The obvious first plum was the 2,500-foot northwest face of Half Dome, and when Robbins heard that Harding was planning an attempt, Robbins scrambled a team and, in 1957, got to the top first. He first climbed in Yosemite in 1952 at the dawn of the sport’s true golden age, when equipment and techniques were finally mature enough for the biggest walls, but Yosemite’s marquee cliffs remained unclimbed. He found schoolwork difficult but climbing easy. Robbins ran for help, Chandler disappeared and Robbins soon reclaimed his birth name and resolved to become a better man than either of his fathers. Robbins was 10 when he heard his mother beg his stepfather to put down a knife. Then came years of abuse by an alcoholic stepfather named James Chandler, who moved the family to California and changed Robbins’s name to his own. Born in West Virginia in 1935, he suffered early abandonment by his father, also named Royal (“Ah, Dad, why did you leave me?” he wrote in an autobiography titled “To Be Brave”). Robbins craved order, greatness and the confidence that he was doing the right thing. Worst of all, in Robbins’s view, Harding ascended huge blank sections of rock by drilling more than 300 bolts and then clipping on stirrups to eliminate difficulty and risk.
SOHO NOTES EL CAPITAN TV
To establish Wall of the Early Morning Light, a 3,000-foot sweep of golden granite, Harding and his partner lived out of hammocks for 27 days and drank cheap wine while pandering to the TV news crews filming them. A California road surveyor who loved fast cars, he saw climbing as an enjoyable but silly vice and felt no responsibility to anybody. Harding found all this pompous and ridiculous. To ignore that responsibility was to sin against the larger climbing community. The canvas of the great rock walls was finite - there was only so much cliff - so those who claimed a piece of it had a responsibility to climb along natural rock features and minimize the use of permanent safety hardware, like bolts. Climbers who made first ascents should consider themselves artists creating aesthetic pathways for others to follow. The sport, in his view, should always be a quest for self-understanding, not self-aggrandizement. Robbins saw climbing as spiritually exalted - “a game in which we play at acquiring the courage necessary to a beautiful life,” as he once put it. The most influential American rock climber of the 20th century, and a serious-minded fellow who disdained vanity, Robbins had spent that whole day chopping steel bolts off El Capitan, obliterating the climbing route called Wall of the Early Morning Light, created by his alcoholic rival, Warren Harding. One cold mountain night in 1971, Royal Shannon Robbins dangled from ropes hundreds of feet up the gigantic Yosemite cliff called El Capitan, clutching a hammer and chisel and worrying that he had made a shameful mistake.
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