Chuck Pratt

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guido

Trad climber

Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific

Apr 26, 2017 - 06:18pm PT

Nice reflection from the past Jeff!

larryhorton

Trad climber

Apr 21, 2018 - 06:24am PT

Seems as if I stumble onto these posts long after they’ve been abandoned.

Chuck’s brief presence in my life was a lasting one, as it was for so many of us. We ran together in the Berkeley hills a few times, once encountering Allen Steck going the opposite direction. “F**kin’ rock climbers...”, he muttered as we passed.

We never climbed together, but he set me in motion to go climb the cross on Mt. Davidson in San Francisco, which eventually manifested two memorable events—one at night.

My recollection of the last time I saw Chuck was appropriately after, having climbed the Nose in May 1970, he asked me how it went. I was young, stupid, and full of misguided impressions about climbing—especially big wall climbing. Here, I had just been given the awesome opportunity to do this classic piece of rock, ‘serendipitously’ given most of the best leads on the route, and I answered that I was kinda disappointed! His disappointment in my reply was cringingly palpable. The fact that I had been anticipating great hardship and threat of death as part of the experience, couldn’t redeem such an adolescent response.

But the reason I post here now, is to share a story he told me which many of you may have heard, but which so succinctly, for me, portrays not just Chuck’s humility, but simultaneously his lifelong pathos.

Sensing a possibly attractive pursuit in his life, young Chuck went to a Sierra Club event where rock climbing was being taught to beginners. I don’t remember where it was, but Mt. Tam comes to mind. All day long instructors were helping newcomers learn the ropes and some moves. Chuck quietly watched. Finally, toward the end of the day, a big, prominent instructor walked deliberately over to Chuck, who was thinking, “Oh, great! They’re gonna ask me if I wanna climb.” The guy towered over hopeful Chuck, and said, “Don’t stand on the ropes!”

Chuck left without climbing that day. Beautiful soul, who thoroughly exhausted an astounding amount of karma in a short, intense life.

PS I didn’t become aware of Chuck’s translation until probably about 2006, when Dave Carman told me one night, pulling into the Teton guide camp. I saw Chuck’s name carved in wood to mark his spot in the camp. I got all excited, and said something like, oh, Chuck’s here!

Yes, his example is still indelibly here for many of us who witnessed the depth and sincerity of his yearning. It’s a universal component of all human beings—Chuck simply chose to milk it for all it was worth to him in the quietude of his own experience.

Tarbuster

climber

right here, right now

Apr 21, 2018 - 07:12am PT

I wonder what the ascent count was for The Nose by 1970?
Thanks for posting up, Larry. May you never step on the ropes. Ha ha !

Tarbuster

climber

right here, right now

Apr 21, 2018 - 07:23am PT

DrDreeg wrote, concerning Pratt's lead of the crux pitch, East buttress of Lower Rock:

"I think I'm at the hard part," and the rope kept going at the same rate when he called again, "Yep, that's 5.10."

I've done most of the classic multi-pitch 5.11s in the Valley, and that climb is still a standout in my memory. When Bachar did his on-sight solo, that pitch definitely caught his attention.

The crux 5.10c of EBLR would to this day give climbers well versed at that grade some cause for pause, I'm sure ...
And the Fissure Beck has been rated 5.9, as opposed to 5.7, for quite some time now!

larryhorton

Trad climber

Apr 21, 2018 - 08:23am PT

Someone told me at the time we were the 35th or 36th ascent, Tarbuster.

Bill Lawrence and Graham Wilson organized the climb—don’t hold me to the accuracies of those names. I’ve seen neither of them since the climb. No problems—I was just being moved along.

Tarbuster

climber

right here, right now

Apr 21, 2018 - 09:31am PT

Interesting, Larry: there is a Bill Lawrence here in Boulder who is my accountant.
He's about your age, and I think he was a climber!

That would be an interesting coincidence. I'll ask.

John Morton

climber

Apr 21, 2018 - 10:26am PT

A precious Valley memory from around 1964, so I was 19: it was a quiet off day, and I found myself in the company of Chuck Pratt and Frank Sacherer. It was suggested that we do something besides spend an unproductive day in C4, and the choice was the Direct Route on Washington Column. I was amazed and honored at being included without question. (The Direct was familiar to us as a historic 5.7 trade route of the era, though it was dropped from the guidebooks after a few years.) We set off carrying one coiled rope (I wonder if it was for me) and did the climb in complete silence without uncoiling the rope, and ran down the Column Gully descent.

Everything seemed so vivid to me: the joy of untethered climbing completely within my powers, the aroma of the plant life, the changing view as we ascended, and especially the peace of our shared silence. That day has fortunately not vanished from my memory, though sadly those great men Chuck and Frank are long gone.

Roadie

Trad climber

Bishop, Ca

Apr 21, 2018 - 10:53am PT

Very nice. I never had a chance to meet him and have always felt poorer for that.

larryhorton

Trad climber

Apr 21, 2018 - 11:18am PT

My recollection is that Bill was a geologist at a Montana university, Tarbuster, but who knows?

Graham Wilson was a Scot with an unstoppable sense of humor which happily made light of difference in pespectives between Lieutenant Lawrence and Laid Back Larry. I was actually castigated for not drinking my fair share of our water.

The three of us were half a day behind our schedule, and spent the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, watching traffic streaming into the Valley all night from our three foot by six inch sliver of a ledge. Held roughly in place with jury-rigged slings, no one could move without jostling the other two.

My memory’s probably exaggerating, and besides this thread is for Chuck’s legacy—and I don’t think this is it.

Tamara Robbins

climber

not a climber, just related...

Apr 24, 2018 - 02:09pm PT

This is quite long - but as I'm unsure where it was published I just copied and pasted here. It's an obit Dad wrote following Chuck's death, and seemed appropriate to share here (since the thread has recently come back around). If it's a repost, my apologies! I like to think that they (and many others) are reunited and hanging out at a Camp 4 in the Clouds somewhere....

“Ah, Chuck, Chuck, so lately here, so soon gone. How can I be writing this? You, gone? Yes, irrevocably. Your death sudden and unexpected. Unreal. Somehow…wrong. Kim Schmitz called and gave me the news: You had died peacefully in your sleep on the night of December 16, 2000.
Only a few weeks ago you had phoned me, out of the blue, from Lafayette, a small community nestled in the hills east of Berkeley. You called about my speech at the Banff Mountain Summit. Speaking to an audience of mountaineers from around the world I had paid tribute to the men who inspired my climbing career. I had sent you a copy of my talk and you told me you thought it was good, notwithstanding you were included among my heroes. But I could tell that you approved not because I cast you among those I most admire, but because you thought I had been fair and accurate, and had said what was true about you and about others. Your words meant a lot to me. The truth was what I had aimed at.
Before returning the phone to its cradle I mentioned my slide show coming up the following week in Danville, a town just over the hill from Lafayette. I hoped you would come. I would be proud to have you in the audience. It would be a pleasure to introduce my old climbing companion and to have you actually there when I paid my usual tribute to you as “The best climber of our generation, and the best climbing writer as well.” Back when I saw you at the Yosemite Camp 4 Reunion in September 1999, after an interval of many years, I told you I had been saying that in my talks for a long time, and I noted that you, even you, Chuck, though ever alert to the stealthily cat steps of Pride, seemed pleased, even touched, by the accolade.
I didn’t really expect you to come. If you had you would have been, for a few minutes at least, the center of attention, and you had always treated the limelight as it was poison gas. You were very consistent that way, Chuck, always wary of allowing a chink in your personal honor. And so it was, when I called a couple of days in advance to invite you to dinner with friends and then to the slide show, you couldn’t come because you were in the process of selling your late mother’s home there in Lafayette and you had to be around “pending escrow and agents who might show up, etc.” I didn’t argue, Chuck. I didn’t question why you had to be there 24 hours a day. I just knew I couldn’t drag you to that show with a team of wild horses, especially if you thought all eyes might be at one point turned on you.
So I let it pass. I never thought this would be the last time I would speak to you, the last time I would hear your voice. And I had vague plans of following up, of getting together.
And I don’t know, Chuck, why it is so particular. Your death, I mean. Lord knows, I have lost lots of mountaineering companions – Mick Burke, Dougal Haston, Don Whillans, Tom Patey, John Harlin, Gary Hemming, Bruce Carson, to name some of them. The loss of these friends was often a blow, but never seemed so “out of place” as your leaving does. Why so particular? One reason is you are the first to go from the inner circle of what we like to think in our sentimental moments was Yosemite’s Golden Age. Yes, we have lost some friends in the heat of battle, back then – Sacherer, Madsen, and Baldwin come to mind. But of the survivors, of those who lived to look back, and to witness the evolution of Yosemite climbing, of those, you are the first to depart for that “undiscovered land.”
But there is something else that makes your death “so particular” with me at least. This is that some of the greatest moments of my life were spent with you. We were together with our buddy Tom Frost on the first ascent of my favorite climb of all, the Salathe Wall. I will never forget it. Such beauty! Such a grand and pure adventure! And you never hesitated. You were at the top of your game, as smooth as glass on all of your leads. You could have led the Ear with aplomb and saved me a fear-filled half-hour. But you got the last pitch, and the last word, so to speak, with a brilliant lead up the final overhanging crack. Such a perfect expression of your genius!
That was 1961, the year after we had done the second ascent of Warren Harding’s masterpiece, the Nose of El Capitan. Joe Fitschen had joined you and Tom and me for seven days of hard labor. Boy, that was tough work, but the big thing was the commitment – we were committed. Up there, time was suspended. And we too, often, were suspended -- great swinging pendulums, hanging belays, climbing the rope with prusik knots with a 50 pound duffel bag hanging from our waist as we dangled over the void. Yes, all that, plus trust… trust… trust – always trusting the hands that secured the rope, out of sight, above us. Those climbs became the glue that cemented a life-long friendship.
But I thought of a third reason for the sense of vacancy, of something irretrievably missing because you are gone, Chuck. And that is this: That the people we love the most and miss the most when they are gone, are those who are irreplaceable. We all sensed that about you, Chuck, you were one of a kind. You were uniquely, irreplaceably, absolutely, yourself! You never tried to be anything or anyone else but yourself. You never tried, you only did. You were always the master. We love that which is truly itself. We never miss posers. We miss that which is real.
And you and I made the second ascent of the West Buttress of El Cap. One of the rare times it was just the two of us. Steve Roper and Layton Kor had put up a tough one there. It was hard, but we did OK.
And then back on El Capitan again, the North America Wall, 1964, ten days, the “hardest technical rock climb in the world.” Our companions were Frost and Yvon Chouinard. Another truly memorable climb – once again, total commitment, “hard rock, thin air, a rope,” the most splendid aid climbing we had ever done, storms, mystery, fear, discovery, joy, and triumph. And one other thing – camaraderie – as good as it gets. We did so much laughing. The combination of the piled up stress and your sense of humor had us rolling in helpless laughter on whatever ledges we could find. That’s one thing that comes back strong, Chuck, is how much laughing we did together. It was a good life.
And there were all your other climbs, Chuck, among them: The East Face of the Washington Column with Harding, the South Face of Mt. Watkins with Harding and Chouinard, the second ascent of the Northwest Face of Half Dome with Fitschen and Frost, the North Faces of Lower, Middle, and Higher Cathedral Rocks, and the second ascent, with Kor, of the Arches Direct.
Those are some of the big walls, but your shorter free climbs inspired just as much fear and respect, especially your string of brilliant crack climbs, surely the hardest in the world at the time -- routes supplied with names that aptly attest to their character: Crack of Doom, Crack of Despair, Twilight Zone. There were many others but those were three of the fiercest. I later thrashed up them, and my admiration for your gifts and mastery rose with every vertical foot I scraped my way past. One fear we all had, Chuck, was you going off with someone and making a first ascent and then hearing the horror stories from your still trembling partners of a terrifying (to them) lead you had done up some slippery unprotected ogre of an off-width jam crack. We would contemplate with deep anxiety the prospect of leading these pitches so we could say we had done your route. One great advantage about being with you on first ascents, Chuck, was that you couldn’t pull that stuff. You could lead the most daunting cracks and we could follow with a top rope and still get full credit. We wouldn’t have to lead any Pratt test pieces, in order to make the second or third or whatever ascent!
But you weren’t just a crack specialist, Chuck. You were at home on any sort of rock, using any sort of technique, free or aid. Nothing ever stopped you, and I never saw you become stumped or even slow up. You were the master. I remember when I first saw the legendary English mountaineer Joe Brown lead his famous route, Cenotaph Corner. I remarked that the only man I had ever seen climb with such command and seemingly effortless agility was Chuck Pratt. You had the touch. And in his autobiography, Don Whillans, Joe’s climbing partner, made the same comparison from the opposite point of view after he had climbed with you.
I learned from your aunt, Pauline Cayias, that you were born in Los Angeles, of all places. Your family moved to Salt Lake City during the war, and your dad traveled arranging entertainment for our troops. Pauline remembers you climbing an outcrop above Salt Lake City with your mother’s clothesline. We will never know where you got the idea to do that. After the war your family moved a lot – to Montana, Washington, and Oregon, and settled finally in Lafayette, California. You enrolled in the University of California, and by and by moved to Berkeley. Your goal in academia was to become a research scientist, and you would have been a brilliant one. But a more seductive calling, a vocation with a promise of higher beatitudes, soon claimed you. In the vernacular, you got the climbing bug. When I met you in 1959, you had joined the UC Hiking Club and climbed with them on the rocks in the Berkeley Hills. You were already, quietly and without particularly meaning to do so, building a reputation as a climbing wizard.
For a while we roomed together at Krehe Ritter’s abode, a little secondary ramshackle house on Spruce Street we called Krehe’s Pad. It became a favorite gathering place for climbers. Ah, the times we had there – not a few parties, folk dancing, chess, music blaring all day and night, and word play. Not that you played chess. I played with Krehe and Joe Fitschen. You weren’t a chess man. You were ever an artist. Nor did you engage in word play with the rest of us. You were highly intelligent but never an intellectual show-off. Besides, you were always wrestling with something deeper than puns. But those were great times. We had fun.
Then there was the time that two well-dressed young men came to the door and asked to see you. They wanted to talk to you about your fading Mormonism. The poor chaps unwittingly walked into a firestorm. One of our roommates sprang to the attack, bringing all his fiery rhetoric to bear upon the two earnest fellows. With an avalanche of words brilliantly strung together he heaped withering scorn upon them, and especially upon their presumption to proselytize. I was in the other room and a little surprised at the level of his fury. He was attacking with the conviction and energy of a true believer.
He drove them away and they never again came searching for you, Chuck. But I wonder how it would have gone had you handled it alone. There must have been something in you of your great-grandfather, Orson Pratt, astronomer, scientist, surveyor, and well-educated Mormon pioneer who was among the first of those who arrived and settled in Salt Lake City. Your aunt remembers you being a devote member of the faith. In your family travels you often visited Mormon churches, and when you did, you were called upon, because of your eloquence and biblical knowledge, to bear witness to the faith.
Your aunt thinks your aversion to being the center of attention diluted or destroyed your faith. In light of your later visceral reactions to the spotlight, this explanation takes on a certain plausibility, though it doesn’t seem quite adequate to account for your apparent total apostasy. One can’t help but wonder whether the Berkeley experience, especially in the rampaging 60’s, didn’t contribute its share to your saying “Adios” to God.
Yes, Chuck, you were the best. We were often following you, and not only on those appalling crack climbs. There were also boulder problems. Especially confounding were the mantleshelfs, of which you were the preeminent artist. When we heard the phrase, “Pratt mantle,” we knew to expect the worst in a corkscrew boulder problem. You have quite a record of climbs, Chuck, on boulders, crack climbs, face climbs, and big walls. But you were always so easy. You were never driven, you never had to “have a climb” the way I occasionally did. I often wondered what you might have accomplished had you had the drive and ambition of a Layton Kor or a Warren Harding. But we will never know because you refused to be driven. You would always be free.
The Valley, Chuck, was particularly your home, even more so than for the rest of us. When others left for the Tetons, the Canadian Rockies, or the Alps, you remained, through the heat. Yes, you loved the heat, and you hated cold, and so you stayed, and climbed, on and on. And you amassed the best record, at the time, of first ascents in Yosemite.
But one thing drew you from Yosemite, from the vertical crucible of smooth granite, and that was the red crucible of the spare and lonely southwest desert spires. This was adventure to your liking – the solitary sandstone pinnacles of Utah. There was something that suited you about the desert, something beyond the welcome heat. Did it speak to your soul, Chuck? Did something strike the severed cord of Faith? Did you see the divine in the arid and cruel beauty of the desert? Maybe, maybe not. You didn’t write or speak along those lines.
But how well I remember the only climb I did with you there – You and Roper and me, on the second ascent of Kor’s route on the Titan, near Moab – a fine big mouthful of a route. We climbed it in cloudy weather and light rain. It was a bit of a mud bath. But we had fun, as we always did together. I remember the pictures of us, in our down jackets on top, in a rainstorm. The sandstone grit that clung to our ropes seriously abraded some of our carabiners when we rappelled off. But what’s a few carabiners? This was life!
And then you went at last to the Tetons, as a guide -- an honorable profession, and one that allowed you to again and again rediscover, in the delight of those you taught, the joy of those early moments when you first came into contact with the wonder of climbing. You could have done anything you wanted. You were so intelligent and talented. But you had such an aversion to anything that might smack of the Rat Race. Frankly, you seemed to have an aversion to that sort of striving. So you became a guide. How artistic, in a way. I sometimes talked to people who had been your clients. They uniformly spoke of your friendliness, your skill, and especially of your patience. It was always a special memory to them to have climbed with and been taught by Chuck Pratt.
I heard rumors that you wintered happily on the warm beaches of South Pacific islands. I learned later that it was exclusively Thailand where you spent the winter months in welcome heat. You did that for years and years. What a shame you stopped writing. As I said before, you were the best writer of our generation. We all wished you had written more, much more. A couple of your masterpieces come to mind: The South Face of Mt. Watkins, and your magical essay on desert climbing, “The View From Dead Horse Point.” I know you could have penned marvelous stories of your adventures in Thailand. You always did have a gift for spinning a tale. I know you could have done it professionally. Why you didn’t we will never know. You kept to yourself.
A few years ago I came to the Teton Ranch run by the American Alpine Club to present one of my slide shows. I hoped to see you, but word was you were off guiding the Grand Teton. I wondered at the time if you had arranged that so as to avoid any embarrassment. Who knows?
And then, someone got the bright idea of having a Camp 4 party to celebrate the success of the effort to save Camp 4, traditionally the Yosemite climber’s camp, and the target of plans for obliteration and replacement with employee housing. Of course, our buddy, Tom Frost led that effort. This party would become a remarkable reunion of many of the players in Yosemite climbing in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. Old friends would reunite for at least one final time. The big news was that they had talked you into taking part, something I had doubted they would ever be able to do. It was great to hear you would be coming and greater to see you there.”

When I saw Pratt, after all of these years, it was like a barrier had been broken through. I walked up and gave him a big hug. He hugged back. It was something we had never done before. We had been friends, companions, but not “bosom buddies.” But this was a special occasion and I wanted Chuck to know how much I loved him. But I was struck, as I embraced him, by how slight he was. I had always known that Chuck was small. He was one of the little big men of Yosemite. But I never thought of him that way. I was aware that he was frustrated at being small. He made jokes about it. But I never saw him that way. He always looked “regular” to me. So it was a bit of a shock to realize he was not only small, but also slight. He had lost what bulk he had in his prime. But, as Tom Patey wrote of Joe Brown and as Chuck showed so often on his fearless leads, “His heart was as big as the mountain, and his nerves were made of steel.”
The Camp 4 reunion was, indeed, a special occasion. So many of the old gang were there. Together again for the first time since the North America Wall, Pratt and Frost and Chouinard and I hung out, talking, getting our pictures taken, hiking, and joking and laughing. And it all came back; it all came back in the laughter. My friends, now as before, took life and its tears, and turned them into laughter. And it was so wonderful, so refreshing, so freeing! And I remembered why my best friends were climbers, why I loved them. Because in them burned the joy of life!
And Pratt, with his cynical and mocking air, ever alert to what Tom Wolfe refers to as the “irresistibly lurid carnival of American life today,” hadn’t lost a step in his sense of humor. We had a good time together, and when it came to an end we four found ourselves talking together in the parking lot next to Camp 4. We talked and then we kept talking, past the logical point to split up and go our ways. We didn’t want this to end. We had grasped something, something precious, something that hadn’t been in our lives for awhile, though we were not aware of it having been missing. And we didn’t know when we would be together again. It had been 35 years! And here we were, back there again, just like that. Sentimental old fools! Yes, but for me at least the sentiment was a new thing. I realized how precious my friends were to me, and had been. I think we all had a sense that we four might never be together again. But I don’t think any of us guessed that a death of one of us in the near term would be the defining reason.
I was never that close to Chuck. I don’t know if anyone was. He had a lot of friends, and a lot of admirers, and no enemies. But I did not have a special relationship with Chuck, other than having been on the greatest climbs of my life with him. Others are perhaps closer, know more about the “inner” Pratt, than I do. He was probably closer in spirit to that other artist, Chouinard, and that other maverick, Harding. But he was my friend. Most of us who have a few years behind them are painfully aware of the syndrome of regret, when a friend passes, that we didn’t take the opportunity, when we had it, to express our gratitude for the gift of friendship that person has given us. On that score at least I can thank God that I had had the opportunity to see Chuck near the end, and to let him know of my abiding friendship and admiration. I paid honor to him (along with Tom Frost and others) in my talk for the Banff Mountain Summit, included in the book, “Voices From The Summit.” It seems fitting to close this tribute with an excerpt from that article:
s
“But beyond and above these deeds and talents, Pratt is my hero because of the kind of person he is, because he was, among other things, the very best of climbing companions: Jovial, keenly witty, with a sense of humor that has a laser beam focus on the absurdities of the universe and the hands we are dealt to play in the cosmic poker game. I once heard the phrase, “Only the pure climb gracefully.” I know Pratt would wince at being called “pure,” being as much a sinner as the next man. But when it comes to climbing itself, well, that is almost sacred to Chuck. Pratt, more than perhaps anyone I have known, has always climbed, first and foremost, and last and finally, for the climbing experience itself, for the rewards that come directly from the dance of man and rock. Climbing, for Chuck, is a life-giving elixir, and he has always wanted to keep it as pure as possible, uncorrupted and unalloyed by gain, fame, or ambition, or any sort of debasement. Chuck has kept his integrity.”

He was a man; he was a climber; he was a guide and teacher; he was an artist; he was a friend. Thanks, Chuck, for being with us, for joy and laughter, for your achievements, for setting an example of how to live with integrity. Thanks, Chuck, but, damn, I wish you were still here.

Steve Grossman

Trad climber

Seattle, WA

Sep 12, 2018 - 08:27pm PT

Bump for the essence of greatness...Thanks Tamara!

Charlie D.

Trad climber

Western Slope, Tahoe Sierra

Sep 13, 2018 - 07:03am PT

Thanks TR for posting.....these few sentences sure resonated with me:

And it all came back; it all came back in the laughter. My friends, now as before, took life and its tears, and turned them into laughter. And it was so wonderful, so refreshing, so freeing! And I remembered why my best friends were climbers, why I loved them. Because in them burned the joy of life!

Charlie D.