a naked blade, as Lincoln pulls our rope through the abandoned carabiner. Ed and I have the shakes; our muscles jump painfully, uncontrollably.
Our next passage is a long one, almost three hundred feet. The first part, perhaps one hundred and forty feet, is over rock sloping at an angle of ten or fifteen degrees. This would be unroped walking if only it weren't covered with ice. The following sixty feet are steep and will comprise the crux of the down-climb. The angle then eases again and fades into a big ledge in the middle of the face where an ancient cedar grows. If we can reach this tree safely, we'll be home free.
We place anchors and awkwardly tie our two ropes together. Frozen ropes and frozen fingers make this a lengthy chore. The temperature is dropping like a stone in a deep, deep well, but the snow is fading.
Lincoln, wrapped in icy coils, backs down the upper section of our joined ropes. Straightening and arranging as he moves, he quickly traverses the low, angled section. A prussic safety sling backs up his figure of eight rappel device. He stops when he reaches the steep section of cliff and surveys the scene below. He has reached the knot, which joins the ropes. Half of the usable three hundred feet of rope is gone. Will the other half reach the big tree? Perhaps.
Ed clips onto the rope next to me, smiles and says, "See you at the bottom, pal." I nod hopefully. He backs down the rope toward Lincoln. Lincoln, meanwhile, has untangled the icy lower section of rope and thrown its coils into soft, snow-gray air. Its knotted end now rests, we hope, somewhere near the tree's wide ledge.
Ed reaches Lincoln. Lincoln helps him transfer his rappel device past the rope joining knot. Ed, the lightest member of our party, has the honor of testing the knot. He disappears over the edge.
There is a good deal of waiting involved in climbing. It can be the best of times or the worst of times. The wait for Ed to reach the tree's safety is not high on my list of favorites. I am cold. I have on a tee shirt, a sweater, a gore-tex anorak, the wool cap Miguel gave me for Christmas and soaked blue jeans. The muscles in my arms and legs are shaking and jumping, trying to generate some warmth. My teeth are chattering like a Halloween toy. I'm basically functional, but hypothermia is not far down the road.
Lincoln's shout drifts up through swirls of mist. I can't understand his words, but his tone tells me enough. Ed is down and okay. He waves and turns to his rappel. He is a gray shadow against a gray infinity. He is gone.
Soon, sooner than I'd thought possible, Lincoln's voice again sounds. He has reached the tree and Ed. I remove my hands from within my jacket and slap them against my thighs. Pain indicates a return to life. I lift the anchors and tie into the rope. I am still shaking, but even this small exertion has warmed me.
I step down. Ice is an inch thick in some places, awash in rivulets of ice water in others. I aim for knobs bared by the flowing water and quickly descend the easy section.
I reach the final cliff and peer over its edge. I see Lincoln and Ed within the tree's deep shadow. Lincoln has set up a belay and is hauling in slack rope. I can tell by the tense line of his body that he is not at all sure what I plan to do. Neither am I.
I face the summit and ease over the edge onto the steep wall. My feet find edges. I trust them. I step down with my left foot. It finds an ice-covered knob and skids into air. Adrenaline fire surges through me. I muscle back onto the sloping ramp and lie panting for several moments.
Fear is a killer in the mountains. It turns skill, courage, and hope to jelly. I can think of nothing but the swinging, smashing, life ending, two hundred-foot fall, which lies just below the iced edges of rocks I must descend. I think bitter thoughts and want to shout, "Ice is not fair! It's May in Yosemite and this is a beginner's climb, for God's sake!"
The mountains never play fair. They just play ˗ by their own rules and in their own time. I know this. It's no small part of the love I have for them. This thought leads me up a little way out of my fear. I look around.
A horn of rock ˗ a chickenhead, a large, super-hard crystal of pegmatite ˗ protrudes promisingly only ten feet to my right. I can tie it off and give myself a running belay, a top rope. I move across to the horn and fear is banished into a deep corner of my consciousness. I hope it will stay there.
The horn is perfect. I take time to arrange a sling. If I do it right, the weight of the rope will cinch it down. I test it and test it again. It's good. I have no further excuses for delay. I stretch my right toe downward and descend.
It's amazing what my contrivance has done for my state of mind. I move with confidence now, mitigated confidence. Lincoln adjusts to the new plan. I can tell by his touch on the frozen rope that he no longer thinks I'm completely insane.
My path down lies over big holds, pegmatite crystals, but they're in a water chute filled with a modest waterfall, a waterfall of liquid ice. I lose the sensation in my fingers quickly and must check to see that they are gripping properly. My shoes, however, stick to the sharp crystals. Down, down, down forty feet, more, I reach a ledge. Ed and Lincoln are off to my left. I traverse the ledge and work my way down one more steep section. I reach a mildly sloping slab and hop between patches of ice to the tree. I grin at Lincoln and Ed. They grin back.
The rest of the descent is easy, though at times comical. The ice, after all, is still ice. We finally reach the forest. Six inches of snow have transformed it into a winter wonderland. The deep quiet of the snowy woods bemuses us, but we're cold and getting colder.
A long tramp through wet snow ends at our vehicles. Bonzo, Lincoln's big golden retriever, swishes snow around the bed of the truck with his tail in greeting.
* * * * *
Chartres, Notre Dame, the blood of saints frozen in ancient glass ˗ light from above passes through my wineglass and stains the table red. Ed has just told a joke and is about to tell another. Lincoln listens with wry amusement. Our friend's Irish humor winds lazily between sips of wine. The waitress arrives and sets down bowls of steaming soup, fresh bread, yellow butter. Ah.
We raise our glasses to each other.
Even as I smile in acknowledgement of the silent toast, visions of our day on Pywiack arise in my mind ˗ a cloak of luminous snow sweeping across Tenaya's blue depths, Ed's grin before the long rappel, Lincoln's touch on the black, frozen rope. Somehow, and for some reason I cannot name, I wish that I could still be up there in wind and snow.
I shake my head and laugh. Soup, fresh bread, butter and ˗ yes, I'll have another glass of wine.
Becky Coffield (USA): Awesome! Just awesome. And I'm not even a climber.
Don Bolles (USA): Incredible writing. I felt I was there with you, shivering, fearing certain disaster. So glad you survived to tell your story. Well done.
Lincoln Hatch (USA): Nice writing Bob, Brings back some very fond memories. Almost makes me want to go climbing again.