Tobin Sorenson

The Last Time I Saw Tobin

By Tim Sorenson

The last time I saw my brother was in September of 1980, about three weeks before he went to climb the north face of Mount Alberta in the Canadian Rockies. My mom, younger brother Tom, and grandma Wynne were driving him up to Edmonton, Alberta, and they came by the fire station in Nipomo California where I worked as a firefighter for the Department of Forestry. He was taking a job at a Christian youth retreat in Edmonton as a counselor, said he might need a climbing partner, and asked me if I wanted go to climb with him. As hard as it was to decline, he understood that I was trying to make a career in the fire service and couldn't leave my job at the drop of a hat to join him in his adventures. This is a story about some of my climbing experiences with, and the loss of, my brother Tobin Sorenson, one of the most energetic and iconic climbers of the 1970s.

Being the oldest child and two years my senior, Tobin was the closest to me of any family members I had in the early years, and we fought and wrestled like two wild bear cubs about everything. He showed me how to build models, fly model airplanes, ride a skateboard and a unicycle, and we attempted all manner of reckless stunts together. We tried almost every crazy idea we saw, and made the inventions and discoveries of our early youth together. Pyrotechnics, riding a sled off the roof, smoking coffee grounds, pounding pitons up the side of a conifer, or bolting the side of a concrete wall in a Southern California wash...you name it, we probably tried it. Where Tobin led, I would follow without question, and being less agile, less athletic, and less experienced, it was always me who ended up in the emergency room with the broken bones, burns, or gashes.

We had to be no more than 12 to 14 years old at the time when Tobin said we should go climb Mount Baden Powell, in the middle of winter. Mom and dad must've been really busy, because Tobin and I packed up our backpacks, called mom at her work and told her we would be back in three days, and hitchhiked across the LA freeways and up the Angeles Crest highway to the trailhead. We spent two days backpacking in the snow trying to make the peak, only to turn back because it was snowing again and the snow was up to our hips. We had no snowshoes and were breaking trail in spongy old mountain boots with freezing toes. Our winter camping gear being pretty miserable, we were lucky to get home with only frost nip and not hypothermia.

Later in high school, as our circle of friends grew, Tobin had his friends and I had mine. He being into sports, girls, and religion while I was still into comic books, drugs, rock 'n roll, and trouble, we grew apart. Tobin attempted to teach me about serious rock climbing and it was a hard slope. My first few attempts were met with injury or near calamity, and later, some fellow novice climbers and I endured a humiliating rescue on Tahquitz rock at the hands of Tobin and his hard-core climbing friends. Being stuck at night on a ledge several hundred feet above the ground, with only T-shirts in forty degree weather wasn't too smart. But I don't know which was worse, the terror of being keel-hauled up into the darkness, or the shame of being berated by my brother and his friends after being pulled to the top.

So after that, my brother told me that he didn't want me around him if I was going to embarrass him that way. It was not until a few more social indiscretions on my part that I finally did take my leave of him for awhile, much to his relief. With my tail between my legs, I went off to try and prove myself with other climbing friends and climbing adventures. While sustaining some injuries and surviving a few calamities along the way, I managed to improve my climbing to some degree, and was starting to get up some Yosemite climbs by the time Tobin came around asking me to go climbing with him again.

He really didn't ask...He would just say, "Hey, Tim, let's go climbing at this place by Riverside, there's a crack there I want to try," and it pretty much went like this... It was in a quarry, it was overhanging, it was loose, it needed a top rope, it hadn't been done before, Tobin led it, there was blood, I couldn't follow it without falling all over the place, and it was desperate." Later, sometime around 1975, I was hanging out and climbing in Yosemite valley when Tobin took me aside and said, "I noticed that you have been climbing really well lately," and he asked me if I wanted to try and do the first free ascent of 'the Cobra' with him. There have only been a handful of times in my life when I felt as proud as I did then. That was the effect he had on me, the influence he had over me, he could be so humble and self effacing, that follow him I would. But if he chided me, being his little brother, it cut like a knife, and I did not want to disappoint.

The Cobra was a Powell/Kamps route done in 1966. There were four or five pitches of run out 5.8 and 5.9 face climbing that started diagonally up and right across slabs from about pitch eight of the Royal Arches route, followed by four pitches of aid in a cobra shaped corner system that had never been free climbed. We made our approach and began climbing at first light with Tobin leading as we simul-climbed the first several pitches of the Royal Arches, then we swapped leads on the face climbing until we reached the Cobra cracks. I remember Tobin’s only comment as I grumbled about the fact that the bolts were pretty poor and very far apart up to that point. He just said, "So don't fall Tim." It was late morning, and the belay anchor at the start of the corner system was two opposing nuts along with an old piton pounded down into the top side of a flake.

As I was belaying him from a butt bag, Tobin led out above in the left of two corners. He had lay-backed for 40 feet up a shallow four-inch wide groove of a crack and was run out off a large hex, with no other protection on the pitch save for a couple of badly placed nuts near the top. I distinctly recall thinking to myself then, while looking down over the slab as it fell away above the huge arch and into the void, "If he falls now and these anchors pull out, were both doomed!" I jugged the pitch and from what I could see, it was at least 5.11. I took the next lead up a crack with better protection and then onto a greasy 5.10 arête, but the somewhat run out and steep face climbing left me exhausted. We took a short lunch break on a ledge as the afternoon was getting late. "There are rocks and sticks in the pack,” I exclaimed in disbelief while unpacking our food, and carefully stowed the surprise baggage against the back of the ledge. He never said a word, but I thought I saw him grinning at me, childlike, as he looked away.

Leading again, Tobin furiously jammed and lay-backed the long corner above and then set up a belay. He said it was 5.10, but we agreed I should Jumar it to save time because it was nearing sunset. On the last pitch, the corner hooked to the left and overhung to the top. It was the crux pitch, the Cobra's head. In the dwindling light, I kept the rope running as Tobin quickly lay-backed and under-clung the corner. Several feet above the belay as he held himself into the corner with one arm, he quickly placed some protection with the other hand. Farther out, he blindly stuffed a small hex or two up into the crack, and with feet swimming against the wall, he climbed out past the lip and out of my sight. Fifteen hundred feet above the valley floor, I cleaned and jumarred the mossy, lichen covered 5.11 pitch alone in the twilight, and joined him at the top, where we carefully scrambled our way down the descent in the dark, and caught the last shuttle bus from Curry Village to Camp 4.

I never thought about it until recently how Tobin led a first free ascent that day, of a grade IV 5.11, with no falls, with a far less experienced climbing partner, no siege tactics, no top ropes, no pre placed bolts, nothing, he just went for it. It just never occurred to me before what an amazing climber he actually was. You know how you can be so close to something you never really look at it, and then it's gone.

We saw each other infrequently over the next five years, Tobin was at college and I was still trying to figure out my career. I lived on the central coast and in Northern California and Tobin lived, well, all over the world. And when I saw him, I saw in him a man who lived in quiet desperation and joy, desperately in love with climbing and joyfully in love with his god.

The last time I saw Tobin, I would have followed him anywhere; but the constraints that act on most men acted on and grounded me. Three weeks later, on a fluke, I went to Southern California to visit my mom, and was there the day the police came and gave her the news that Tobin had fallen and been killed while soloing on Mount Alberta. I don't believe in religion, or luck, or providence, but for whatever reason circumstances warranted that I be there that day. I've been through some hard things in my life and losing my brother was bad enough, if I didn't have to see how it affected the rest of the family. But I had climbed for years and had worked as an emergency medical technician, I had seen death and loss, and knew what the risks were. So being a young man, I climbed on and off for many more years until work, family, and repeated injuries outweighed the risks involved with continuing climbing. Now, as I near my retirement years and reflect on those times growing up with, and climbing with Tobin some forty years in the past, it seems like almost yesterday, but the last time I saw Tobin was so very long ago.

03/04/2014