Scaling El Cap

Harding, Merry, and Whitmore
Arrival at the top of El Capitan

Wayne Merry, a member of the first team to climb El Capitan in Yosemite, died on October 30 from prostate cancer at the age of 88, according to today's New York Times.

The 1958 climb sticks in my mind because it occurred during my first quarter of college, and because the last few days were heavily reported by our college daily newspaper.  Heavily reported, because this was not a two- or three-day climb, like many of today's climbs of El Cap, but the conclusion of a 45-day marathon over a period of 18 months.

I was well familiar with reading about climbs at the time, but only with the sort of slogs uphill that had characterized the the conquest of Everest five years earlier by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.  So far as I recall, I'd never heard of rock climbing, where the object is to choose an apparently nonclimbable rock face -- and climb it.

Merry was one of three members in the team -- all from the Bay Area.  The others were George Whitmore and Warren Harding.  Harding died of liver failure in 2002, at the age of 77.  Whitmore, now the lone survivor, lives on in Fresno at the age of 88.

Purists today -- and many back in 1958 -- insisted that climbs be made without hardware that disturbed the natural environment.  Merry and his friends aimed only at making the climb, by whatever means seemed necessary.  This meant pounding pitons into cracks in the rock, or using expansion bolts pounded into the solid rock where pitons could not be used, connecting climbing ropes that were left in place, and returning to the ground at night.  Each day's climb consisted of climbing the ropes already in place, and pounding pitons and placing ropes to the next higher point.

Harding, in a 2002 interview for the Los Angeles Times, recalled that they had used 600 pitons, and that he himself had drilled holes for another 150 expansion bolts.  Rock climbing hardware as known today was not readily available, and for part of the climb they made their own pitons out of the legs from old wood stoves.  In a 2016 interview, Merry noted:

I wouldn't hang a picture from them today, but back then we hung our lives on them.

But winter was coming, and in early November the team decided to "race" to the top, without returning to the ground.  They remained on the face, day and night, for the next nine days, arriving at the top on November 12, 1958.  The excitement and publicity -- at least in our campus newspaper -- almost equaled that given the first landing on the moon.

I've never rock climbed, or been tempted to do so.  I'm not totally risk-averse, but I like to think that my rationality works hand in hand with my inborn acrophobia.  But memories of the first El Capitan climb remind us of a time when the natural world still had many challenges to be conquered, when it offered adventurers a multitude of opportunities for "firsts." 

Many kinds of "adventure" will always exist, of course, not all of which require hanging by a rope thousands of feet above the ground in freezing temperatures.  And young people invent their own adventures where necessity might not seem to require them. Today, free solo climbing, where climbers climb not only with no hardware, like expansion bolts, but without ropes for protection -- is increasingly popular among young people.

In the future, exploration of the planets will provide the human race collectively plenty of opportunities for adventure.  But one person, or a team of three, confronting a sheer rock face, provides the individual with adventure of a direct and personal nature, an adventure unlike the thrill we get watching a rocket leave earth on the screens of our television sets.
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PS -- In the summer of 2018, two California climbers, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell, set a new speed record on the same route up El Capitan: 1 hour, 58 minutes, 7 seconds.