John Westlake, Rock Climber

John was one of the adventurous youth who climbed mountains in Yosemite in the 1960s, the Golden Age of climbing in the valley.  Although he camped with many climbers, including those would go on to become famous, he seldom climbed with them.  In those days, people lived in Camp 4 for months at a time as they expanded the limits of climbing.  They were climbing everywhere, trying to see what was possible, and attempting to create new routes up Sentinel Rock, the Leaning Tower, Washington Column, and the Lost Arrow.  The big walls of El Capitan and Half Dome were looked at longingly and with awe, but dismissed as unclimbable. 

John was in high school then, sometimes skipping classes in Berkeley to head for Yosemite to climb.  This was in the days before new techniques and innovative gear brought a measure of safety.  Just to climb in Yosemite required a huge amount of physical energy and courage. Then a few people took on the sheer granite monoliths of El Capitan and Half Dome.  Warren Harding laid siege to El Capitan for months, setting lines and putting in bolts, coming down at night to rest, and taking time off to plan the next segment.  He finally made it up.  Others tried their luck and began to stay on the rock, hauling their gear with them.  Today the climb to the top of El Cap is a 4-7 day event, depending what part of the rock you are attempting.  Some daredevils will go up in a single day without using any aids.

One day John realized that he had to climb El Capitan.  Months before the actual climb, he stood in the meadow looking up at that massive monolith, saw where he would start, where he would end, and figured out the line he would follow, and where he would need to put his hands and his feet all the way up the 3000 foot face of the rock.  By the time he started climbing, he knew what he would do. 

Everything did not go as planned, because from thousands of feet away it's hard to tell if a crack the size of your finger actually continues upwards or simply ends.  Rudimentary pitons and bolts provided the security.  This was before spring-loaded cams and gri-gris that adjusted on their own to the width of cracks were available.  John and the other climbers jammed odd pieces of metal found in junkyards into cracks, attached a rope, and hoped they held.  Yvon Chouinard, Royal Robbins, and a few others were beginning to create their own security pieces in blacksmith shops and spawned a new generation of gear. 

Sometimes the cracks did end, stranding John with nothing to hold on to, and nowhere upward to go.  Then he had to try a number of alternatives.  Sometimes he climbed back down and headed up at a different angle.  Sometimes he would swing on the end of his rope like a pendulum and catch hold of another crack forty feet to the side, secure himself and continue on, hoping to reconnect with the route he had carefully laid out.  A couple of times he had to unclip himself from his safety rope and walk delicately along a ledge barely an inch wide, trying to maintain enough contact with the rock with his fingertips, knees, and feet to keep him on the side of the mountain, trying to make his body a suction cup.

He climbed with others on the nine days it took to reach the top.  Some days they were only able to move up fifty feet, and it was easy to get depressed.  There were times when tempers flared, nerves frayed under the constant pressure of serious consequences if a mistake was made, and the shock and frustration they felt when they fell 80 feet and were yanked back by their ropes and slammed against the mountain.  They yelled at each other more frequently as the days went on and they grew more tired.  But they were tied together on a common rope, and knew that they would succeed or fail as a group. Working together, and sharing their visions and strengths, they eventually reached the top.  Getting up was only part of their goal.  The hard journey of finding a way to work together through the difficult stretches, and the simple joy of climbing, were why they risked their lives.

John would later climb Half Dome and the rest of the big routes in the valley.  Today some of his fingers are permanently bent from injuries he suffered from wedging his fingers into cracks and pulling himself up, and a light comes on in his eyes when he talks about those years. 

Today he loves to hike in the Sierra, especially on the eastern side.  As he puts it, “There is a certain joy that I experience when I look upon Conness from Saddlebag Lake with my silver-haired companion.  The solitude of early morning mist rising from the water, the call of Clark's Nutcrackers, the scurrying of Alpine Chipmunks and the taste of fresh-brewed coffee.   These things I can share on an Autumn morning.  I have a much stronger feeling now for the Sierra than I did in my teens, a spirituality that I missed.  Maybe as Leopold would say, "I was young then and full of trigger itch,” not stopping to look at what was around me. Only wanting to get to the top of a cliff but missing the mountain it was on.”