The pioneering ‘stoned master’ who conquered Yosemite
Jim Bridwell, a paisley-clad climber who pioneered new routes up some of the world’s most formidable rock faces, including the prow of El Capitan — a granite monolith in California’s Yosemite Valley that rises twice the height of the Empire State Building — died Feb. 16 at a hospital in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 73. He had liver and kidney failure from hepatitis C, his wife, Peggy Bridwell, told The Associated Press.
Bridwell made historic climbs in the Alaska Range near Denali and in the Andes of Patagonia, and in 1982 was part of an expedition that became the first to circumvent Mount Everest, trekking 480 kilometres around the mountain and over some of its 6,000-metre sister peaks.
But in a five-decade climbing career, he was most closely associated with Yosemite National Park, where in the 1970s he led a group of renegade climbers that dropped acid while bouldering, filched food from the park cafeteria and idolized the strength of Bruce Lee and the psychedelic rock of Jimi Hendrix. They called themselves the Stonemasters. A more fitting name, climber Lynn Hill once joked, might have been the “stoned masters.”
While Bridwell and his circle blazed through prodigious amounts of low-grade marijuana, they also established themselves as some of the world’s most intrepid climbers, devising new routes — and setting new speed records — on the rock domes and spires that have made Yosemite the Mecca of American climbing.
Bridwell notched 100 first ascents in the national park and was 30 when he performed his signature climb, scaling the so-called Nose of El Capitan with his friends John Long and Billy Westbay. The 880-metre ascent was once considered impossible, and even when it was first scaled, in a siege-style expedition led by Warren Harding in 1958, the climb took 47 days.
Bridwell and his partners, complementing their store of ropes, nuts, pitons and water with about five packs of cigarettes, completed the ascent in 15 hours, smoke breaks included.
“Friends greeted us outside the Mountain Room bar with a heroes welcome,” Bridwell later wrote. “Soon, I had more drinks in hand than I could juggle. My fondest memory occurred the following day when (Harding) . . . gave me his warm congratulations. I thanked him and hobbled toward the cafeteria for some stolen coffee.”
The climb marked the first time El Capitan’s Nose had been ascended in less than a day. The achievement has long since been surpassed — last year, climber Alex Honnold scaled the rock in about four hours without the use of ropes — but became an indelible moment in the history of American climbing, immortalized in a photo of Bridwell and his partners standing at the base of the mountain.
“They seem to exude cockiness — gods sneering down on mere mortals,” Honnold wrote in his book Alone on the Wall.
“Cigarettes dangle from Bridwell’s and Long’s mouths. They’re dressed like hippies, in loose fitting vests and shirts, but they could just as well pass for Hells Angels.”
Bridwell sometimes wrangled with park rangers, who sought to stymie the allthings-go culture of his climber commune at Yosemite’s Camp Four.
Still, the Park Service commissioned Bridwell in 1967 to establish Yosemite’s search-and-rescue team, according to journalist and climber Daniel Duane’s book El Capitan: Historic Feats and Radical Routes. (Given Bridwell’s disdain for bureaucracy and authority, it was “not the wisest policy decision we ever made,” one Yosemite superintendent later said.)
Bridwell’s risk-taking style led some fellow climbers to label him reckless, and reportedly contributed to his being left out of major American expeditions to the Himalayas in the1980s. In his mind, however, the hazards of injury and even death were part of what made scaling a mountain worthwhile in the first place.
“Adventure and excitement are the two things missing from civilization,” he told the magazine Palm Springs Life in 2015, from retirement in Southern California. “Danger keeps you on your toes. You’ll never feel as alive as when death is over your shoulder.”