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pssesq
Trad climber
Modesto, CA
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Topic Author's Original Post - Feb 4, 2015 - 10:32am PT
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Just glad to be able to drop in on my old friend and wish him a happy 80th birthday yesterday. Just a little note for folks who may have forgotten it and may wish to send a little belated card
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Happy Birthday to RR from all us acolytes.
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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Sorry to hear that Royal is having trouble. It surprises me since I thought that he had like forty years chopped.
Cheers Royal!
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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In the old days @ Devils Tower they made you climb the Durrance route first. When Robbins visited in 1964 he was no exception. In the days following, he put up Danse Macbre 5.10+, and the Window A-4. I think that was the same year he and his droogs, Pratt, Chouinard, & Frost put up the North Americain Wall, and no doubt other history changing ascents. " The Danse" is a very physical route that sees few ascents and is highly regarded. I for one, didn't onsight it. The Window, also highly regarded, may have only two later ascents.
I've seen a couple of his slide shows, most recently for the first book of his biography. Always a clever and erudite wordsmith, I like to think of him when he spoke at the Bachar memorial; sincere, positive, and passionate, he refered to himself as a longtime "Bachar Fan."
I started climbing in 1963. His influence, routes, controversies, articles and books were always around, shaping of my view of what the climbing world was.
Thank you, & Happy Birthday Royal Robbins.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Royal was gracious enough to boulder with us at Indian Rock on occasion. He was definitely slumming it when I was part of the crew.
Happy birthday, sir! You continue to inspire us.
John
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Fossil climber
Trad climber
Atlin, B. C.
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Happy BDAY, Royal!
Hope things are going well and just keep getting better.
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Trad climber
Will know soon
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Happiest of days to Royal on his birthday.
Royal has given and continues to give so much to the climbing community. I'll never forget when I organized a memorial for John Bachar in C-4, Royal was the first to arrive (no one knew he was even coming) and he gave a great talk about John. Royal stayed and rubbed elbows with climbers from all over the world. What a treat. Thank You again for your generous spirit.
Cheers, Lynne Leichtfuss
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renzo
Trad climber
Whitefish Mt
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I'll drink to that!!!
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SteveW
Trad climber
The state of confusion
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Happy Birthday, Mr. Robbins.
You certainly were an influence in my climbing.
Good health to you too, sir.
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SC seagoat
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, or In What Time Zone Am I?
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A wonderful day to celebrate. So very happy to have seen him at Facelift and the Oakdale gatherings.
A profound spirit.
Susan
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looking sketchy there...
Social climber
Lassitude 33
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Without a doubt, Royal had one of the most profound effects on shaping the course of rock climbing in the U.S. A rare combination of technical master and a profound thinker. Happy Birthday!
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Royal's articles about his new routes in Yosemite and elsewhere were a huge inspiration to me when I started climbing in the mid-60s. I read each one avidly and can still quote the odd line from memory,
"Denny nailed adroitly, then back left."
So it wasn't just the scale of the climbs that so impressed me about Royal, it was the intelligent, clear and playfully inventive quality of his writing.
Thanks for both, and Happy Birthday old climber!
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Best wishes from just one of a legion of admirers you'll probably never meet-- a testament to the scope of your influence and legacy.
Happy 80th Birthday Royal Robbins.
Again, best wishes from,
Ward Trotter
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Paul Martzen
Trad climber
Fresno
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Happy birthday to Royal. His shop in Fresno was a wonderful gathering place. Sometimes Royal would come down to introduce friends giving slide shows. Made me feel like part of an amazing community of adventurers.
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rmuir
Social climber
From the Time Before the Rocks Cooled.
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Please pass along our birthday wishes to Royal. His continued presence at Indian Rock, Stony Point, Tahquitz & Suicide, Yosemite, and elsewhere, have inspired several generations of climbers. Our campfires have burned bright in his presence.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Congratulations on reaching this milestone.
Truly you are Yosemite's climber emeritas.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Well, I hope you get a chance to read all of these posts, old guy. I will always think of you as the Spirit of the Age!
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jonnyrig
climber
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Sure have enjoyed reading Mr. Robbins' books. Thank you, and happy birthday!
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SicMic
climber
across the street from Marshall
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I hope you had a great birthday Mr. Robbins.
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Friend
climber
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Nothing I can say that hasn't already been said better.
RR was, is, and always will be one of the all-time great heroes of rock climbing. The thinking man's adventurer.
Here's to you Royal. Many happy returns!
Andrew
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Cave Creek, AZ
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Dear Royal,
You may not remember me; I was probably one of your top worst employees ever back in '78. Sorry about that.
Anyway, you made quite an impression on me though you probably didn't realize it then. I have great respect for your sharp mind, your iron will, your focus, your aesthetic eye, and your ethics. You are among the rare few who saw a new way, took it courageously, and shared the beauty and taught us how to do it. You grew from a model to become an archetype.
Have enjoyed your writing over the years from Ascent and from your books.
May you savor your family and friends this birthday and relish what you've accomplished.
Thanks for inspiring the rest of us. I'm grateful, too, for you helping me appreciate classical music and the finer points of darts.
Best wishes,
Mark
PS Thanks for signing my swami belt in Oakdale a couple of years back!
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Bushman
Social climber
In this form at present
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I don't think we've ever met, but Happy Birthday, Mr. Robbins,
Boots, books, and such beautiful lines...
Thanks for showing us the way up some of the best climbs of our lives!
-Tim Sorenson
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Cave Creek, AZ
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Feb 15, 2015 - 07:36am PT
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Honoring one of those who inspired our adventures bump!
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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Feb 15, 2015 - 08:08am PT
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As a matter of pride, How do you like what has grown from the seeds you sowed?
as it were?
Really need a song here if I could it would be Popsicle Toes by Michael Franks.with Diana Krall
Dingus Hit the Mark!!
Happy birthday to the father of American Rock climbing! Sir! it is my honor to say
Thank you for those slim volumes of stoke they have saved many lives in so many ways!
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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rincon
Trad climber
Coarsegold
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Feb 15, 2015 - 09:20am PT
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Happy birthday Royal!
As a begining climber, Basic and Advanced Rockcraft were my bibles and you were god. Thanks for inspiring me!
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Eric Beck
Sport climber
Bishop, California
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Feb 15, 2015 - 09:49am PT
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Happy birthday Royal.
Without you, climbing would be unimaginably different.
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Roger Breedlove
climber
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
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Feb 15, 2015 - 10:02am PT
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Happy Birthday, Royal.
And to play on Eric's words, because of you, climbing became unimaginably richer.
Thanks for the great climbing and friendship. All the best to you and Liz.
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mynameismud
climber
backseat
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Feb 15, 2015 - 10:06am PT
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Happy Birthday.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Feb 15, 2015 - 10:19am PT
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Happy Birthday Sir. And thanks for the lift.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Feb 15, 2015 - 10:29am PT
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Happy birthday to the man. There's a lot of resonance also on this side of the pond...
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SteveW
Trad climber
The state of confusion
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Feb 15, 2015 - 10:46am PT
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Happy birtday, Royal.
Always an inspiration.
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Feb 15, 2015 - 01:36pm PT
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Happy Birthday Royal and best wishes for you and Liz, we are all richer from your contributions and inspiration.
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TRo
climber
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Feb 15, 2015 - 01:41pm PT
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Saw a slide show many years ago--his parting words: "When I go I want to be all used up". Yup.
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steve s
Trad climber
eldo
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Feb 15, 2015 - 03:16pm PT
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Happy Birthday Royal Robbins!!!! You were an inspiration to MANY climbers! Keep on trucking!
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Mark Rodell
Trad climber
Bangkok
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Feb 15, 2015 - 03:23pm PT
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Happy Birthday Royal and thanks for the lift you and Liz gave me back in 71.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Feb 15, 2015 - 03:59pm PT
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Happy Birthday RR!!
Thank YOU for the many wonderful lines!
if i could offer you one,
Wish you many, many, many more Blessings!
BB
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susu
Trad climber
East Bay, CA
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Feb 15, 2015 - 09:09pm PT
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Happy birthday Royal - with gratitude for all you bring to climbing.
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Tamara Robbins
climber
not a climber, just related...
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Apr 16, 2015 - 02:13pm PT
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Geez I've been out of touch with this site for awhile now, trying to catch up! I will forward a link of this thread to Mom, and she'll share with RR in digestible amounts!
On behalf of him/them (and myself), gratitude to you all for the kind and thoughtful messages. I'll post a picture from his birthday dinner at 702 in Modesto....
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Apr 16, 2015 - 02:19pm PT
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Missed this thread.....I was in Patagonia. Happy birthday Royal!
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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Apr 16, 2015 - 02:46pm PT
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Happy belated birthday Royal. A gentleman, a scholar and a climber.
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jonnyrig
climber
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Apr 16, 2015 - 03:05pm PT
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Happy Birthday! Thoroughly enjoyed reading your books.
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Poloman
Trad climber
Anna, Il
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Apr 16, 2015 - 03:30pm PT
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You have always inspired me.
Happy Birthday! Stay comfortable.
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L
climber
California dreamin' on the farside of the world..
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Apr 16, 2015 - 04:35pm PT
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Happy Belated Birthday, Sir!
BTW, 80 is the new 60...what are you planning to climb tomorrow?
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hashbro
Trad climber
Mental Physics........
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Apr 16, 2015 - 04:38pm PT
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thanks for teaching us to climb Royal!
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Tripod? Swellguy? Halfwit? Smegma?
Trad climber
Wanker Stately Mansion, Placerville
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Apr 16, 2015 - 04:57pm PT
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Met him about a decade ago at a local clothing store gig.
Since I live and climb Hwy 50 corridor I asked him about Fantasia to which he told me "now you have to go back and lead it on nuts". I havn't and give praise to micro cams that help here and there on the route.
I asked him about about Fat Merchants Crack 10bX. He pondered a while and said he really didn't remember it........Good grief!! It's chimney soloing for probably 80 feet before any gear appears and thats if you have some big modern cams!!. I would never try to lead it and few do. I imaging he probably romped up it in a pair of hiking boots or some nonsense. All in a days work and off to the next crack with barely a thought.
HARD man defined
(but lets not forget and give praise to the joker antagonist Harding. No less of a man's man)
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PhilG
Trad climber
The Circuit, Tonasket WA
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Apr 16, 2015 - 07:04pm PT
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A very happy birthday!!
I agree with the above comments: it's difficult to imagine 20 century rock climbing without you: from the first days when I started, trying to do boulder problems you did at Stoney Point, to the time (not so very long ago)when you visited a friend in Tonasket and spent the afternoon climbing at our local crags.
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
The shaggy fringe of Los Angeles
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Apr 16, 2015 - 09:51pm PT
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Our lives are richer for his work.
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Yeti
Trad climber
Ketchum, Idaho
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Apr 17, 2015 - 05:28pm PT
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Happy Birthday, Royal.....friend, mentor, master of the craft and prophet of the stone. All best.....Yeti
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mooser
Trad climber
seattle
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Apr 17, 2015 - 07:04pm PT
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I don't know how I missed this, Royal, but a very belated happy birthday to you! As I've shared with you before, my late brother and I were informed, inspired, and probably escaped an early grave because of your books. Thank you again! The world is a better place with you in it, and your mark on climbing goes way beyond the word "mark." Very best wishes to you!
Tom Patterson
Seattle
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Tamara Robbins
climber
not a climber, just related...
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Apr 18, 2015 - 11:38am PT
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As promised, a shot from the 80th celebration. With some faces that will be familiar to some on here!
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Joe Metz
Trad climber
Bay Area
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Apr 18, 2015 - 04:45pm PT
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Happy Birthday Mister RR!
A hero in my childhood, a friend in real life.
~Joe
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Apr 18, 2015 - 05:37pm PT
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Royal Robbins: Yosemite Master
In every dramatic movement there is a person who dignifies what they did. In Iron Age rock climbing, that person was Royal Robbins, or simply ‘RR.’ There can never be another Robbins because equipment and techniques can never again be so primitive and the way overhead so untrod. But even today’s vanguard face the same questions as Robbins more than half a century ago: How much of myself can I put into this? How much risk and fear can I possibly survive? How much adventure do I really want?
Robbins’s climbing career was built to answer these questions with all of his heart and soul. At times it was RR versus Nature. And per his competitive feuds with Warren Harding and others, it devolved into man against man. But as Robbins matured and tackled the never-imagined, he encountered the greatest drama of them all: man against himself.
Born in Virginia in 1935, Robbins and his single mother soon moved to Los Angeles. His was an old story—too much energy and too little direction. A slide into petty crime, then saved at the brink of disaster by a scout master, which led to hiking and climbing, frequent hitchhiking trips out to the boulders at Stony Point (where he met future partners, including Don Wilson, Tom Frost, and Yvon Chouinard), and finally, when Robbins was barely sixteen, to weekends at Tahquitz Rock, under the quiet mentorship of John Mendenhal and Chuck Wilts, two icons of American climbing. Even from these early days Robbins was fiercely driven and bound to a code, perhaps internalized from the scout motto that on his honor he’d do his best. Royal Robbins had something to prove, and style was the issue.
During his early years at Tahquitz, when the young Robbins stormed up the hardest routes with abandon, many elders thought him rash and reckless. Then in 1952, aged seventeen and shod in thrift store tennis shoes, Robbins and Don Wilson made the first free ascent of the Open Book route at Tahquitz (5.9), later considered the hardest multi-pitch climb in America. This was the first of many sea-changes Robbins’s climbs would have on the standards and mind-set of American climbing. The following year, Robbins and two of his young Tahquitz partners, Jerry Gallwas (then hardly seventeen) and Don Wilson , ventured to Yosemite and shocked Valley locals by taking a mere two days to bag the second ascent of the Steck-Salathé on Sentinel. Four years later, after abortive attempts with Warren Harding (his future rival), Robbins, Gallwas, and Mike Sherrick made the first ascent of the Northwest Face of Half Dome, the first grade 6 climb in America. The following year, Harding countered by sieging the Nose on El Capitan, climbed in forty-seven days spread out over eighteen months. In 1960, Robbins called—and raised, making the second overall and first continuous ascent (with Joe Fitschen, Chuck Pratt, and Tom Frost) of the Nose in just seven days.
Over the next half-dozen years, Robbins spearheaded the first ascents of what for two decades were called “the best” (the Salathé, El Capitan), and “the hardest” (North America Wall, El Capitan) rock climbs on Earth. Robbins always sought to up his own ante and explore new terrain, and this impulse found spectacular expression during his first solo ascent of a Yosemite big wall—the second ascent of Harding’s radically overhanging Leaning Tower (1963). In 1968 he made the first solo ascent of a grade 6, also on El Capitan, spending eleven storied days battling up the 3,000-foot Muir Wall—this when only a handful of people worldwide were scaling Yosemite walls. The thought of doing so alone, with a sling of iron pitons, a nylon hammock, and a stuff sack full of gorp, was mind-boggling.
First in 1964 (on the North Face of Mount Hooker, Wind River Range, Wyoming) and later in 1967 (the American Directissima, Aiguille du Dru, Mont Blanc Range, France), followed by the North Face of Mount Geikie, in the Canadian Rockies, and further adventures in Alaska and beyond, Robbins was instrumental in exporting Yosemite big-wall techniques to the greater ranges of Europe and North America.
Robbins’s many historical ascents make clear his role as a pioneer and innovator, always seeking a purer style and the chance to ratchet up the adventure quotient, chasing that trial-by-fire at the personal, and human, limit—technically, psychologically, and spiritually. To Iron Age climbers, the great rock walls of Yosemite were the altars on which their lives found purpose and meaning. Understanding that this was sacred ground, Robbins tirelessly promoted the “clean climbing” movement.
Rampant piton use was trashing the Valley cracks; converting to the gentler, more artful use of hand-placed nuts and chockstones was made fashionable by Great Pacific Iron Works’ hexes and stoppers (plus classic stories and promotion in the “Chouinard catalogue”), and by Robbins’s endorsement in his two books, Basic Rockcraft and Advanced Rockcraft. These codified the clean-climbing ethic while describing ascent as a creative enterprise akin to painting or song writing. Robbins’s game was about self-mastery and aesthetics—but only the skilled and brave saw life on the steep in such august terms.
In 1978, after years of willing his way up big walls, Robbins developed psoriatic arthritis in his wrist, effectively ending his serious climbing. He quickly took up adventure kayaking, completing first descents of challenging rivers from high-mountain elevations and making early descents of thundering South American rios like Chile’s Bio-Bio, now a lifetime goal for world-class paddlers.
For generations following the Iron Age, through the salad days of adventure climbing, Royal Robbins was the Grand Master many strived to live up to. Now decades later, as his name falls faint in the climbing gyms and across the sport cliffs of America, Robbins’s courage and vision continue to inform whoever gazes up at a big rock wall and dreams of ascent.
~from YOSEMITE IN THE FIFTIES, THE IRON AGE
out soon....
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