How to Climb
John Long: Legend of Lord Gym
(and what it really means to “take it outside”)
Out left, a 50-foot arete, steel grey and glass smooth, shot into the blaze. Earlier that morning—in the shade, with a toprope, after several tries—Sammy and I had thieved our way up it. Now we watched “Buster,” cool as a cod, hiking the thing and pausing for its grim clips as if hanging on a pegboard. It was 90 degrees F in the shade, but Buster, 22, and his partner, “Andy,” 20, weren’t bothered.
“Freakin’ crazy he can stay on in this heat,” said Sammy, watching Buster door-hinge up the final moves. Sammy and I were from the same hometown and had been climbing together since high school, about 75 years ago.
“I feel old,” I said.
“How’s that, gramps?” asked Sammy. He’d untied the Stokes litter stashed behind a nearby pine tree by the local rescue group, laid it in the shade, and stretched himself out in it—like a stiff in an open casket.
“Impressive,” I told Buster when he and Andy found their way back to us after polishing off our testpiece.
“That’s some kind of slick rock,” Buster said.
“Solid for the grade,” said Andy.
“Looked like you were marching up a wheelchair ramp,” Sammy said from his coffin.
Their graciousness seemed genuine, though flashing a hard climb can turn a scoundrel into a prince—for a while.
During the two-and-a-half-hour drive from LA, we’d razzed Buster about his new tat—a multicolored tribal emblem filched from some hip-hop rag—breaking to him the sad truth that tattoos had gone out with the 1990s. The silly pirate’s hoop in Andy’s ear and the faux micro-ruby in his beak were embarrassments as well. What did we geezers understand about style? the boys wanted to know. They’d already commandeered my CD player, inserting some thug claptrap featuring a 300-pound artist named Paddy Wack rapping about the virtues of “hot ice” (stolen diamonds). Both boys were products of extravagant LA prep schools and, in one of the daffiest verbal alloys I’ve ever heard, would pepper their drift with Ebonic locutions borrowed from Paddy Wack and friends.
We traded insults for 120 miles to fool away the time, but in fact we barely knew Buster and Andy. They were just two more gifted kids from the gym, and had hitched a ride with us to Suicide Rock. A trip to the mountains promised cooler temps than the city and a chance for Buster and Andy to test-drive some “duffer routes,” as they called them. Neither had ever visited Suicide.
Around 3 p.m., clouds moved in, the temperature dropped, and while Sammy and I futzed about on some cracks we’d climbed a thousand times, Buster and Andy dashed up the few nearby routes that are gym-bolted and beastly hard. Only a geologist could say why, but Suicide is neither steep nor sufficiently featured to produce exemplary sport climbs; the soaring faces and several renowned cracks remain the attraction. A few routes from the 1970s and early-1980s hold water today, but they chiefly involve off-vertical dime crimping and sketchy protection—a technique and a style as passé as Doo Wop and wing tips. Avid sport climbers like Buster and Andy rarely visit. Some So Cal climbers, longtime veterans of Williamson, Echo Cliffs, New Jack City and a raft of other industrial sport cliffs, know little to nothing about Suicide or Tahquitz. Twenty years ago, the place was a regular ant farm, and had been for 50 years. During the long drive up—at Buster’s urging—I’d sketched out a brief history of the area.
Suicide Rock’s glory days ran from 1965 to about 1975. Tahquitz was developed much earlier, starting with the first ascent of The Trough (5.1; circa 1938) by Jim Wilson and a neighbor kid. The Sierra Club Decimal Rating System was developed at Tahquitz, and quickly became the American grading standard. Over the next half-century, ratings were cemented on seminal Tahquitz and Suicide climbs, including Mechanic’s Route (5.8; 1938), Open Book (5.9; 1952), Big Daddy (5.10; 1959), Valhalla (5.11; 1970) and Paisano Overhang (5.12; 1973). In the mid-1950s, the trailblazer and guidebook author Chuck Wilts invented and drove home the first knifeblade piton, into Tahquitz’s white granite. Royal Robbins, Yvon Chouinard, Tom Frost, TM Herbert and many other Yosemite pilgrims had cut their teeth here. On dozens of Tahquitz routes during the early 1960s, Mark Powell and Bob Kamps essentially pioneered on-the-lead bolting of challenging face climbs. Hand in hand with Yosemite, traditional American free-climbing ethics—ground up, on-sight—were, in large part, forged at Tahquitz.
Though sporadic development continues at Tahquitz via link-ups and niggling variations, most all the prized lines were bagged by the mid-1960s. After the last of these were free-climbed, around 1974, the great white rock, and the shadowed slabs across the valley at Suicide, began gathering dust. In time, the sport-climbing revolution lured young, ambitious climbers to steeper cliffsides more conducive to clip-and-go routes.