Climbing movies, the Gulch, the Tetons, and how Crooked Thumb got his name
I cannot find Preston's direct email to reply, so forgive me for posting this
on the remailer. It is vaguely associated with caves, cavers, and caving, so
as someone else has famously said HIT DELETE NOW if it does not immediately
attract your attention.
Hi Preston:
Both of those are excellent films, if a bit obscure. Climbing is now a
different sport that it was when I (and Fred Becky) started climbing. It has
become so much more athletic! It's inconceivable to me that a human can make
the climbs that Alex Honnold and his cohorts manage. Yet there it is,
documented on film. Another film in the works and already shown in limited
theaters, mostly at festivals, is Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson's 7-year
effort to climb the 3,000 foot Dawn Wall (that is also the name of the film).
I think you and I have talked in the past about my climbing days, when I knew
Fred Beckey, Yvon Chouinard, Bob Kamps, Tom Frost, Wayne Merry and other top
climbers of that time. I never actually climbed with them but did camp with
them and got to know them, mostly in the Tetons and the Black Hills.. I was
pretty good, but not that good. I spent two summers as a climbing bum in the
Tetons, and one in Yosemite as a Ranger-Naturalist.
Mt. Teewinot towered over the climbers camp at the south end of Jenny Lake. In
1959 some Nittany Grotto cavers were hiking, climbing and working in the area.
Pat Purdy and Peg Fowler rescued a puppy from some woman who was drowning an
unwanted litter in the River Snake. That rescued puppy, a shepherd-collie
cross, lived the rest of the summer in the climber's campground. We called her
"Teewinot". Pat and Peg took Teewinot back to State College for the fall
semester. They had the dog with them on a trip to Kenny Simmons cave (West
Virginia) the first time she came into heat, and a "big, white, runty-looking
beagle" got to her. The puppies turned out to be good-looking, intelligent
dogs! Mine grew up to look much like an American Foxhound. Much less white
(mostly black and brown) but a long-legged, long-back galloper.
I was working in Wyoming that winter and corresponding with Pat. We had
planned to go to Alaska the next summer together, and I promised to take one of
the puppies. The summer came. Pat married Jan Smith, and they spent the summer
in Idaho working on his geological PhD thesis outside of Lead Ore. The puppies
came and Pat and Jan let me know that they were going to deliver "mine" in the
Tetons on their way back east around Labor Day. There was another contingent
of Nittany Grotto folks in Jackson (Jack Stellmack. Rebne Thompson, and some
others), so about the time I knew that Pat and Jan were planning on
materializing with Teewinot and her puppies, we decided we would go around on
the back side of Tetons and I would take them into Darby Canyon Ice Cave and
explore the alpine karst nearby.
I thought that took care of the puppy issue, as they were 6 weeks old and it
was a 4-mile hike and then across some the bare, sharp, jagged, limestone
karenfelder to where we were going to camp. I was wrong. One night about
dark-thirty, Pat, Jan and Teewinot, along with a whole herd of little foot-sore
puppies, staggered into our camp
Rebne Thompson was a wonderful and welcoming guy and all the puppies crawled
into his sleeping bag as it got down below freezing that night. Sometime, in
the middle of the night, one of the puppies crawled out of the mob scene in
Rebne's sleeping bag and crawled into my sleeping bag. What can a guy do? That
dog grew up with the size and proportions of an American Foxhound. Much less
white (mostly black and brown) but a long-legged, long-back galloper.
After that digression , I go back to the climbers campground earlier in the
1960 climbing season.
There is a prominent pinnacle on the north side of Mt. Teewinot, called the
"Crooked Thumb", which overhangs Cascade Canyon. Several of us had been
working on climbing it during the summer. Yvon Chouinard and Bob Kamps showed
up and were determined to climb the overhung side. That's where Yvon took his
famous zipper fall, but that is another story. Briefly, the piton cracks are
not good. Kamps was belaying Yvon, who reached the limit of his rope - Bob had
only about 5 feet left in his hands - and Yvon finally found a place where he
thought he could set up a hanging belay. He did, but as he was getting ready
to have Bob start up, his belay piton(s) pulled out: PING!
Then piton after piton popped out. PING, PING. PING, PING, PING ------
Yvon was 20 feet out as he fell past Bob's belay. Bob said that as he watched
Yvon fall past him, his own life passed before his eyes.
PING, PNG, PING, PING ------------
The rock wall turned less then vertical below Kamps, and just as the last piton
pulled out Yvon hit the rock and took a huge gouge out of his knee. The last
piton, holding Kamps in his belay stance, held.
Chouinard was in poor shape from his knee injury, but managed to walk back to
the climbers camp with Bob helping him, where we hustled him off the hospital
in Jackson.
Now the puppy. I called him "Crooked Thumb". A wonderful companion for many
years, a caver and climber himself, and discoverer of the Crooked Thumb Cutoff
in Ft. Stanton cave. A lot of cavers over the years have thought, and a few
have said, "What a stupid name for a dog!" What can I say, other than that to
a Teton climber "Crooked Thumb out of Teewinot" makes perfect sense.
I always thought of Fred Becky as a leathery pterodactyl flying around from
climb to climb in his pink Thunderbird. How does this lead back to him and the
movie Dirt Bag ?
In the 60s I was at the University of Wyoming and then at the University of New
Mexico. I had climbed Ship Rock several times. By the way, The Navajo name for
Ship Rock (tw words not to be confused with the town on Shiprock, NM - one
word) is "Tse' Bit' a'i'" which translates as the Rock with Wings. According to
Navajo legend it flew here from the north bringing the first Navajos on it's
back.
I had noticed what looked like an obscure system of cracks up the imposing
southwest buttress, which is what you see as you approach Ship Rock from the
south.
See the attached image from 1961 showing me, my a 1952 red VW convertible, and
Crooked Thumb admiring the southwest buttress. That VW came with a 25-HP
engine, was my first real climbing and caving vehicle, and accumulated over 450
K before I sold it. Note the gas-pipe bumpers and the roll of wire lathing to
get unstuck from the sand.
I worked on that route for several years, and it became more and more apparent
that it was going to become a bolt ladder, and I was losing interest.
If you know the history of big wall climbing in Yosemite (as documented in 2014
in the entertaining film Valley Uprising) Royal Robbins and Warren Harding were
competing to climb Half Dome. The first big wall climb in Yosemite was by Royal
Robbins using the traditional climbing philosophy of the time. Harding upped
him by climbing El Cap but Harding used siege techniques, taking 45 days over
more than a year of time to make the climb, and using a lot of iron including
many expansion bolts.
We were using expansion bolts for protection in caves in the 50s because it was
rarely possible to place secure pitons in the cave environment. Expansion
bolts were uncommonly used rock climbing in the 1950s and were not exactly
"approved" for use except in unusual circumstances. Ship Rock saw the first
successful use of expansion bolts in 6th class climbing in 1939. Herb Conn
used a bolt for protection on the first ascent of North Mule Ear Peak in Big
Bend in the 1950s.
Meanwhile, out in the Gulch (Yosemite Valley), traditional climbers (lead by
Royal Robbins, Tom Frost, and Yvon Chouinard) revolted at this non-traditional
use of mechanical protection and began chopping bolts out of the Yosemite
Granite. In 1963 or 1964, Tom Frost climbed Ship Rock and chopped out all the
bolts, not understanding that the nature of the rock there is different from
the Sierra granite. Other climbers wrote to Summit magazine complaining that he
had made Ship Rock "virtually impossible". That prompted me to write the
article (attched) titled "Ship Rock - it's Nature and Ascent".
At the end of that article I mentioned the possible route up the southwest
buttress. Fred took the bait. He and Harvey Carter pounded it up in the
spring of 1965 - two bivies and a lot of iron and bolts. In the advertisement
for Dirt Bag there is an image that is almost the same as the one I took a few
years earlier, but this one shows Fred, Harvey, and the Thunderbird approaching
the southwest buttress.
That is also attached.
Well, I guess that is more than enough said. Originally I only planned to tell
you about the Dawn Wall . I got carried away.
Dwight
Attached are several things, including
Image 1961 Dwight and Ship Rock
Image: Becky and Ship Rock
Summit article: 1964 Ship Rock: It's Nature and Ascent, PDF file
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On October 9, 2018 at 4:49 AM
We watched two new very high adventure movies over the past 4 days. Both movies
involve lots of vertical rope work, similar as in caving.
Dirt Bag about Fred Beckey.
And,
Free Solo with Alex Honnold.
These are excellent. We watched in NY.
Preston Forsythe, Browder, KY
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