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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Jul 30, 2009 - 01:22pm PT
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So this climber pulls into a gas station. Tuolumne, 1987. There’s a cut, blond surfer kind of a guy filling his 4x4 over there. Running shorts, track singlet. Knee socks with bold soccer stripes -- is this cool or goofball? He looks strong and self-… Wait, that’s John Bachar!
Dude rolls over, throwing his best insolent strut. So stunned, though, when he opens his mouth out croaks the obvious and pathetic: “How can you solo all that crazy stuff?”
John meets his gaze, level and cool: “You’re soloing right now.”
I wasn’t even part of the conversation, but it has stuck with me ever since. On a few levels.
This afternoon, for instance, balancing on a redwood log across a ravine. Classic third class, the moves aren’t bad but below is a twenty-foot drop into a leg-breaking tangle of trunks. That’s barely beyond bouldering on John’s soloing scale, yet his goofball-obvious, zen-quick, tossed off line flashed into my mind. If conversation were chess, that was a knight’s move.
To see him in action was a treat. A couple of years earlier in Joshua Tree he swung onto the Gunsmoke Traverse, V3 before there was such a thing. It runs horizontally a hundred feet or more and the moves often overhang. John had finished his soloing circuit for the day, including a beyond-highball ascent of Leave it to Beaver, 5.12a, and Gunsmoke was just finishing it off with a workout.
After a couple of laps John’s well-oiled, seemingly effortless moves have me lulled into thinking it’s easy. He even climbs over a guy going the other way. I struggle maybe half way along the traverse in his wake before I can’t hold on any longer. John does six laps.
Leave it to Beaver had looked not only casual but nearly effortless, his footwork precise with an almost ballet-like lightness. He paused way up there, nothing but an open-palm sloper holding him to the overhanging wall, and chalked up. Look closer and you can clearly see that this is not dance. There is a slight pause over each hold, affirming his grip. Positive press on the rubber, and each handhold locked on. John is building up his ascent with great care.
He had done it the day before, and probably would again the next. There was a quality of performance in repeating it, but not so much because of audience as for the sake of practice. John Gill articulated the likeness to a gymnastic routine, an ideal of movement, repeated for its own sake even to an empty gym. During other stretches of his life that routine played out in the Valley, Tuolumne, the Owens River Gorge. You might get lucky and stumble on a performance. Or a photo would make it big and glossy and breathtaking. Who can forget Phil Bard’s shot of John On the Lamb, with the billowing clouds of a Tuolumne summer sky over his shoulder?
I once saw his foot, not yet weighted, skate off a slick Tuolumne knob. His body hung with certainty over the remaining holds as he pulled the leg back, unfazed.
Good? Well I guess! How good was he? Comparisons feel clumsy, but I’m driven to try. Coming out of the Valley in the sixties, several generations before John as climbing goes, it was hard for me to tell. I had held the rope for the likes of Pratt, and struggled up his pitches. Going into the 70s, Bridwell’s climbs still felt within reach, maybe, by training hard. But the Stonemasters left us in the dust. And by the end of their seventies decade Kauk and Bachar were way out in front of the rest. They were pumping irrational numbers, and John was often unroped. The stuff they climbed had fully broken contact with my ability to understand it. As Royal Robbins once said about John Gill, “I could grasp the holds but not the problem.”
He was very careful. Far from the abandon of say a balls-out Yabo or the desperation of many a guy’s breakup solos, John thoroughly worked it. That was a little hard to see against the backdrop of a Stonemaster culture that was so California in projecting casual, offhanded, ain’t-no-thing. He could be crazy, sure, like the story of riding a skateboard down the centerline of a Valley tunnel, playing his sax. But his approach to soloing had a huge conservative streak.
Maybe careful is an odd quality to attribute to a soloist, but John actually took training and preparation to new levels, even to the point of wrecking his elbow tendons on the Bachar Ladder. Some of what we know now about how not to overtrain comes from John’s eagerness for preparation, probing the outer limits of fitness. The signs were everywhere, like toproping and leading repeatedly before casting off the cord. When he took off the rope, John was way ready.
Even when he put on a rope to walk among the rest of us, legends were born. Like the Bachar-Yerian. Yet there was a lot of care in that innovation too. When he began flirting with the idea of placing bolts on lead on walls so steep he’d need to hang from a hook, John mentioned recently that he had practiced for a week drilling from hook placements to be sure he could work it. That part wasn’t so obvious when you just caught a photo of him poised up there, locked onto shockingly steep tiny knobs.
Maybe one thing that attracted him to blowing crazy Sax was the chance to step out more freely, to let it all go into spontaneous improv. The lure of jazz was so strong he even tried to turn his back on climbing. “I gave it 20 good years,” he said once. Of course that didn’t last. From then on he juggled both lovers.
His shoe designs were as innovative as his climbing; you could see how much thought went into seeing freshly how best to make feet work on rock. It’s a revolutionary idea, but you really can climb better when your feet are comfortable. And John’s ability to hop lightly out of the rut of tradition is what got him into the shoe game in the first place. His willingness to simply try some guy’s strange Spanish shoes one day in Camp 4 ended up bringing us all the gift of gomme cocida, sticky rubber. That moment has always been one of my favorite examples of the potent innocence of beginners mind.
I go back to my notes from that 1985 day in Joshua Tree. “Surfer-blond with a nearly shy smile, he jumped out of a new 4x4 riding a jazz riff from the Last Poets.” That smile holds a key. He was shy underneath it all, especially at first, an LA surfer boy washed inland, gone vertical onto waves of stone. There he found his true vocation, and it began slowly to erase the shyness. A touch of arrogance showed before it was fully gone.
John’s son Tyrus, who performed 2.0 minutes of silence to transfix his memorial, also said “He was 27% badass.” But like any teenager he underestimated the old man just a taste.
And you know, beneath it all he was just flat cool.
John loved to climb. Whatever the mysterious joy really is – don’t get me started – that we get out it, John Bachar squeezed out more of it. More mileage, more laps, more moments of rapt attention, leading to the state of flow. Bypassing those nagging interruptions -- the sheer mechanics of safeguarding a climb -- is one of the more trivial aspects of soloing, but at least it’s an easy one to understand. We don’t have to get into John’s head to understand about not breaking the focus on movement to fuss with peripheral distractions like rope and partner. Not breaking for pitches or even to fiddle in more pro. The gift is following the rhythm of the rock, and holding that rhythm from bottom to top-out.
Holding open the sustain key of those moments adds to the flow. And the flow, getting into that zone where moves become effortless and the climbing seems to happen by itself – that’s the real deal. That’s the gift John gave himself, damn near every day. It’s easy to call that selfish, and John seemed to have no illusions about the absolute nature of soloing. But in the always questionable way that climbing builds character, we could see him transforming. Less arrogant. More going out of his way to turn his attention and kindness onto strangers, geeks and nOObs. One of the best things to arise since his death is the countless small tales of his pausing to give full focus to the query of a stranger. Gone in those moments was the guy on the cover of Life magazine, out there alone in the stratosphere of his achievement. Lately, approaching him sincerely seemed to be the only gatekeeper to John’s kind attention.
That transformation was the gift to the world that flowed out of John’s gift to himself. It was coming into full flower. Lynn Leichtfuss has illuminated how he was in process of hatching a plan to carry his influence beyond shoe salesman. For us still here in the world, his budding gift was cut short. Leaving aside the void his immediate family wrestles with, losing that gift of compassion showered onto the larger world is the tragedy of John’s death. Kindness will survive; we have been charged and inspired by his example.
Thank you, John. Rest in Peace.
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Social climber
valley center, ca
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Jul 30, 2009 - 01:31pm PT
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DR, beautifully penned. You captured the essence of the man then and now. Thank you ...... lrl
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Loretta Chuzum
climber
Taos New Mexico
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Jul 30, 2009 - 07:59pm PT
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ooohhhh....no.
When living in Mammoth in the late 80's, I was climbing in the gorge one day, (after those great oats they served at Anything Goes!) Feeling strong and confident with just a few moves to go....when someone swept past me on the rock to my right moving with grace and elegance and no rope. I couldn't move... just watching with my mouth hanging open. I whispered "wow".
It was a beautiful and impressive sight and he also was a beautiful man. Peace John Bachar...
(Still have the Patagonia catalog with you playing your sax)
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oldcragger
Trad climber
Truckee,CA
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Thank you DR, for saying what I have been feeling since the news. Beautiful.
Michael
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Social climber
valley center, ca
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Know people are still thinking what we be sayin'. John Dude, missing you and will for a Long Time. Every day, many times during the day....jb what would we be working on now ?
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east side underground
Trad climber
Hilton crk,ca
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DR your pen flows like a high sierra stream - beautiful- cheers
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storer
Trad climber
Golden, Colorado
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At John's talk in Golden recently someone asked him about memorable experiences in Yosemite. He mentioned ranger-climber softball games. I told him I had some pics and he said he'd like to see them but I didn't get a chance to send them....(c1975?)
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mucci
Trad climber
The pitch of Bagalaar above you
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Bump for Mr. Bachar
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ron gomez
Trad climber
fallbrook,ca
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Good form, weight on the back foot, elbow up, hand back, waiting to transfer with the front foot up, head looking forward and chin down! Damn he had form even with baseball, his Dad musta coached him well.
Peace
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Social climber
valley center, ca
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Thinking the same thing today Ron, darn he was the Dude. Missing, missing, missing.
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Anastasia
climber
hanging from a crimp and crying for my mama.
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Bump...
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dogtown
climber
Cheyenne,Wyoming
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Doug;
Thanks for that post, What you wrote is so true. I think the only thing I could add is John was no doubt the best climber in the world with or without a rope for more than two decades, And has left his mark soundly on our sport right up there with all the greats before him. StoneMasters Rule! His dedication to training was inspired by Gill heavily ( I think ) and then the competitive nature of the brotherhood set them a part from us mere mortals of the time.
We here will miss him, Bruce.
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Social climber
valley center, ca
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In memory of a great man....Yeah, and so much more. Darn, Dude ...... wish yo were still here. Life has a huge yawning gape without yo......Sigh ! Praying for your loved ones. Peace, lynnie
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ß Î Ø T Ç H
Boulder climber
the ground up
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"
I just noticed these posts from 2008 in the Alan Nelson thread: " (Clint)
Reardon death, he says the same thing . in one of those old t.v. interviews Bachar said like " I'll climb until I die " . i know .. but not at 52 !
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Friend
climber
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Aug 22, 2009 - 06:56pm PT
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Here's a classic Basecamp blurb from Climbing, April 1989
RIP Bachar.
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Social climber
valley center, ca
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Aug 23, 2009 - 12:17am PT
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Missing yo Both......dAN AND jOHN
but bet you both be having fun together in the heavenlies. Know you guys will put up the best route ever ....hey, you found the route to eternity.....love and missing yo. Peace, Lynne
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jason Crichton
climber
NZ
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John, You inspired me to become a soloist and I climbed to that end for 8 years. Only someone who tries to climb some of the routes you soloed or is familiar with the areas you climbed in, could have any idea what you were actually doing so long ago. Thank you for guiding me to soloing and especially now for helping me to stop it for good just as I thought to start again. My children are too precious and I am only just learning to live fully, even in hindsight of my soloing exploits. Growing in Love is so much more important than a short lived solo and extremely risky style of climbing. I say again however thank you for inspiring me to solo, it was one of the greatest gifts I ever had.
Now I want to climb with my children.
Jason of the Valley.
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guyman
Trad climber
Moorpark, CA.
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Just thinking about John, DR's post is right on!!
rIGHT NOW, with 3 plus Gin and Tonics in me all I can say is
John Bachar Rules .....
GK
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sunnyside
Big Wall climber
boulder
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Oct 12, 2009 - 06:38pm PT
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[photoid=130745]
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ron gomez
Trad climber
fallbrook,ca
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Oct 12, 2009 - 06:50pm PT
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Thanks sunnyside, made my day sunnier! Posted some stuff on climbing art thread, one mention of Bachar on there!
Peace
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