“You Rotten Lucky Bastards”
This article originally appeared on Climbing
Editor’s note: In his latest book, acclaimed climbing writer David Smart unpacks the life and times of the American big wall pioneer Royal Robbins. Royal Robbins: The American Climber, winner of the Climbing Literature Category at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, describes how Robbins emerged from a childhood of truancy and need to become one of the greatest climbers of his age, then charts Robbins's later life as a father, husband, and outdoor apparel executive.
The following excerpt describes five of the most significant days in American climbing history and their immediate aftermath--days during which Robbins, along with Mike Sherrick and Jerry Gallwas, quested up 2,200 feet of vertical granite to make the first ascent of America's first Grade VI rock climb, the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome. It was an event that turned the volume up on the now-infamous rivalry between Robbins and Warren Harding; changed Robbins from an awkwardly arrogant youngster into the dean of American rock climbing; and helped shift the attention of the American climbers away from the siege-style pursuit of distant Himalayan peaks to single-push ascents on the polished granite walls of Yosemite.
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The following material was excerpted from Royal Robbins: The American Climber by David Smart (September 2023). Published by Mountaineers Books. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. You can buy the book here.
On Sunday, June 23, 1957, Wayne Merry, Royal Robbins, Mike Sherrick, and Jerry Gallwas carried their gear, food, and water up the trail to Half Dome. Merry left his load at the base, wished his friends good luck, and hiked up the cables to the summit, where he posted a sign warning tourists not to throw rocks because there were climbers below.
On the first day, Royal and his friends climbed fifty feet beyond their 1955 high point and rappelled to a bivouac ledge. They zipped up their flight suits and waited for the Firefall at Glacier Point, the signal to flick their flashlight on and off twice so that Merry, at Mirror Lake, could see that all was well.
The next day, Gallwas spent five hours drilling a ladder of bolts across a blank wall that separated them from a 500-foot-long crack system. When Gallwas was exhausted, Royal took a turn and got a few pitons in a crack above the bolts, but there was still thirty feet of blank rock between him and the crucial crack. He lowered forty feet and, on his second try, made a wild pendulum to a ledge, where he placed an anchor and rappelled. In the morning, their third on the wall, they left a rope across the traverse, anchored to a flake that would not support a climber's weight. It was a safeguard for retreat, not an expedient for the next party.
Difficult free climbing led up the long crack system to a bivouac behind a seventy-five-foot-tall sheet of rock leaning against the main wall. The next day, pebbles dribbled down the wall as Royal squirmed up behind the flexing wafer of granite. At sunset, they reached the flat ten-by-five-foot ledge that would later become known as Big Sandy. Five hundred feet above them loomed the tiered Visor overhang that they had to find a way around in the morning.
Shortly after dawn, the temperature reached the 90s. They were at least two days from the top, with only two quarts of water left. Gallwas mimed drinking from a water bladder to preserve water. The others copied him. That day, three pitches of vertical aid climbing led to a tiny alcove, where, too exhausted to find more suitable lodgings, they crammed into the crack for an uncomfortable bivouac.
The closer they climbed to the crackless overhangs of the Visor, the farther it seemed to jut out from the wall. Gallwas spotted a horizontal ledge a foot wide and fifty feet long, leading to a crack left of the overhang--"a Thank God ledge," as Sherrick described what would become one of the most famous rock climbing pitches in the world. It took them straight to a crack system that led to the final slab.
After five days on the wall, they stumbled onto the flat granite summit like sailors stepping onto land after a long sea voyage. Harding had come to Yosemite to try Half Dome with Powell only to be surprised to find Royal's party high on the route. Harding hiked up with ham sandwiches and a gallon of water for his rivals.
"Hey, congratulations," he said, "you rotten lucky bastards."
Royal instantly felt like Harding's next climb, whatever it was, would be motivated by competition and jealousy, feelings to which Royal was himself vulnerable. In fact, Harding was upset by the Half Dome climb, but did not know what to do next.
"Warren was complaining about Royal Robbins finishing the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome without him," recalled Valley climber Bea Vogel in an interview. "He was pouting and moaning because he had been left out. Well, I told him, 'Oh, hell! There are lots of other walls. Why don't you do El Capitan?' and standing in El Cap Meadow and pointing at a line, I said, 'You can climb right up the South Buttress.' And he looked at it and said, 'Well, OK, maybe we can.' "
But El Capitan was still a big maybe and Half Dome was a real, new, American type of climb: vertical, committing, huge, a big wall in the most literal sense--a pure, technical rock climbing tour de force. Gallwas and Royal didn't even own crampons. Severe weather was all but impossible. It had been climbed from the bottom up in a continuous push, without any of the fixed ropes so essential to the first ascents of the 8,000-meter peaks then seen as the apex of world climbing. There were no flags at the top. The four Los Angeles climbers in their early twenties reinvented climbing as a deeply personal, aesthetic act. Any rewards were purely symbolic.
"Half done [sic] first ascent 5 days," Gallwas telegrammed his mother, "but late to work Love Jerry." The National Park Service's press release was almost as brief. The rangers called the climb "the first ascent of the east shoulder of Half-Dome." The same description was used in newspaper articles. Some used the even less impressive "east slope." The attention of the average reader of the Bakersfield Californian was more likely to be drawn to the adjacent story, "Grandma Holds Suspect for Police." California climbers, however, were agog. In the July Mugelnoos, published two weeks after the ascent, Wilts asked if "Half Dome was the hardest north face yet?" and described the climb as "fantastic and formidable" with "staggering statistics."
Royal gave the route the name that stuck. His full report, "The Northwest Face of Half Dome," appeared in the Mugelnoos, almost eight weeks after the climb. He called the climb "arduous," "perpendicular," "enervating," and "seldom-remitting." His tone suggests that the privations of heat, thirst, and fatigue were routine for his party. The use of the third person gives the impression of a youngster straining to be taken seriously.
In December, a longer piece by Royal was published in the more polished Sierra Club Bulletin, "Half Dome--The Hard Way." The photograph of Half Dome by Ansel Adams with the route and the bivouacs scrawled over it foreshadowed a clash between those who, like Royal, saw themselves as legitimate figures on the Yosemite landscape and the high-wilderness aesthetic in which the only evidence of humans was the artist's gaze.
Half Dome's Regular Northwest Face was, as expected, crowned the first grade VI. Now, Royal's presence in the campground at Idyllwild excited a kind of low-intensity celebrity gossip. His friends began to comment on his masculine appearance, his shyness was now sometimes interpreted as arrogance, and his voice struck some listeners as terse and manly.
About the author: DAVID SMART is founding editor of Gripped magazine, editorial director at Gripped Publishing, and author of five guidebooks. His biography of Austrian solo climber Paul Preuss was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize, and his biography of Italian climber Emilio Comici won that prize along with the Banff Award for Climbing Literature. Other honors include the H. Adams Carter Award for Mountain Literature from the American Alpine Club. His work has appeared in Climbing, Rock and Ice, The American Alpine Journal, The Canadian Alpine Journal, and Alpinist. Smart resides in Toronto.
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