Lou’s News #6 — Memories, El Capitan Climbing
My memoir project is all about words. Yet there’s more to it than words alone. For decades now, I’ve bent my spine at the feet of Photoshop, prepping and restoring countless images for my archives, some of which you’ll see if I publish my novel.
The collection is vast, with contributors ranging from old-time climbing and skiing partners through the “modern” years of the WildSnow website, skiing Denali in 2010, and living the mountain town lifestyle.
In the early 1970s, I was spending about two months a year in Yosemite Valley, eventually partnering with well known climber Ray Jardine. In spring of 1974, Ray conscripted me for an audacious plan: be the first to climb El Capitan in a day, via the Nose route (e.g., Nose-in-a-day or NIAD).
We joined up with Colorado aid climbing specialist Kris Walker and gave it our best shot, but we didn’t make the mark. Even so, a grand adventure was had. (And a year later, Jim Bridwell, John Long, and Billy Westbay made history when they did the deed.)
Ray recently loaned me a selection of photos from our climb. Most of the shots were taken from a distance with a long lens — fun to view on the light-table, but of little use for publication. But there was one gem: the shot I present here, our trio just after the climb.
Our 1974 NIAD attempt crew. Ray Jardine (with wife Sandi), Lou, Kris Walker (L to R).
From left to right, you see Ray, his then-wife Sandi, me holding my ratty EB climbing shoes, and Kris Walker. That’s Walker’s Porsche 914 behind us. I’d turned twenty-two that past January, and was as feral as I look.
The Kodachrome slide was a challenge: extreme contrast, faces obscured with blank shadows, featureless highlights. I extracted what I could with a muti-pass scan, noise reduction and lots of spot work. It functions as a retrospective piece, viewed small. The sepia tone brought out some of the shadow detail and helped mellow the blasted highlights. I think we look like young warriors of the rocks.
From my work in progress:
The day before the climb, Walker pulled into Ray’s campsite in his silver-metallic Porsche 914.
“Made it in fourteen hours,” he said from the driver-side window. “Never got pulled over.”
Walker’s roguish brown hair and boyish twenty-two-year-old face reminded me of John Denver.
“Man, how fast did you drive that thing?”
“About one-twenty a few times, downhill with a tailwind.”
The normal, continuous drive time from Boulder to the Valley was at least twenty hours, often stretched to two days with an overnight. Walker had cannonballed it in fourteen hours with no tickets? This guy was a walking luck charm…
Lou
