How to Climb
John Long: High Times
The search for the source
Eric “Ricky” Accomazzo, Richard Harrison and I grew up in Upland, California, learned the ropes together during high school, and remained climbing partners for the next 15 years, traveling to heck and gone, raising Cain and searching for the next great adventure. Back then (circa 1972), the way a climber approached their “mountain” was inspired by Odysseus Laertiades’ sketchfest home to Ithaca and the frostbitten warriors of romantic alpine texts like Annapurna and The West Ridge.
We admired Annapurna, the book, and were all over the proto-Homeric tough-man approach. But we wouldn’t have gone within 50 miles of Annapurna, the mountain, had it reared straight out of the Rose Bowl. Born and raised in So Cal, we rated rain and snow right alongside bubonic plague and the guillotine. Nevertheless, the ideal represented by the Homeric archetype stretched all the way to the small-fry outing clubs where most of us learned to climb.
Take the squadron of fogy climbing instructors we encountered at Tahquitz and Joshua Tree, self-styled George Pattons all, who were not climbing so much as conducting war games on the rock, right down to barking out belay signals like martial commands and treating every neophyte like Gomer Pyle. Their tackle was military issue as well, including Marine “mummy bags” and Guadalcanal-era “mess kits” rusty enough to put a mule down with tetanus typhoid. Even their garb bristled with paramilitary pins and patches, denoting past alpine conquests and, by implication, rank in the granite echelon. Within this milieu, a climbing route bore the severity of a mission into enemy territory, and the honorable mountaineer was expected to suffer like a dog—and like it.