Doug Robinson - OG Yosemite Climber shares history

The rule is the leader must not fall. It was considered very impolite. In fact, they considered it so impolite that they would take their hemp rope and the belayer, the second, would put it over a sharp piece of rock. And if the leader were so rude as to fall off, they could break the rope and save the rest of the party. Chouinard became the manufacturer and he'd make a few of these in the chicken coop and then throw them in the trunk of his car and he'd go to the Tetons and go to the valley. And one of these, I mean, his early ones cost a dollar and a quarter. So it was, it's like I could eat for two days for that. But, but give me three of them because there's nothing like them in the universe. And I already broke one of those soft iron pins. So I'm a believer now. This is exciting. We're going to get a history lesson on climbing gear. So, uh, once upon a time all climbing was soloing. Yeah, I guess that's true. Um, no, it's really, really exciting that we have an opportunity to hear Doug's stories. Cause he's been climbing for 65 years. What was it? 62 years. 62 years. Don't exaggerate. Don't, don't, don't need to. He's going to talk about from Petons to nuts to friends. And he's got a whole show and tell for us here. I started climbing in 1958. I was 13 years old. There were no just commercial climbing schools in California. I guess the Tetons was the closest one Rainier maybe. And I was stoked because those guys, these Silicon Valley nerds who were teaching me were so much fun. They love puns. And so I could get into their sense of humor right away. And, and they had their baggy army surplus pants, these big old army surplus boots that they claimed were climbing shoes. And I didn't know any better. And it was really fun to go out on the sandstone at Castle Rock State Park, which is between Silicon Valley, where I grew up, except it wasn't called that yet. And Santa Cruz. And, and it's actually a high quality sandstone, really fun climbing, but, you know, I didn't know it was the only rock I'd ever been on. And that was cool. The people were cool. The lessons were good. I learned, I tied onto a rope, wrap it around your waist and tie a bowl and you're on the leg. Don't fall. Did you ever fall on a rope like that? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Did you shove your ribs? Uh, yeah. I feel like that would break your ribs. I broke a rib in a ski accident about that same time. But is this the rope that you would tie into? Yeah. No, but, uh, type of rope. This is a hemp rope or Manila was the good quality hemp from Manila in the Philippines. But, um, I bought this out of the hardware store just so I could show what old rope used to be like, because it's the three strand construction. Um, they didn't hold a lot. They would break at under 2000 pounds. And if you do the math, that's a person falling 10 feet. It's about enough to break this rope. Do they have stretch? No. So like they actually have, they, um, I just saw this number the other day. It's like 12, 13% at failure. At failure. Well, yeah. Yeah. So it was basically jerk you around if you fell on it. So you would get high forces with such a static. You get a high force. And that's one of the reasons that they would break with a person falling only 10 feet, you know, which led the old British mountaineers very reasonably to say, the rule is the leader must not fall. It was considered very impolite. In fact, they considered it so impolite that they would take their hemp rope. The belayer, the second would put it over a sharp piece of rock. And if the leader were so rude as to fall off to get break the rope and save the rest of the party. That sounds rude, but it's own way, put it an understandable cap on the progression of difficulty of climbing. I mean, soloing did too before that, obviously, right. And the rope came into use in the earliest part of the 20th century. They were lassoing knobs and stuff with it before that it was kind of the old tricks, but to actually belay, which they didn't obviously know much about if they were putting it over a to actually belay came in and well, 100 years ago, a little more. And once they got the rope going, they're thinking, well, if the leader does fall off and maybe I can hold him standing on this ledge, but he might just rip me off here and we'll both go down. And that didn't seem recommended. So they got nails at first and pitons of course, came into existence in Austria. They were kind of the tech leaders at the time. And once you got a piton, well, it's got a ring on it. You can untie the rope, the ball on around my waist, thread it through, tie it back on. There are a few stances where you might think about putting a piton in where that might not work. Wait, when did carabiners come into this? Yeah, the Austrians, once again, the tech leaders, here's an old Austrian carabiner. It's kind of a nice gate on it. I like that. And this is not that old, but it's old enough pins in the anyway, of course, with a carabiner. I mean, you guys all know how this works because you're modern climbers, but you clip the carabiner in and then clip your hemp rope. So this was revolutionary approximately when we were going to the moon. I'm like, it just doesn't seem like my history's right. Okay. No, it was like 1910. 1910, 1920, that decade. But this was revolutionary. Cars meant you could get to the crags. This is the first revolution in climbing was cars. But yeah, early 1900s, this stuff was being developed and hemp rope, manila rope. In the 1930s, there were a few silk ropes and silk has a single strand of silk will stretch 22% at failure. It's a nice stretchy rope, but they're expensive and, you know, the French had them, but they wouldn't let anybody else use them. Meanwhile, the Brits, because the Austrians invented pitons, immediately said, well, that's unsporting. You can't anchor yourself to the wall. You know, why would anybody do that? We're sportsmen here. So they were behind the times for 30, 40 years, but they were leading some damn hard stuff in England on practice rocks because that's what anybody assumed that crag climbing was at the time was just practice to go to the Alps and do real climbing, alpine climbing. So, okay. So the Brits, and I just happened to have a demo here. Check this out. Machine nut, 1950s. These guys are good, like Joe Brown and Don Willans are the hottest climbers in the world at the time. And they're walking up the tracks of the Snowdon railway to go to Cenotaph corner, which was maybe the hardest climb of the 1950s. And they find a machine nut on the tracks. It's like rattled off one of the engines of the railway. How'd they come up with the name nuts? Machine nut. So they could actually, before that, they had pebbles. They'd fill their pockets with pebbles. They'd go up with their rope and go, all right, I want some pro here. Pro bro. They'd put the rope into the crack, pull just the right size little stone out of their pockets. They'd put it into the crack in front of the rope so that if they fell, the rope would go over the stone, right? And chalk stones, which is another old name for nut. How's the second person clean that? Do they take the rocks out and throw them down? Rock, nut. So of course it didn't take long before they started putting nuts on slings and they would wear them over their neck like this. Maybe several of them, maybe several different nuts on one piece of cord. Oh, that's actually a good idea. Yeah. Different sizes. You know, how many times have you pulled the wrong size nut off your rack and you're shaking there on the wall going, oh no, it doesn't fit. Only twice per move. Right. So what year, where are we at? Oh, we're, we're 1950s here. All right. So we're modern. We're totally modern, but. Because Piton's been around for 40 years at this point. Yeah. 1910s, somewhere in there. Okay. And carabiner, maybe 1920, super modern. Super modern. But still hemp ropes, you know, you can't trust the rope for much. But when I started climbing in 1958, nobody in California had heard of this. Word traveled really slowly. There are no climbing magazines. I mean, zero at the time, you know, no videos traveling across the Atlantic. When did YouTube start? We'll have to get a tech expert to tell us about that. Not my department. Wait, what made you like rock climbing if you didn't see it on Instagram? That's one of those, I'm sorry. I'll have to refer that to my Zen master. Like, did you see. It's just so much fun. Come on. Did you see rocks and see people climb it and go, that's what I want to do? Or did you like, not see people climb it and you just like naturally wanted to go up there? No, I was so lucky because I moved to California when I was four. And when I was five, my parents started taking me to Yosemite to go camping and then walking around and then we're scrambling up and down peaks. And once you're scrambling peaks, the question arises of like, maybe I need a rope here. I wish I had a rope. So I went to the people who had ropes and they taught me how to use them. There are nylon ropes by then. World War II. Nylon was invented by DuPont in 1938. Okay. It immediately got commandeered by the military and they made the first real nylon climbing ropes and used them. The 10th Mountain Division in World War II used them. So civilians didn't get their hands on them until army surplus. Nice olive drab ropes, same three-strand construction that all ropes had ever been. And they were cool. Suddenly they would hold two tons, more than two tons. You could hang a pickup truck from them. How big were they? Were they like 11 mil thick? They were 11 mil. Yeah. 11 was, I mean, nine was considered too sketchy at the time. Yeah, I know. So the, like, if you just take Yosemite, which is kind of a cool place to climb. Before World War II, the biggest climbs were one day climbs like the Royal Arches or like the Higher Cathedral Spire or the Lost Arrow even got climbed. Pretty bold. But you're back in camp in the evening. And in 1947, all of a sudden that jumped to a five-day climb on the Lost Arrow chimney. Radical. Second ascent wasn't done for five years after that. But in 1950, same guys, John Salathe, brilliant innovator. And he, in 1950, he grabbed Alan Steck, who was a teenager, and they did the North Face of Sentinel Rock, the Steck-Salathe, right? Also brilliant, really hard climb. It was almost all then. And Salathe made the first hard steel pitons ever, right? So this stuff, which we consider junk now, but is soft iron. And you pound it into a crack in the rock and it'll bend to fit the crack, which was a good thing. Like in the Italian Dolomites, the cracks are all wobbly and you pound a piton in there and it's going to stay, not coming out either. So you leave the ground with quite a few pitons and put them in and leave them, which incidentally led to the first thoughts of clean climbing. Or maybe it was because Salathe's hard steel pitons, the rumor is they were made out of Model A axles. Probably true. Were expensive. And so that, plus the beginnings of a clean climbing ethic, led to pounding them back out. Well, the second takes a pin out, we'll take it with us. Now maybe I only need a dozen pins to do the Steck-Salathe, which is fortunate because even Salathe himself only had 15 of them at that point. He was a wrought iron worker. He was a blacksmith. He knew what he was doing. And he knew that he needed hard steel for this. For Yosemite cracks. Yeah. I don't have to show you all my old stash of old pitons, but this is a Kasin. You could buy these for 30 cents when I started climbing. So I had a few of them, but I took one of these and pounded it in for aid in Yosemite, just a little crack near the ground. I'm going to try out direct aid. And the last hit with the hammer, the head broke off it. Off the piton. Not confidence inspiring. But this is like the soft iron pitons. They were just cranked out of junk metal. So Salathe came up with these radically strong pitons that you could actually pound in really hard because you're probably scared. And then the second would pound them back out and you could pound them again and again and again and again and again. And they kept working. Except, of course, that they chipped the edges of the cracks, which was maybe not so clean. And later on, that was one of the big motivators for the whole clean climbing revolution going to nuts. So where did Chouinard come into the picture if Salathe was making hard iron pitons? And what year is that? Chouinard came onto the scene in 1958 in a chicken coop in his parents' backyard in Burbank. He was a falconer, so he got started climbing up to falcon nests to steal falcon chicks. And then pretty soon he was in the Tetons doing hard routes. The rest is history. But he had probably bought a few Salathe pitons from Salathe himself and went, hmm, I got a hammer. Forge, I might be able to do this. And, of course, he could. And he did. And his Salathe had actually quit climbing at that point. So here's a Chouinard piton. It says Lost Arrow on it. And it has a diamond C, which is his mark. Interestingly, Salathe's mark for his peninsula ironworks was a diamond with a P inside it. So Chouinard got the idea for the pitons and for the mark from Salathe. And since Salathe wasn't doing this anymore, Chouinard became the manufacturer. And he'd make a few of these in the chicken coop and then throw them in the trunk of his car and he'd go to the Tetons and go to the valley. And one of these, I mean, his early ones cost a dollar and a quarter. So it's like I could eat for two days for that. But give me three of them because there's nothing like them in the universe. And I already broke one of those soft iron pins. So I'm a believer now and put this on my rack. And the more scared I get, the harder I pound on it. So it essentially costs what the cost to us for a cam today would cost. Two days of food for a hippie. Yeah, I guess that's right. I happen to have an early Chouinard carabiner here too. It's a beautiful thing that he scraped together the money to get Alcoa to turn out the blanks for this. And then they, you know, put the, put the gates on them, but not a lot of finishing work. Doesn't look like they're tumble polished. Well, may have been tumbled and polished at one time, but it's been on my rack. Yeah. So of course it, you know, you know how, well, maybe you don't know how this works and, and I'm going to pound one of these for you because it's interesting historically. And you'll sooner or later, you're going to run into a fixed piton on a Klon, right? Here it is in the crack. You just see the head of the thing sticking out. You wonder, yeah, well, you can't quite fit a cam in next to that or anything. So I wonder, should I clip into it? It looks kind of just test it with a carabiner just by tapping on it. And you can tell how tight it is in the rock and whether you can trust it or not. It's pretty simple, kind of old school. Chouinard went on. He very quickly started making angle pitons too. This is a standard angle, three quarter inch. The first size that he made larger and smaller, of course came along soon. Soon in terms of years. I mean, there's so few people climbing and that we're not even widely, but completely universally considered to be nuts by anyone who has felt themselves unlucky enough to run into climbers. You know, they're curious too, but they also wanted you to know that you were crazy. No question. These stories remind me of high lining, but instead of every decade, it's like every two years. Because the internet makes things just happen faster. Now, the way that one person starts making the gear and then somebody else kind of gets a lot of the same ideas, but they are the ones who take off with the business. And then people think we're crazy. And now it's like, Oh, I know what slacklining is. And it's slowly getting traction. And we feel like we're in the seventies of climbing. It really is getting traction. So, uh, it resonates with me so much to hear the climbing history, but the history stretched out over a hundred years. Yeah. And in like five years, slackline is just going to be so much different than is today when climbing is also exploding with climbing, becoming more popular. I mean, changed everything forever, but in the late fifties, there was not even a climbing magazine. And then there was a backpacker hiker magazine that would have a climbing article once in a while. It was called summit. And in the mid sixties, Royal Robins became their climbing editor. And so all of a sudden there'd be a Royal article every month or every two months. And, and so then you had to start looking at this hiker magazine because it was the only information you could find. So enough of pitons, but interesting to know that we had pro, I mean, 1957, the year I started climbing was the first ascent of the North face of Half Dome, Northwest face, you know, Royal Robins, Jerry Kalwas. I always forget who the third guy was. Sorry. Third guy, uh, five days on the face, second attempt. And that was the first grade six climb in the world. Walls just as big in the Dolomites were done, but like nine hours, you could climb a 3000 foot wall in the Dolomites, especially if you didn't have to bother to take your pitons out with you. Um, so anyway, huge breakthrough. So Yosemite's on the cutting edge, but interesting sidelight. We've got nylon ropes then, but nobody's willing to fall because we have this whole backlog of climbing history when, you know, the leader must not fall. And it was ingrained in not just my head, but the whole of climbing culture felt that like, yeah, the test report on this nylon is good. And it's got the same stretch as the silk ropes that were highly prized in the thirties, like 23% at failure. They're really stretchy. I know that, that they'll let me down easy, but look, let go fall off the rock or do something so hard that I'll probably fall. No. So like by the late fifties, five, eight was maybe getting into five, nine, the hardest stuff that was being done. And nobody was falling off it. People were pretty confident before they did those climbs. So it wasn't until 64 that, which incidentally was about when five, 10 came in the very first, um, that people were willing sort of to take falls. I mean, nobody's willing to fall any, anytime, but, but nowadays you, you have to fall or you can't push grades, just part of the deal. But it's interesting to know that it took 20 years after the nylon rope arrived before people trusted it enough or trusted themselves enough. The belays were good, um, sitting hip belay on a ledge, no problem. But, um, anyway, it just took a long time for the trust to get there enough. And a part of the trust was trusting the pitons and the carabiners and the rope itself. But anyway, it happened and things really began to accelerate about 1964. I feel like that culture of don't fall in Yosemite still happens. Like I started in 2005 in Yosemite and I, I've taken very few lead falls because as a leader in Yosemite with cans and stuff, like you don't trust the gear. I trusted the rope, but the culture, whoever taught me, it was always, the leader doesn't fall. Now sport climbing, if that's where you learn, like, of course that's okay because it's quick draws and ropes and climbing gyms, you're like used to that. But if you start in Yosemite and that's all you ever know, that's what I learned. I think you're saying that you have to wear lycra to be able to fall. You have to wear what? Lycra. Sorry, that's going back to the 80s, but when sport climbing got, got invented, there happened to be brightly colored lycra tights that people would wear. You know, and it made a divide, like there were the traddies and there were the sport climbers and like Ron Kauk's famous line was, John Wayne never wore lycra. So yeah, it's super interesting to hear that was the, how much past culture still affects future teachings. Yeah, I mean the cutting edge of free and L cap, people take falls all the time. Yeah. When you watch Dawn Wall and just the giant whippers Tommy will take over and over and you're just like, I didn't know ropes. I thought they were UIA rated for seven falls. I was like, who's bringing them up fresh ropes every seven falls. No kidding. And you read the rope pamphlet and it says, once you take a fall on it, you untie, you let the rope rest for five minutes. This is the official word. And then you can tie back in and lead with it. Yeah, Tommy. Do you know how many one falls a rope can take before it breaks? Because we know what a factor twos, how many, but how many factor ones? Well, we know how many 1.7 falls. Cause that's what the test tower actually is. Yeah. 1.7. So it's printed on, you know, well, we're going to every row. It's like the one number that everybody reads on the little card that comes on the ropes is how many falls is it rated for? You know? Okay. That's good. What color is it? I'm buying it. So we're going to find out what our drop tower that we're building. Cause we all know what 1.7 factors are, but not 1.0. That's excellent. I really want to see those test results. I mean, what you guys are doing with the tower is so cool. Yeah, because I'm going to probably use me as the dummy. So, all right. Okay. So that reminds me of a story. Sorry about that, but yeah, so it's the 1930s hemp ropes, but the Sierra club, the predecessors of the guys who taught me were really on it because they were climbing in Yosemite, you know, and they realized that falls could happen. So they went out to Cragmont Rock in Berkeley with their hemp ropes. And what triggered this story is you're talking about you being the test subject, right? And they would do practice falls off of Cragmont Rock, overhangs on Cragmont Rock. And so they were developing a thing called the dynamic belay, which means that the belayer slides the rope a little as he's holding the leader on his hip. Yeah. No kidding. Well, big leather pads, hip pads. Okay. When I literally, we had dynamic belay practice when I got started. And point is they never would have been able to hold such gigantic falls, let alone with a real person on the end of it, trusting them without a dynamic belay. So they were sliding the rope and the rope was raising smoke off the leather pads that they were wearing. I mean, it was serious stuff. And they published this beautiful little booklet about called belaying the leader. They were leading the world in understanding the forces involved right then. So cool. We got trained that way by the CR club climbers to slip the rope a little bit. It's not actually easy to do, but it's still done. For instance, with a boot ax belay on snow, you want to slip the rope a little because how much is your ice ax going to hold even with your boot up against the edge of it? There's a limit. So it's 1958. I'm 13. Three Sundays a month, we'd go to Castle Rock and go rock climbing. The fourth Sunday, we'd go down to a creek bed where they had the dynamic belay set up. And here's how it worked. There's like a 150 pound cement weight, a separate rope, and they haul it up the big ass oak branch with a pulley and a trip bar. And then they would kindly put some slack in the rope. The rope would run up over a pulley, not even a carabiner, and down. And so I'm tied to the bumper of a Volkswagen there. I've got this big leather pad, gloves. I'm on belay, ready to go. And they trip the lever. Concrete sails towards the creek bed. I get into position. Hold on, you're 13 and you're trying to catch a 150 pound block of concrete. I'm 13. I'm scrawny too. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't have lighter ones for, well, you know, the Sierra Club leaders weighed that much, so they wanted to know how I could belay them. And I held a block for a while and smoke's rising off the leather and then it's too much and the concrete crashes into the creek bed. And I know that I'll never be a real climber because I can't hold real falls. I don't even know if I could catch a 150 pound block of concrete. Contrasting story, now it's early sixties. Actually stayed with climbing. Been at it a few years. My partner is leading Bishop's Terrace. This is what the climbing guide at the time called an appalling series of jam cracks. They were five, eight. And he comes off in the cracks. Well, I'm, the rope runs down the cliff through a couple of pitons, several, and off to the side and I'm sitting on a ledge, but it's a down sloping ledge. And by that time we'd actually gotten kind of casual about belaying cause we'd been doing it for a while. And so I had a foot and a half of slack in my anchor. My partner fell 30 feet, most of it free. But by the time the fall got to me, it was, and through the stretch in the rope, this magic climbing rope, the only, there was only enough force left to gently pull me down this down sloping ledge until my anchor came tight and that's it. No smoke, no fireworks. It was an easy catch. So the contrasting experience, the whole difference was basically nylon rope. Were you disappointed when you found out you were safer than you thought? That's how I feel about bolt busters. When we realized we were safe. Yeah, that's what we call when we break the bolts. Cool. When I found out the bolts are stronger than we thought, I was like, Oh, we're not as bad-ass as I thought we were. Yeah. Well, I mean, we thought quarter inch bolts with leaper hangers, which have all been recalled, were, yeah, I clip into that. It's so bomber. No problem ever. We took falls on those. Don't name gear after yourself in case it's recalled for the rest of forever. Poor Ed Leaper. I mean, he was really a good engineer and he was very conscientious and he called, blew the whistle on his own gear and said, please stop using this. There are all these bolts all over the country. He, you know, he's fat quarter inch bolts, man. Couldn't do any better. They're inch and a quarter long too. But anyway, the, a couple of hangers that actually disintegrated in falls. Apparently I never saw one. We kept on using them because it was a while before even bolt replacement or let alone three eights bolt got going. So we're, it's bomber. But was I scared? Sure. I was scared all the time, but I wasn't really scared that the rope would break or that the hardware would break or come out. It cause it held. How did the rope hold when you were belaying? If you were holding it on a sharp edge for your, for your climber? Okay, wait, technique had advanced a little. Were you not, were you not blamed properly and putting it on a sharp corner for your climber? I was doing a very proper hip belay that the Sierra club guys had taught me how to do. I mean, it was the most advanced belay we had. You didn't hold it in case he fell? You know, the bowline was more of a problem than the hip belay. I think it was TM Herbert was leading on the Lost Arrow, the Lost Arrow chimney. And he looked down just in time to see his rope snaking out from, at that point we were advanced to the point where we had wraps of one inch webbing around our waist and the rope was tied to that. So it was snaked out of his Swami belt, we called him. And he had to stand there very quietly on his holds for an hour before one of his partners could lead up to him and tie him back in. So it was a huge advance when we got the figure eight knot, man, we got it. You know, it's like, that was the last sketchy thing in climbing. Advances keep happening, you know, and that one, that was such an interesting one, the figure eight knot. The Tetons were revolutionary at some point in history. And then ropes in literally nuts were revolutionary. When did they really take off? Well, in the mid-60s is the short answer to that. But of course, I have a longer answer for you. Let's hear it.