How to Climb
John Long: Slaying Giants
Cast by chance into the frenzy of a dramatic Yosemite rescue, the author confronts his youthful fears head-on
Looking back on all the crazy, dreary and magnificent days I spent in Yosemite, I’m amazed how certain events, some loud, others discreet, could launch me in unexpected directions. Throughout it all, some nameless anxiety pressed me to try and reinvent myself every summer — a no-win game of diminishing returns once I became fluent per all things Yosemite. When my learning curve flattened after a decade, Yosemite and I were done with each other. Leaving was easy. Getting started, however, almost never happened but for a glum May afternoon during my first summer in the Valley.
I was an 18-year-old wannabe hardman in the early 1970s and had lived in Camp 4 less than a week. Bleak shadows stole over the valley. An hour before found me storming up 300-foot Arch Rock and sweating in a T-shirt. Now, I sat dead still with my arms wrapped around my torso. I was more than simply cold. The towering walls had lost their sunny grandeur and seemed to sneer down at me with hostile intentions.
I glanced down valley at Half Dome, veiled in ancient shade, then panned right to Sentinel, soaring off the terraced approach slabs like a prodigious black tombstone. I shuddered. Would I ever get up those walls? Did I really want to? Everything inside and outside of me felt huge and overwhelming, and nothing in my experience tempered the moment with proportion. For months I’d thought about little more than finally getting right here, in the presence of the giants. But in all the dozen books I’d read about Yosemite, no one had ever come clean about how this paradise could seem so menacing.
I’d bolted for Yosemite the second school let out, and naturally, I’d run my mouth off about all my big plans. Now the bluster had calved away and I could actually see where those plans would take me. For a long while I sat on top of Columbia Boulder, in an edgy daze, wondering which option I might survive: slinking out of the Valley some lonely night and living with shattered aspirations, or packing the haul bag, jumping onto the vertical unknown and fighting the beast of my own doubts. I could have gone either way, when a “Hey, John,” startled me back to the present. It was my cousin, Roger Rudolph, then the head backcountry ranger, and allied with the budding Search and Rescue Team.
I scrambled down and Roger gushed out a mouthful: an accident on the East Buttress of Middle Cathedral, two pitches below the summit; a leader fall and a head injury. A helicopter was en route to ferry the Valley czars Jim Bridwell and Mark Klemons to the top of Middle to conduct a rescue. In case that plan did not work, the Park Service needed another team to trudge to the top of Middle, schlepping a green backpack that was currently occupying several acres around Roger’s feet. If the Bridwell/Klemons team hadn’t set down by the time we gained the top, I’d rap to the victim and ... well, we’d have to flesh out the plan from there. “You handle that?” Roger asked. Roger was about 15 years older than me and a mentor who had skied 100 miles across Tioga Pass in winter, carted injured hikers out of the backcountry on his back, and ran a government department with 40 men. By sheer happenstance he now needed me to pony up.
“I’m in,” I said.
“Meet me back here in five,” Roger said. I dashed for Camp 4’s rescue site, urgent to find someone who could handle the job. Luckily I found Englishman Ben Campbell-Kelly lounging around camp, recovering from an early ascent of the North American Wall with his countryman Bryan Wyvill. I explained the situation, and that I needed him along, and Ben said, “Let’s go, man.”