Joseph E. Taylor III | Joseph E. Taylor III On Climber, Granite, Sky | Environmental History, 11.1

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JOSEPH E. TAYLOR III ON CLIMBER, GRANITE, SKY

CLIMBER, GRANITE, SKY: The elements are ubiquitous in climbing imagery, clichés of modern marketing, yet it wasn't always so. Until recently mountain art favored peaks and vistas. From Vittorio Sella to Ansel Adams, photographers presented the mountaineer as a static figure; it was the mountain that evoked romantic grandeur. In the 1960s, however, climbing aesthetics rapidly evolved.¹ The viewfinder zoomed in, framing grew more dynamic, and action suffused everything.² The individual became as important as the scene, and selling adventure became a raison d'etre. The cover of the 1968 Ascent is not just emblematic of such changes; It was a moment of change, and through it we can comprehend important shifts in outdoor recreation and environmental culture. Official credit for the photo goes to Steve Roper, who captured his buddy Allen Steck on Liberty Cap in Yosemite National Park, yet the two still argue over who deserves credit, Roper for clicking the shutter or Steck for bringing the camera. Theirs is a familiar climbers' debate—who led, who helped—but how that image became a cover, and how Ascent became a cutting-edge journal, involves a more complex tale of how personal friendships and stylistic shifts converged with Sierra Club politics and generational ambitions to transform sport and environmentalism into what we recognize today.

Ascent represented both an evolution and revolution in climbing literature. London's Alpine Club invented the climbing journal in 1859 with Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers. Its successor, Alpine Journal, became the sport's template, recounting hard climbs for consumers of a marginal pastime. Some journals, such as La Montagne (Club Alpin Français) and American Alpine Journal (American Alpine Club), served national organizations, but most covered regional clubs. Fell and Rock, for example, charted the Fell and Rock Climbing Club of England's Lake District, while Appalachia reported on Boston's Appalachian Mountain Club.³ All shared two key traits. One was a tendency to portray adventure in gendered codes of imperialism. Authors perfected a style that understated while underscoring accomplishments for club and country, what Ian Cameron calls the "'and-so-we-climbed-to-the-top-of-the-hill' reminiscences."⁴ The other was a commitment to the sacred spaces of play. In the 1880s Alpine Journal railed against plans to build funicular railways up Swiss peaks, and the Mountain Club of South Africa formed to ensure access to hiking and climbing areas.⁵ In western North America the BC Mountaineers, Colorado Mountain Club, Seattle Mountaineers, and Portland Mazamas mixed pleasure with politics, but none more so than the Sierra Club. Established in 1892 by John Muir and 282 like-minded mountaineers, the club spent sixty years playing in and battling "to render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast." Only in 1951 did its charter change to "preserve the Sierra Nevada and other scenic resources of the United States."⁶

Image courtesy of the Sierra Club.

That reworded charter contributed to the creation of Ascent, but to understand the full implications we need to remember how World War II inspired events. Long a mountaineering organization, in the 1930s the club established Rock Climbing Sections (RCS) for enthusiasts. Some RCS members, including Richard Leonard and David Brower, emerged as leaders in the sport, scaling the unclimbed Cathedral Spires in Yosemite, Shiprock in New Mexico, and Snowpatch Spire in Canada's Purcell Range. These ascents drew wide acclaim, and in 1941 the military enlisted Leonard to equip and train an alpine fighting force. Leonard in turn recruited other RCS members into wartime roles. Leonard infiltrated Burma as a spy, and Brower invaded Italy with the 10th Mountain Division. Both suffered harrowing ordeals, but their time in long-inhabited mountains, experiences neither would have had except for the RCS, also radicalized them as wilderness preservationists. By 1945 they had vowed to keep the Sierra undeveloped, and in 1951, Leonard as club secretary and Brower as soon-to-be executive director changed the charter to reflect their war-inspired wilderness politics.⁷

This commitment to wilderness became the ironic inspiration for Ascent. Brower is now famous for using the club's press to further the cause. Less noticed is how he also marginalized the club's recreational orientation. Since 1900 the Sierra Club Bulletin, a journal of record for western mountaineering, had blended political activism and mountain reminiscences. Climbing filled a significant portion of the Bulletin until the mid-1950s, but thereafter Brower devoted ink primarily to environmentalist issues.⁸ By 1965 club climbers felt alienated, so Steck proposed a new journal "to publish material of a creative, entertaining and exploratory nature."⁹ Brower resisted, wanting to keep plum climbing essays for the Bulletin and relegate the rest to ancillary publications. Club president Will Siri, himself a Himalayan mountaineer, warned Brower not to "throw a roadblock in the way of someone dedicated to a worthwhile project." Siri reminded Brower that in "the past two years I have defended you... on just these grounds on a good many occasions. Let us now give Steck a free hand, just like the one you insist on having."¹⁰ Already plagued by troubles within the club, Brower dropped his opposition, even encouraging Steck to use color, something no other journal had done.¹¹ This is how Ascent came into being.

Once approved, Ascent's editors gave it a novel look. In addition to feature articles and climbing notes, Steck, Roper, and Joe Fitschen published fiction, poetry, humor, and cartoons. They pushed the genre with works on spirituality, ethics, and technique, and reprinted farcical essays by MAD Magazine and Mark Twain.¹² The first volume, issued once a year from 1967 to 1972, was a stylistic watershed. Despite its groundbreaking essays, however, Ascent's most important innovation was imagery. Photo editor Glen Denny crafted an aesthetic that blended reportage and interpretation. Some photos were grainy, others astonishingly clear. All revealed a rapidly shifting sensibility about mountain art among a clique of photographers that included Denny, Roper, Tom Frost, Henry Kendall, and Galen Rowell.¹³Ascent looked like nothing else. The Bulletin had featured photos by Ansel Adams and Leland Curtis, and the American Alpine Journal printed many fine images, but all journals, even the commercial Summit which began in 1955, used images to illustrate text. In Ascent photos often stood alone as works of art, and those which did accompany text tended to emphasize immensity, beauty, and action. The 1968 cover captured this aesthetic evolution, and color set it apart. Climbers even played to the camera, as when T. M. Herbert feigned panic or Warren Harding posed as a tourist, and the satirical cartoons of Sheridan Anderson, coupled with the lampooning pen of Joe Kelsey, were without parallel.¹⁴

Yet what seems most striking are Ascent's contradictions. Most contributors idealized pure experience, a vestige of nineteenth-century Victorian amateurism, yet in practice many were professionals. Their philosophy echoed adventurers who celebrated mountains as liberation from effeminizing modernity, but their behavior revealed that climbing was no longer purely play. In an illustrative moment Yvon Chouinard complained that new technologies allowed "the average Joe" to try routes "normally over his head and... experts to do incredibly hard climbs without having to stick their necks out."¹⁵ He seemed to mourn the demise of risk, yet more was at stake. Chouinard was producing the very tools he decried. Ideals and practices were out of sync, and by the late-1960s such contradictions were widespread. Roper and Steck loved untrodden space, yet Roper had perfected the climbing guidebook that lured average Joes to wilderness, and Steck invented the trekking industry that led them there. Ascent was produced by a generation learning to sell itself, and its oeuvre marked this shift. From the 1968 Ascent cover we can recognize the dawn of a form of recreation in which marketing and play go hand in hand, and extreme sports, slicksheet magazines, and outdoor competitions are normative. It is also easier to see why recreation and environmentalism no longer meshed, why separate journals seemed so necessary, and why climber, granite, sky signified an emerging tension within environmental culture.

Joseph E. Taylor III is a Canada Research Chair in History and Geography at Simon Fraser University. His first book, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (University of Washington Press, 1999), won the George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history. He is currently writing a history of Yosemite rock climbing and conducting research for a series of studies on the fisheries of the northeast Pacific.

NOTES

The author wishes to thank Lara Braithwaite, Ellen Byrne, Matthew Klingle, Kathy Morse, Steve Roper, Allen Steck, and the Sierra Club Press for assistance with this essay.

^1. Vittorio Sella, Summit: Vittorio Sella, Mountaineer and Photographer, the Years 1879–1909 (New York: Aperature, 1999); Ansel Adams, "Vittorio Sella: His Photography," Sierra Club Bulletin 31 (December 1946), 15–17; Allison Kemmerer, Reinventing the West: The Photographs of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams (Andover: Addison Gallery of America Art, Phillips Academy, 2001).

^2. See, for example, Galen Rowell, Mountain Light (San Francisco: Sierra Club Press, 1986).

^3. For club journals, see Matthew S. Willen, "Composing Mountaineering: The Personal Narrative and the Production of Knowledge in the Alpine Club of London and the Appalachian Mountain Club, 1858–1900" (PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1995); Erik Weiselberg, "The Cultural Landscape of the Alps: British and German Mountaineering in the Nineteenth Century" (MA thesis, University of Oregon, 1994), 36–43; Richard G. Mitchell Jr., Mountain Experience: The Psychology and Sociology of Adventure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 100–109.

^4. Cameron quoted in Reuben Ellis, Vertical Margins: Mountaineering and the Landscapes of Imperialism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 31. For gender and empire see also Peter H. Hansen, "Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain," Journal of British Studies 34 (1995): 300–24; Peter H. Hansen, "Vertical Boundaries, National Identities: British Mountaineering on the Frontiers of Europe and the Empire, 1868–1914," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24 (1996): 48–71.

^5. F. W. Bourdillon, "Without Are Dogs," Alpine Journal 27 (1913): 153–66; Peter H. Hansen, "British Mountaineering, 1850–1914" (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1991), 257–70; Fergus Fleming, Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000), 324–25; Jose Burman, A Peak to Climb: The Story of South African Mountaineering (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1966), 15–17.

^6. For Sierra Club, see Michael P. Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988), 10, 100. For other clubs see Hugh E. Kingery, The Colorado Mountain Club: The First Seventy-Five Years of a Highly Individual Corporation, 1912–1987 (Evergreen, Colo.: Cordillera Press, 1988); Jim Kjeldsen, The Mountaineers: A History (Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1998); John D. Scott, We Climb High: A Thumbnail Chronology of the Mazamas, 1894–1964 (Portland: Mazamas, 1969); Erik Lawrence Weiselberg, "Ascendancy of the Mazamas: Environment, Identity and Mountain Climbing in Oregon, 1870 to 1930" (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 1999); Karen Ferguson and Meg Stanley, "'Out of Bounds': Risk, Mountain Culture, and Public Memory on the North Shore of Vancouver, 1871–2000"; and Christopher Dummit, "Risk on the Rocks: Creating a Modern Masculinity on Vancouver's North Shore Mountains, 1945–1975," papers presented at the 2004 meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, March 2004.

^7. For vows, see David R. Brower, "How To Kill a Wilderness," Sierra Club Bulletin 30 (August 1945), 2–4; Dick Leonard, "Conservationist Writes From I-B Jungle," Yodeler 6 (December 4, 1944): 3; Major Richard M. Leonard, "Threats to Wilderness Arising from Unexpected Sources; Need for Vigilance Seen," Yodeler 7 (17 September 1945), 1, 8. For charter, see Cohen, History of the Sierra Club, 100.

^8. John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 14–17; Cohen, History of the Sierra Club, 117.

^9. For "creative," see Allen Steck to David Brower, April 13, 1966; for alienation, see Allen Steck to Nick Clinch, November 26, 1965, Allen Steck to Will Siri, February 1, 1966, and Will Siri to Allen Steck, October 12, 1966, all in carton 193:35, Sierra Club Members Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter cited as SCMP).

^10. For balk, see David Brower to Publications Committee, March 24, 1966, and Steck to Siri, March 28, 1966; for "philosophy" and "free hand," see William E. Siri to David Brower, March 30, 1966, carton 193:35, SCMP.

^11. For Brower's troubles, see Cohen, History of the Sierra Club, 291–99, 314–23, 339–65; Brower's encouragement derives from personal conversations with Allen Steck, June 2001.

^12. For major essays, see Lito Tejada-Flores, "The Games Climbers Play," Ascent 1 (1967): 23–25; Tom Higgins, "The Fiend," Ascent 1 (March 1969): 14; Royal Robbins, "Tis-sa-ack," Ascent 1 (April 1970): 14–19. For farce, see Ira Wallach, "The Conquest of Tillie's Lookout," Ascent 1 (March 1969): 36; Mark Twain, "The Conquest of the Riffelberg," Ascent: The Mountaineering Experiences in Word and Image, eds. Allen Steck and Steve Roper (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1980), 225–40.

^13. For aesthetic genealogy, see John Rawlings, The Stanford Alpine Club (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), 68, 104, 127–28; Steve Roper, A Climber's Guide to Yosemite Valley (San Francisco: Sierra Club Press, 1964). For RCS and SAC relationship, see John Rawlings, "Alfred W. Baxter: Interviews Conducted by John Rawlings," 5, Stanford Oral Histories Project, Department of Special Collections, 1997, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California.

^14. For Herbert see Ascent 1 (February 1968): 5. For Harding see Ascent 1 (May 1971): 32. For Sheridan and Kelsey see Joe Kelsey, "The Rock Gods," Ascent 2 (1974): 38; and Joe Kelsey, ed., The Climbing Cartoons of Sheridan Anderson (Schenectady: High Peaks Press, 1989).

^15. Yvon Chouinard, "Coonyard Mouths Off," Ascent 1 (June 1972): 50–52.

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