Climbers

Sometime back before the first white man laid eyes on Yosemite Valley, probably in spring, with the falls spilling the high country melt in roaring plumes and pretty ribbons over the tall granite rims, Columbia Rock let go of a boulder the size of a farmhouse and dropped it 1000 feet into a grove of cedar and pine, as if to mark the spot as dead center in the world for those who were going to love to climb rocks.

It's called Columbia Boulder, and it's surrounded now by Sunnyside Campground, the climbers' camp. Not that they ever call it Sunnyside; to climbers, it's Camp Four, and every spring they gypsy in from everywhere with their ropes and their ambitions; and then, every day, for whatever time they've stolen, they go after these rocks like the lizards that live in them.

It always feels good coming into Camp Four, listening to climbing babble in four or five languages, with wood smoke in the air, big, fat blue jays begging around from table to table, haul bags and coolers hanging from the trees out of the bears' way. And last year, when I walked in, there was a particular site not far from the entrance that struck me as the perfect signal that I was back among my favorites of all athletes. The tent was Army-green nylon, and on the ground in front of it was a weathered chaise that would have hung your butt in the dirt had you sat in it, would have given you a perfect view up the magnificent face of Cathedral Rock across the valley, an all-day climb if you're a great climber--no climb at all otherwise. And next to the blown-out lounger, jammed into the ground at a particularly goofy angle, was a dusty-pink lawn flamingo. I never did meet the owner of that tent, but I didn't have to. Camp Four in spring is always full of the spirit that planted that bird--a lunacy so deep that there is nothing crazy about it.

Doug Robinson and I went into the valley on an early evening near the end of May, and at the first curve in the road that let onto a big-rock panorama, we stopped just to look. Robinson was badly smitten with the love of rocks a long time ago, and for him and all rock-climbers I know, it's a passion that starts before and goes beyond just the climbing of them. I think it's mostly unconscious, and it draws them first to admire the line of the stone, then its feel in their hands and under their feet, and even its smell and taste as they hunch, crawl, hang and pull themselves along. Whether the rock is 2000 feet high or 20 makes no difference to the essence of these feelings, really. The moves you have to make to overcome the puzzle of any particular rock are the same at any height. Only a fall puts the difference in the bargain--or the thought of a fall.

That evening, as we sat on a roadside stone wall, the Merced River was 100 feet below us, and south down the valley was 100,000,000 years of its stunning work and the work of the glaciers that followed its trough: El Capitan, 3000 feet of stone shoulder; Cathedral Rock, flanked by its sharp spires; Sentinel, the ragged tooth; and behind them all, at the head of the valley, Half Dome, out there looking more like a thunderhead than a mountain in the pink light.

Robinson has been in the valley to climb just about every summer for the past 20, enough time to have seen some of these monsters change. He pointed to a ramp of rubble and scree that reached down to the river from halfway up a great hump called Elephant Rock.

"Chuck Pratt first climbed that around 1960, before that slide, a route that will never be repeated," he said.

These rocks are alive.

Then, because we wanted to be on the rock that day, if only for a short climb, we raced the sunset to Glacier Point Apron and scrambled up an easy little route on Monday Morning Slab. Last light caught us about 150 feet up, so we sat and watched the campfires get vivid below the trees on the valley floor. Royal Arches was smack across from us, and we eyeballed the route we'd taken up its wide face several years before. We tried to guess from what point, two days earlier, a young climber had fallen to his death. We had only the sketchiest story: big guy, no ropes, no hardware, found dead at the base in the early morning.

Sounded like a free-solo death, Robinson thought. Free-soloing is a relatively new phenomenon in climbing, and it's just what it sounds like: a trip alone, with no rope or other safety gear, hand and foot up the rock, just like the first tree you ever climbed. Except that a certain few climbers are by now doing some of the longest, damnedest climbs in Yosemite by this style in which a single failure of rock, muscle, nerve or savvy means a death fall. It is the new outer zone of rock-climbing, and over the past couple of years, a 28-year-old named John Bachar has emerged as its premier character.

"Bachar can do it," Robinson said, "because of his intense shape and his nearly perfect sense of his limits. He got a lot of press a couple of summers ago, and there are a bunch of climbers out here now reaching for the dangerous edge he treads. Unfortunately, in climbing, judgment develops more slowly than physical skill."

We rappelled from our little catbird seat down a near vertical in the dark. I was excited at the prospect of a week on these famous rocks and a little apprehensive, too. Although I love this sport, I am still beginner enough that at least once every climb, I get scared. Sometimes badly. Sometimes worse than that. Backing off Monday Morning Slab without light enough to see the ground and barely enough to see my feet was the moment that night.

•

The history of climbing in Yosemite, from its first hemp-rope ascents through the big-wall assaults of the Sixties to the hairy free solos of the Eighties, reads like a goddamn soap opera. The most famous of its episodes came in 1970, when Warren Harding and Dean Caldwell made the first continuous ascent of El Capitan. They were 27 days on what they called The Wall of the Early Morning Light, and in order to cross its long blank sections, they drilled hundreds of bolts into the rock. It was an astonishing climb--the last and most difficult of the great walls to be done without retreat, the kind of feat you might expect to go into the books without criticism or quibble.

But nothing ever goes into the annals of climbing without some bitching from somewhere, because among climbers, it is never simply a matter of what summit you've reached but of how you reached it. Did you lay siege to the rock or take it in one nonstop alpine stroke? Did you haul yourself up by rope and piton or go by hand and foot only? Did you follow the natural curve of things or engineer a forced line to the top?

When Harding and Caldwell stepped over the rim of El Cap, the grumbling was most intense from Royal Robbins, the first man up Half Dome, sometimes called the finest climber of them all--passionate, competitive, a friend of theirs. Robbins didn't like all the iron they'd pounded into the rock. In fact, "El Capitan had been raped," he said, and he was afraid the example was going to "encourage further heartless rapes, instead of taking the rock with love." So, two months later, he and Don Luria began a second ascent of the same route, and as they climbed, they chopped Harding's bolts out of the rock, a rough equivalent of going after Huckleberry Finn with a blue pencil. Not far up, however, Robbins had a change of heart. The route, despite the bolts, was too beautifully difficult to erase, so he and Luria stopped chopping and, in six days, finished the climb as Harding had authored it.

When Harding heard what they'd done, he laughed, called Robbins an alpine Elmer Gantry, said the only reason to climb was for fun and that once you were on the rock, you were free to get up it any goddamn way you wanted to.

By now, time and technology have turned Yosemite climbing away from the use of hammer and bolts to gentler, more aesthetic methods of protection, and when Robinson and I laid our gear at the base of Manure Pile Buttress that first evening, it included nothing that would leave our trace on the rocks. Instead, we carried aluminum chocks, stoppers and nuts (hardware that we could wedge into the cracks) and nylon slings to loop over nubbins and then take up after us. It's called clean climbing, and this rock--with its long cracks, its ledges and its less-than-vertical faces--is perfectly suited to it.

Manure Pile is about 600 feet high, and there are seven guidebook routes on it that run in difficulty from 5.6 to 5.9 on the Yosemite Decimal Scale, a variable measure that climbers share and argue over in an attempt to describe how hard a climb is in something like objective terms. The problem, of course, is that there's nothing objective about climbing. Everything depends on the animal and the spirit that's in jeopardy, and with that in mind, here's my translation of these numbers.

• 5.1 to 5.6: Careful crawling over rocks (continued on page 174) Climbers (continued from page 122) that could hurt you only if you did something truly stupid.

• 5.7: Some clinging, but plenty to cling from.

• 5.8 to 5.9: Sweaty clinging, sometimes on the perfectly vertical, to nubbins and rugosities that are too damn small.

• 5.10 to 5.11: Gymnastic zone in which there is no rest or forgiveness.

• 5.12 to 5.13: Just never mind.

Robinson started up a 5.7 crack called After Seven, while I belayed him from the ground. I watched and tried not to go to school on the holds he was using, because I know very well by now that to ape his moves without his gifts is just a quick way into trouble. About the time he got to the crux of the pitch, a dozen or so high school students, in the valley on a seminar, sat on some nearby rocks and began asking me how the rope and the rest of the hardware worked. They watched Robinson while I told them, and then one of them asked, "Don't you ever get scared?"

"He won't; not on this climb," I told them. "But I will. If it's fear you want to see, stick around. I'll swear, whine, maybe even weep if you're lucky."

They thought I was kidding.

About 100 feet up, Robinson got onto a ledge next to a pretty little oak, tied himself to it and yelled down that I could climb. The first ten or 12 moves were up a crack that fit me as perfectly as my fancy new $90 climbing shoes and I felt good and probably looked good to the kids on the ground. Then, just before I reached the branch in the crack that was going to be the gnarly heart of the pitch, a teacher came out of the woods and told his students it was time to go.

"Not yet," they said, almost in a chorus. "We want to see him get scared."

The teacher dragged them off anyway, and it was just as well, because the kind of performance I stepped into doesn't want an audience. All of a sudden, nothing fit. I was about 35 feet up, with three moves to make through the crux. I tried a couple of dumb maybes and pulled back from them. Then I got desperate and muscled myself into the middle of the problem by a move that was as foolish as it was ugly: I still couldn't see or feel the way up, and all the strength I hadn't squandered was going into just hanging there. I yelled at Robinson that I was going to fall, and then I did, though falling doesn't quite describe it. It was more as if the crack spit me out, but I didn't go far--three feet, maybe--before Robinson caught me with the rope. I got back onto the rock, thought about it for a minute, made another angry, graceless little try and this time I beat it, but there wasn't a shred of satisfaction to it.

When I reached the ledge, I was utterly disgusted with myself and asking out loud why in hell I bothered to play this difficult sport if I didn't have the heart for it. We sat there while I grumbled and calmed down; then I told Robinson that I didn't want any more that evening. He said, "Fine," and as we pulled things together for the hike down a side trail, a curly-headed blond guy in red shorts stepped up to the bottom of the pitch we'd just done. He was shirtless and tan. He had a chalk bag and a pair of climbing shoes hanging from his belt, and that was it. No rope.

I said, "Doug, I think we're in for a little free solo here," and I was right. Then, while the lone climber sat at the foot of the rock to change from running to climbing shoes, I ran down the trail so I could watch him from the ground.

By the time I got there, he was maybe three moves into the climb, and already he looked like water running uphill. He was dancing, making a fool of gravity, the way Fred Astaire danced. He paused only to reach back into his chalk bag with one hand, then the other, and even that fit the rhythm of his progress. He moved through the crux as if it weren't there, except that what I had done in three moves, he did in six elegant little steps and reaches that obliterated the problem by paying it a sort of Oriental respect. It took him about two minutes to reach the oak ledge and swing up over it. It had taken me nearly 30, and where I had collapsed into a sweating heap, he looked up, chalked his hands and kept climbing--not as if he were late for something but as if he were on his way to tea with an old friend. Robinson and I watched him for about 450 feet before he disappeared over a hump where, like a wizard, he left a puff of chalk dust in the wind where we'd last seen him.

On the way down the trail to our car, I went on about the pure silkiness of what we'd just seen, and Robinson agreed that whoever he was, he was a great climber. Then he said, "But that's Yosemite in spring. There are probably a dozen guys in this valley right now who could have done that."

I was still trying to get used to the idea that there was even one who could have put on that show.

In the parking lot, we coiled the rope, sorted the hardware, changed our shoes; and before we were finished, the solo man strolled out of the woods and then to his car, which was just behind us. He sat and strapped a large ice bag to his elbow.

I walked back and said, "Nice job."

He smiled and said thanks. I told him it looked as if he knew Manure Pile pretty well and he said, "I ought to. I've climbed it about a thousand times. I could do it blindfolded. It's a great little warm-up."

I guessed that he lived in the valley and he said yes; and when I asked if he worked here, too, he said, "No, I just climb."

When I got back to our car, Robinson was having a flash of recognition. He looked at me and said, "That's John Bachar."

Then both of us walked back, and Bachar and Robinson, who had known each other off and on for years, talked about old friends, then about the Spanish climbing shoes that are the rage in the valley and for which Bachar is a distributor. We'd heard rumors that he had tendinitis in his elbow; but when we asked, he said no, that it was worse than that: articular capsulitis, which heals more slowly. He thought he was back up to about 75 percent of his peak condition. Then, with a wry smile, he said, "Learning to live with the ice bag."

When I said something about his speed up the climb, he told me he had just been cruising. "Rick Cashner and I speed-climb this rock sometimes," he said. "We race each other. It's a great aerobic workout. He holds the record--eleven minutes--and I was a few seconds behind him that day."

•

Around five o'clock, a weary bustle begins to gather up in Camp Four. Sunburned climbers straggle in from all over the valley, drop their gear, light a dinner fire. You see them supine on foam pads, looking up the rock or into the trees overhead, adrift in a hard-won, spent glow. Or they catch up with friends and trade stories about what it was like up there on Crack-a-Go-Go, or on Mr. Natural, Peruvian Flake, Separate Reality, Outer Limits, Lean Years, Crack of Doom, Sea of Dreams, Gravity's Rainbow.

"Five point ten, my ass. You're out there smearing and pinching and it's overhanging, and, I mean, it's animalistic."

Sometimes, just the telling of the tale can hurt you. "I damn near knocked myself out," a kid from Phoenix told me. He'd been on a 5.12 crack called Hang-Dog Flier that afternoon, and he'd taken a nasty ten-foot fall that had banged him pretty good, but that wasn't where he'd injured himself. He had gotten the bump he was telling me about in camp as he was describing his fall to a pretty climber girl at the site next to his. She'd watched as he threw his arms out for dramatic effect, then cranked his head back full force and bashed it into a boulder he'd forgotten was behind him.

"Feel that," he said. I reached up under his hair to a knob you could have pulled yourself up on. His name was Jason Sands, he was a carpenter, about 25 years old, it was his fifth trip to Yosemite; he had two weeks off, but he was going to stretch it to three. He figured he could get away with it because his boss was a climber, too. He was shirtless and had the hard, lean chest, arms and shoulders most climbers wear; and as we talked, he reminded me of surfers I'd known in the Sixties, with their deep tans, long hair and quiet, no-tomorrow swagger. Some of these guys come into the valley with no money and no campsite. If they're broke, they sometimes go canning, picking up empty aluminum cans, which are worth a nickel each at the recycling center. If they have no authorized place to sleep, they go out of bounds, which will get you a night in jail if the rangers catch you, and they usually do.

Sands and I watched as the evening's bouldering began on the big rocks that stud the eastern edge of the camp. The climbs on them are seven or 15 moves long at most, but some of these little routes demand the outrageous gymnastics that characterize the top end of this sport nowadays. In a way, work on these boulders presaged the style of modern rock-climbing, because once the grand obvious had been done--El Cap, Half Dome and the others--Yosemite climbing was forced on to the more technical, smaller, subtler, harder problems. So hard, in fact, that Bachar and the other best around here have built rough-hewn workout areas so that after six or eight hours of climbing, they can round off the day with weight-belt pull-ups (100 at a time) or by walking a slack rope for balance or hanging by their fingers and toes from medieval-looking wooden contraptions. The entire regimen is Olympic in intensity, and dangerous: Bachar's elbow injury, for instance, came not on the rocks but in an outdoor gym. And he is not the only one of the champions who is climbing hurt these days. The territory these men have opened up is literally tearing their muscles from their bones.

The boulders in Camp Four provide another kind of warm-down from a day's climbing and something more--a chance to show your monkey, a few feet off the ground, to anyone who wants to wander over and watch. Reputations are made on rocks all over the valley, but Camp Four, after dinner, is where you strut your stuff. These are the ego hours.

Columbia Boulder is the prince of rocks in camp, and it's inevitable that at some point every evening, someone will stand on its northeast side and look his way up the 11 or 12 moves to its flat top, which sits 20 feet up under a toupee of fallen brown cedar needles. Climbing it by eye is as close as most will ever get to doing this little route, because these seven yards are the pure, mean essence of rock-climbing at its 5.13 cruelest: an arc of rock that sweeps up and then back out over your head in three tiers that make a route that most spiders would walk away from. The face is black with the stain of old campfires, and across it is chalked a streak of lightning, a sort of pictograph that commemorates the first ascent.

The first man or woman up a route gets to name it; and after all the years of trying by all the climbers who camped here, it was a guy named Ron Kauk who finally grappled through the last move and onto the top. He called it Midnight Lightning; and for two weeks, he was the only man in the world who could climb these 20 feet. Sometime later, Bachar made it, and not long after that, a crucial bump he was hanging from broke off; and without that knob, even Kauk couldn't make it. At that point, Kauk began what would be a year away from climbing; and over that time, Bachar found a way up without the knob. Kauk returned, and after several weeks or months (nobody quite remembers), he relearned it, and then, for almost six years, they were the only two. Even now, seven years later, there are only eight or nine men who have ever made the climb.

•

The night Sands and I talked, four of those men were in camp, but it was a lanky young Oklahoman named John Frank who started the evening's round of attempts up the humbling little stretch of granite. He said something like "Here goes nothing," laughed, then stood for a minute taking deep drafts of air to pump himself for the try. Then he chalked his hands, stepped into the first move and reached immediately for the second, because once you've started, your body is already out past dead vertical and any hang time will sap you for the upper moves that are the crux. Frank used all of his considerable 5.12 talents to get about ten feet, came off with a scary suddenness and landed upright only because he made a catlike gyration in the air. He and Sands talked about the two-finger hold he'd missed; and while they did, other climbers began to drift over--half a dozen at first, then 20--and by the time Frank had made four tries, there were 50 or so spectators, some of them beginning to kibitz.

"Bachar mantles it," said a small, baby-faced guy, referring to the move Frank couldn't get past. "I just put my foot in the seam."

He turned out to be Kurt the Kid--Kurt Smith, from Lake Tahoe, one of the guys who've made it. He had just taken a year away from climbing because his body was wasted. This was his first week back, and he was pretty sure he wasn't yet in shape to do it; but he stepped up anyway, asked for someone to spot him, then looked up at the chalk splashes that mark the route. When he started climbing, it became clear that what he lacked in size, he made up for in strength and will and rock smarts. He got himself cleanly to the eighth move, blew three blasts of air--somebody in the crowd yelled, "Fire it!"--then pulled himself with one arm toward a hold so small you couldn't see it from the ground. He got it but couldn't hold, and he landed in a small explosion of dust. About that time, a rathead-looking climber on a BMX bicycle rode past the edge of the crowd, making very convincing chimp sounds. Probably the guy with the lawn flamingo, I couldn't help thinking.

About then, Kauk sauntered over from the rescue site, an area in Camp Four reserved for the best climbers, who pay nothing for the space in return for being on call in case of trouble in the rocks. He was wearing red warm-up pants, no shirt, and his shoulders were dusted with chalky finger marks where he had been slapping at mosquitoes. He was carrying a rough walking stick, which gave him the vague air of a mountain aristocrat, and as he and Kurt the Kid talked about how to beat the crux, he used it as a pointer. There was something unmistakably professorial about the scene, and Kurt the Kid was listening hard, as was some of the crowd, because although there is no real way to rank the champions of rock-climbing, this fraternity knows very well who they are.

The Kid made four more attempts and gave it up. Then Dave Cosgrove, another of the men who'd done the climb, made the best try of the evening. He came off in the final move to loud sounds of disappointment from the gallery.

As the crowd drifted away, four Japanese moved to the rock, pointing and talking among themselves. Then the smallest of them put one hand up as if he were going to start the climb, another of them said something, then all four of them laughed so hard it bent them at the waist.

•

A couple of mornings later, I stopped in Ahwahnee Meadow, sat in the sun and opened my map so that I could name the falls for myself, relax and watch the birds go overhead in small stanzas. At least that's what I thought I was there for. It turned out I had taken a loge seat for an act of geological violence the likes of the one that had dropped Columbia Boulder into Camp Four.

I'd been there about ten minutes when I heard a sharp crackling, then a cannonlike boom from the general direction of Stair Step Falls, exactly across the valley. I saw the small beginnings of a dust cloud coming up from the steep gullies between the pillars and buttresses near the crest of the mountain; then the sound of all hell cutting loose reached me, a rumble that shook the meadow, and I watched as mammoth boulders and 100-foot trees fell, rebounded off a lower apron, then smashed into a massive spray of rubble that settled finally onto the scree slopes 2000 feet below.

I stood, as did the half dozen other people in the 100-acre meadow. Don't let there be any climbers up there or anywhere near was my first thought. I didn't expect there would be. It's not a heavily climbed part of the valley, and there were none, it turned out. Still, it's not the sort of event any climber ever needs to see--or maybe it is, was my second thought. Just so you never forget that this valley is still inventing itself, that these rocks that seem so eternally still and solid are alive.

The thing went on for two long minutes. Then silence. Nothing. Not even the chatter of the birds. A thunderhead of dust grew till it hid the entire mountain, then took 15 minutes to rise and dissipate.

•

I was still buzzing with the experience when I caught up with Sands and Frank at the base of Royal Arches, and I asked them if they'd seen it. No, they said, but they'd heard it.

They were already roped up at the foot of Hang-Dog Flier and they had their hands taped like boxers so that hanging in the sharp 5.12 crack wouldn't tear them up too badly. The route was about 100 feet long, with a vicious overhang all the way and a nice 50- or 60-foot fall waiting at the high crux if anything went wrong up there.

Eight or ten of their friends and a Japanese couple were scattered on nearby rocks to watch as Frank led off. Sands belayed him and turned Talking Heads to full volume on their tape machine.

It was hard climbing from the first, with no place to rest, and Frank climbed slowly but well, setting protection every few feet. It took him 45 minutes, hanging by his fingers and shoes, to go 30 feet. Ten minutes later, he reached a spot where he could haul himself just off the route onto a sloping ledge by using one arm, one leg and his cheek to lever himself up. After a short rest, he got back down into the crack, took his first try at the crux, missed, fell about ten feet and swung back into the rock hard enough that we heard the wind go out of him. He swore and pulled himself back onto the ledge for another breather. He made three more tries to get over the top, but he had less energy for each, and finally, he gave up, pulled on the rope to get a higher purchase, stepped through the last two moves and he was there. He'd climbed beautifully, but he wasn't very happy about it, because by the ethics of free-climbing, the game is over the first time you use your protection to advance, or even to balance yourself.

At a campfire the night before, a climber from Flagstaff had talked to me about just that thing. His name was Rand Black, and he'd been climbing for 17 years, since he was four. Just the year before, he'd taken a fall that had flipped him over backward and smashed his heel bone into five pieces. He said he could have saved the plunge if he'd just grabbed the rope, which he didn't, because his climber's code told him not to. He said it wasn't a total loss, though. It had left him with an unnaturally large bump on his heel, which made his left climbing shoe fit perfectly. "And I learned something from that climb," he told me. "I learned never to let ethics hurt you."

With Frank on top belaying, Sands climbed quickly and smoothly, removing the chocks and stoppers as he passed them. Then, at the crux, Frank took up the slack exactly as Sands made his move and the taut rope pulled him off. He fell five or six feet, banged the rock and then swore at Frank. He made two more tries, exhausted himself and finally used the rope to finish the climb the way Frank had. The two of them came down arguing about whether Sands had fallen or been yanked off.

As they coiled their rope, the Japanese couple who'd been watching rigged themselves for the same climb. The woman belayed from the bottom while her partner hung himself in the crack and moved out and up. Just about halfway, he took a 30-foot screamer, which left him hanging spread eagle upside down, with his hardware draped over his face. Sands grabbed his camera, took the picture, then yelled, "Nice photo."

"Thank you," said the Japanese, still swinging.

•

The next afternoon, I caught up with Werner Braun in the Camp Four parking lot, which is his home pretty much all year. He sleeps in his van, which is against the law for everyone else in the valley, but Braun has a working arrangement with the rangers that earns him an exemption from that statute: He's one of the men who bring the dead down from the high faces. Braun has been in Yosemite for eight years and is sometimes called "the Zen master."

"I didn't mean to stay this long," he told me. "I was on my way to be an engineer. I just turned out to be a climber."

By all accounts, he is one of the very best, a sometime free-soloist, though he refuses to acknowledge the climbing feathers that go with his reputation. "I figured out a while ago how to keep from getting hurt," he told me as we talked about the danger of climbing without ropes. "I just don't care. I climb for fun."

We talked about the ascent of Lost Arrow Spire that Kauk and Jerry Moffit were going to do live for ABC in two weeks. Braun had been hired to help carry video cameras to the adjacent rim, and I asked him if he knew who had made the first free climb of the beautiful pillar. It was a soap-opera question, pure climbing gossip. Bachar had told me that a certain famous climber has claiming to have been the first when he knew very well that Dave Shultz had done it before him. "True?" I asked Braun.

"Who cares?" he said. "It just doesn't matter."

When I asked him about the kid who'd fallen off Royal Arches, he didn't know anything about it. It had been a lucky season so far, he said; no major rescues. The year before hadn't been so quiet.

"Last fall, we got a freak snowstorm and had three major rescues going at the same time," he said. "We were flying down the valley to one of them in a helicopter, and as we passed El Cap. I looked out the window and saw two Japanese guys dead on the Nose Route. One of them had fallen, and the other was stuck and froze to death. It was a shock. We didn't even know they were up there."

A ranger pulled up in his car, and we asked him what he knew about the Royal Arches fall. It wasn't a climber, he said, but a hiker who had evidently wandered off a lower cliff around dawn. "Big, well-developed guy," he told us. "Looked like he might have been a football player. Had a couple of full beers in his pockets."

•

Robinson and I spent our last afternoon back on Manure Pile. I'd climbed most of the week with my usual baggage of fear and hesitation, but I'd felt some small improvement; and before we left, I wanted to get back on this rock to see if I couldn't get at least a step or two nearer Bachar's spirit, and Braun's, and the spirit of all the other young climbers I'd been with for the week.

There were shouts of "On belay!" echoing through the woods when we got to the base, as there usually are around this well-climbed rock. Robinson wanted to lead me up a more difficult route than After Seven, a 5.9 crack called Cocksucker's Concerto. It's adjacent to another route called The Nutcracker, which Royal Robbins put up and named because of his love for classical music. C.S. Concerto, as it is called in the guidebook these days, was another top climber, Yvon Chouinard's, answer to Robbins' route-name poetry when he put up a new climb next to it.

As I stepped onto it, I told myself not to care so much, to think about climbing, not falling, to dance a little, to picture Bachar and his Tai Chi rhythm, to do it for fun and to quit if it wasn't. And damned if it didn't work. For the first time ever on the rock, I didn't have one desperate moment, not a drop of adrenaline. Instead, I took my time, looked for the graceful line up, listened to the birds, admired the pretty little flowering succulents that live in the dirty cracks; and when I rested, I looked out at Sentinel Falls and down at the shadows of the broken clouds sliding across the valley floor. It was a halting, stoop-shouldered little dance if you compared it with Bachar's, but a dance nonetheless; and on top, Robinson and I laughed, and he congratulated me.

On our way out of the valley, we stopped by the road, and through a pair of big binoculars, we found Frank and Sands 1000 feet straight up on the face of Sentinel. Even through the glasses they were tiny, but they seemed to be moving well, six hours from the bottom, an hour or so from the top. And as I watched them up there, giving scale to this magnificent face, I remembered something that Sands had said in camp one night when I asked him what it was like to be on El Cap for days at a time.

"At first," he said, "you miss your friends. You want to be down in camp, partying with them. Then, about the second day, something happens and you get to love it up there."

"What is it?" I asked him. "The solitude?"

"Not so much that," he said. "I just like being vertical."