Recollections of a Mountaineering Sierran Geomorphologist

My early December 2012 Christmas letter began with the following. “For the 12 months climbing, my efforts gave to me: 12 months of aches/pains, 11 body piercings, 10 crunched toes, 9 stretched tendons, 8 trashed fingers, 7 head bumps, 6 bruised shins, 5 gold rings (I wish!), 4 torn cartilages, 3 bloody noses, 2 blown rotator cuffs, and a smashed foot in a pear tree (really, on a 300-foot cliff above Donner Pass).” When I wrote this, little did I know that I had broken my back in a head-first fall back in 2005, at age sixty-two. Also, little did I know that in twelve months, I would break it again. Believe me, you don’t want a broken back.

I’ve been climbing since 1960, and I realized early on that it is both strenuous and life-threatening. As I’ve told my college students over the years, “If I had been a cat with nine lives, I’d be dead!” So why do this? It’s the rush. Or, perhaps, the addiction. In defense of climbing, I offer a subjective hypothesis: only a climber could have resolved Sierra Nevada uplift, since some key evidence exists in risky and/or remote places.

My last day in the field was October 8, 2016, which capped twenty-seven rigorous seasons in the Sierra. That day was a roped ascent with my twin, an excellent climber, to reach a large basalt flow 300 feet above the floor of the upper part of the North Fork Feather River canyon. Earlier, in June 2013, I, along with a geophysicist mountaineer of my age, had climbed this unroped, he with failing hip joints and me with a broken back. We were “free soloing,” climbing without a rope. Up high, if we fell, we’d almost certainly have died. For whatever reason, neither of us collected rocks, just photos and GPS coordinates. Hence, the return on October 8 to retrieve samples for analysis and dating.

All knowledgeable Sierran geologists would agree that no remnants of basalt flows exist close to the river in this part of the canyon. But they do exist, some buried, some not. You have to search for them, even if it means fording the river, above which my field partner discovered his “Bonanza,” flow remnant atop flow remnant with river cobbles scattered between flows. At the river crossing closest to the bonanza, there is a sign that warns of the perils of fording the river’s rapids. People drown. In June 2015, I almost lost him.

But you can cross fairly safely upstream, the downside being you’ll have to climb over a ridge to reach Bonanza. First you push through the thornberries and poison oak, ford the river, reach the far bank, push through more thornberries and poison oak; then, bloodied, start up an abandoned service road that narrows to about a foot wide higher up. Don’t even think of falling here. Neither my partner nor I mind getting bloodied, but he is allergic to poison oak. Are we having fun yet?

Let’s go back to the beginning. In 1960, at age seventeen, Greg and I discovered unroped climbing at Stoney Point (about five miles northwest of then-nonexistent CSU Northridge), beside northern Topanga Canyon Boulevard, which was then just a country road in a relatively unpopulated part of the San Fernando Valley.

Two years later, when he was a sophomore at MIT, Greg was getting into the heavy subjects, but he found time to join the MIT Outing Club (MITOC), which was something like Cal’s Hiking Club, which I would later join. Both had serious climbers. Though a novice, Greg was a natural, and early on he climbed a local route in tennis shoes, while more experienced climbers struggled in climbing shoes. Greg had caught the climbing bug, bought shoes and equipment, and his enthusiasm (and need of a California partner in summer) would quickly spread the bug to me.

It just may be that I beat Greg in leading the first roped ascent, for in Yosemite Valley on...