![]() My hands gripped the table and I stared at Jerry, unsure which surprised me more: my recoil at hearing Blake’s name, or that through some cold-blooded fluke I was eating breakfast with Blake’s last partner. ![]() “Then I met a young man bouldering out at Stoney Point,” said Jerry. John Long: Violating Sacrosanct Trad Ethics Was, Ironically, Liberating But by 1973, and well into his 30s, Jerry still hadn’t managed an ascent of El Capitan, the pot of gold for all California climbers. Jerry had partnered with many of the Californians whom I’d idolized and frequently saw during my high school days out at Joshua Tree and Tahquitz, where the old guard used to hang. Much as I had, Jerry came to climbing through athletics. “I’m ancient,” said Jerry, now pushing 80, “but there was a time … ” And we both flew back to the Valley. The confusing part is how most of us die without ever growing old. He had a collared shirt, a face thrown wide open and the eyes of a kid full of beans. I met Jerry for breakfast a few days later, at a deli down in Marina del Rey. I had too much going on to swap climbing stories with a hometown duffer, but for nameless reasons I felt compelled to go. He wanted to meet in person, though he never said why. He knew because he’d been there, and when he cracked open our book it all came rushing back. A nephew had gifted him a copy of our new book. Shortly after the book launch at Patagonia’s shop in Santa Monica, I got a call from Jerry Volger, a stranger to me but a local Venice, California man. It took a year of haggling and revising before we finally finished Yosemite in the Fifties: The Iron Age. Then Dean Fidelman wrangled a deal to publish a large-format art book on Yosemite climbing in the 1950s, and he asked me to write the text. ![]() I’d written so much about climbing in Yosemite that even I couldn’t face another John Long story about back-in-the-day. (Bev was nails like that, until she later died in a helicopter crash.) I kept going to Yosemite, climbing walls for another decade until I finally got enough during a heat wave on Mount Watkins, gasping up a first ascent with Bridwell.įast-forward four decades and change. ![]() A couple of summers later she soloed the Dihedral Wall, also on El Cap, and I always wondered if that’s what it took to purge Michael Blake from her life. But Michael Blake jumped in from the shadows, and Bev turned gray.īev wasn’t climbing much just then, she said. The previous autumn she’d made the first all-female ascent of El Cap, with Sibylle Hechtel, and I wanted to hear all about it. I returned to Camp 4 the following May, the moment school let out. It took the rest of that summer and many winter weekends out at Joshua Tree before the ferocious downfall of Michael Blake ebbed away. Now every hour and sometimes more often, Michael Blake surged through my mind like a riptide. But once I locked sights on Yosemite, the currents raced in one direction. Though I was only 18, my life didn’t flow, it spun and churned. Back then, few Southern California teenagers were scaling El Cap, but I couldn’t put a face to his name. I must have seen Blake out at Josh, or up at Tahquitz. For reasons under investigation by park rangers, the rope had severed and Blake had died. The Times reported that Michael Blake, 19, of Santa Monica, California, had fallen from the “last rope” of the Nose route on El Capitan. I kicked around my folks’ place for a few days, doing yard work and sleeping like a wild animal, on and off or not at all. Next morning we rapped off and I hitchhiked back to Southern California. My mentor, Jim Bridwell, the biggest cheese in Yosemite climbing, said I had to get up on El Cap while I still was green and could find an epic. This was my first full summer in the Valley after graduating high school a month earlier. The Nose route goes roughly up the center of the photo. I finished hauling the bag, and when Ed pulled onto the ledge we sucked back against the wall and started chain-smoking. I glanced down at my partner, Ed Barry, ratcheting up on ascenders and cleaning the pitch. The pulley, racks and neatly stacked cords-all of this gear, and me standing there, eight pitches up El Capitan, felt criminal. The haulbag was still half a rope length below. The body came and went in no time, but I didn’t move for what felt like an age, frozen at the anchor by the violence of a human meteor punching a hole through the sky. My head jerked right, and way over on the skyline I saw a human body pin wheeling from the bridge of the N ose all the way to the toe of the South Buttress, some 3,000 feet later. I was hauling the pig to the top of the Half Dollar, 800-feet up the Salathé Wall on El Capitan, a route that would soon be one of the 50 Classic Climbs in North America, when the sound hit me like a punch.
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