Vantage Point: 50 Years of the Best Climbing Stories Ever Told

by The Editors of Climbing Magazine (contributor)

For nearly 50 years, Climbing Magazine’s goal has been to inspire and entertain with compelling coverage of climbing in all its forms, from bouldering to the big walls, trad rock to sport climbing, ice climbing to mountaineering. Vantage Point offers a collection of the most inspiring, thought-provoking, and humorous stories featured in Climbing over the past five decades—an anthology that will move you to grab your chalkbag, rope, and harness.

Genres: Nonfiction

257 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 1, 2018

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome, disturbing, and — I guess? — inspiring?

I think a good-but-strange companion book to Vantage Point is Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite . That book is about all of the deaths that have taken place in Yosemite since the eviction and genocide of the indigenous tribes. Not surprisingly, more than one chapter involves falls from very high places, so this is as a salutary corrective to the “inspirational” stories here. Very few highly skilled (i.e., famous) climbers die that way, but quite a few of these Yosemite deaths are about those who were probably inspired by the elite climbers and their achievements.

There’s even one explicit link between the books. In the Balancing Act chapter, Dean Potter is profiled at “the end of his two-year seasonal residence in Camp Four’s Search and Rescue site”. A little ’net sleuthing leads to this webpage. I’d seen tent cabins behind Camp 4, but it never occurred to me to wonder who gets to use ’em. It turns out a volunteer Yosemite Valley Search and Rescue team (YOSAR) has existed since the 1960s. So skilled climbers get a place to stay at the foot of El Capitan in exchange for providing their skills in rescues.

Dean Potter is about to be evicted from that cabin because he doesn’t play well with others. One incident was apparently “speaking his mind a little too freely in the debrief after the Dan Osman body recovery”. Osman’s 1998 death is described in Off the Wall starting with the sentence

❝The following episode is arguably the Mother of all adrenaline-drenched, bizarre mishaps from a Yosemite cliff.❞

and is emblematic of the fuzzy boundary between athletes struggling to push the boundary of their sport, and those who seem to just have a death wish.

There certainly seem to be more than a few of the latter profiled in Vantage Point. Some of them explicitly tell us they are compelled to put themselves at risk to subdue even scarier demons within. Maybe many of the others are as well. I think Dean Potter’s 2015 death in a wingsuit jump might be a hint of that.

It doesn’t seem too surprising that, in order to tell a featured climbing story in the titular magazine, you’re going to have to out in front. And climbing is inherently a dangerous activity in a way that running or backpacking* isn’t, for example.

So the number of death notices is disturbing. But that reduces the inspirational quotient, since I’ve never been a risk addict, so climbs like these aren’t anything I’d ever be drawn to.

I’m glad someone is doing it, though. And that those crazies have a way of getting financing for their passion. For example, check out this astonishing 3½ minute video of Tommy Caldwell on pitch 15 of El Capitan’s The Dawn Wall in Yosemite. Patagonia was one of the sponsors.

It’s also a good video to make clear what a “free” climb is — that can be unclear. As this glossary provided by REI tells us, a “free climb” is

❝To climb using only hands and feet on the rock. Rope is used only for safety and is not relied upon for upward progress.❞

That’s what Caldwell is doing here. He’s roped in, but at no point does he depend on that rope to assist in climb. So there isn’t any hang dogging — putting weight on the protection rather than the rock.

That’s in contrast to both aid climbing and free soloing.

In the former, the climber is intentionally relying on that gear. A climber might lean back against gear to drill a hole for a bolt as a permanent anchor.

In the latter, there’s no one belaying the climber, so a fall is almost certainly fatal. That’s what made Alex Honnold’s free solo climb of El Capitan so staggering (see this video highlighting clips of the Oscar-winning documentary for that).

There is an in-between, though. Roped Solo free climbing is where the climber protects themselves as they climb, but they have to do each pitch three times. Once going up, climbing and placing their protection and belay anchor; once downclimbing; and once going back up, cleaning the pitch as they climb back to their anchor. Harder, but safer: Keita Kurakami climbed El Cap’s The Nose that way in five days, but fell more than ten times while doing it.

I’ve done a lot of solo backpacking, and have fairly recently added winter solo backpacking to that. I expect go deeper into the snowy backcountry once I’ve swapped my snowshoes for skis (and taken an avalanche class). With respect to climbing, the limit of my ambition right now is to add some roped solo to that mix, but such a trip is at least a year away.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

* However, this prompted the memory of why I stopped my subscription to Backpacker magazine long ago: they really got into scare stories at one point, which I found silly: the more dangerous part of backpacking is the drive to the trailhead. Even the old warning about wearing cotton clothes — “cotton kills” or “cotton is rotten” — really only applies to day hikers, not those with a tent and sleeping bag on their back. Were they attempting to keep up with the thrills told in Climbing magazine? Don’t know. I already owned plenty of non-scary guide books and the internet was gradually becoming an even better source of trail beta. My files are still full of interesting trails I clipped in the ’90s and ’00s.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of articles from climbing magazine organized by decade. Very fun reads but also deeply sad seeing how young everyone dies. 45 is about the average age of a mountaineer in this book, and many stories involve death.

[Andrew Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun read. Bunch of good stories.

[Zardoz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best stories from Climbing Magazine organized by decade starting in the 70’s. Some good, some bad but worth the effort if you were ever a climber or wanted to be one.

[Jennie Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 stars if you’re a climber, 3 stars if not. :) lots that wouldn’t make sense unless you are a part of the climbing world. But many exciting stories.

[Carrie]

Read maybe a third. Worth it for the “Black Dog” set of essays on “the dark side of the climber mind.”