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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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