Climber’s team was the first to conquer El Capitan
‘Maybe it’s a testosterone thing,’’ said Wayne Merry, who took part in the first expedition to scale El Capitan, the 2307m smooth rock face in Yosemite National Park, California. ‘‘But as a climber you want to find your limits. When the opportunity to climb El Capitan came up, it was the most challenging thing I could possibly attempt.’’
Today many climbers scale the entire face in a day. The record time for one of the face’s best known routes, the Nose, is just under two hours.
However, in 1958 rudimentary equipment limited climbers to attempting only a pitch or two at a time.
Whereas modern climbing shoes are tight-fitting slippers, designed to leverage the movement of every toe, in those days they were little different from hiking boots.
Joining Merry were Warren Harding, George Whitmore and Rich Calderwood. Harding had tried the climb the previous year and concluded that ‘‘the only feasible plan of attack would be to establish a succession of camps up the face, linking them with fixed ropes’’.
Merry, Harding, Whitmore and Calderwood did the climb in 45 day stages, spread out over many months, each time reaffixing ropes to the point on the face that they had already reached, allowing them to regain their previous height easily and proceed beyond it.
Their eventual success was all the more remarkable considering the unnecessary risks to which they subjected themselves – they drank wine on the way up and crafted their own pitons out of the legs of wooden stoves. ‘‘I wouldn’t hang a picture from them today,’’ Merry said later, ‘‘but back then we hung our lives on them.’’
The park rangers would not let them climb in the summer and told them they had to be done by Thanksgiving in November. To meet this deadline they made a final push, lasting 12 days and interrupted by a snowstorm. Calderwood dropped out and Harding decided to climb the final pitch with a head torch in the dark. He reached the top at 6am on November 12, closely followed by Merry and Whitmore. A support party met them at the summit with champagne.
‘‘Climbing is the ultimate escapism,’’ Merry said. ‘‘When you are on any difficult wall, it’s total concentration. When you can stop on the ledge and bring up your partner, you have the time to appreciate where you are – and being high on the face of El Capitan is like no other place on Earth.
‘‘To make the first ascent on the world’s most famous rock climb was an incredible experience.’’
Wayne Merry was born in Fresno, California, in 1931. His mother, Sara, and his father, Harold White, a radio station manager, divorced when he was young.
Sara was remarried to Ralph Merry, a Bell Telephone employee who adopted him. He grew up in Calistoga, a town in northern California, and joined the navy after leaving high school. It was while working as a dental technician for the navy in San
Diego that he joined the Sierra Club and his interest in rock climbing began.
On leaving the navy in 1956, Merry began to study conservation at San Jose State University, where he met Cindy Barrison.
While climbing El Capitan he would write her love letters, seal them in a tin can with a ribbon attached, and drop them down the wall for the support team to pick up and post to her. During those many evenings he spent sitting on ledges, part way up the rock face, he had a lot of time to contemplate the course he would like his life to take.
He decided, on finishing the climb, that he would propose to her. They married the next year.
After completing the El Capitan climb, he became a park ranger in Yosemite and attempted to ease the animosity between the climbers and the rangers.
‘‘When I came along into the Park Service in 1959, climbers were considered somewhere between hippies and bears,’’ he recalled.
‘‘Honestly, some of them deserved it.’’
It therefore caused quite a stir when he decided to hire climbers as rangers. ‘‘I had to fight with them to let me hire guys with facial hair and without slick uniforms,’’ he said.
‘‘But the good thing that came out of it is that, all of a sudden, people started to see these guys as people who were very responsible and capable of making a living, not just bums.’’
He became chief ranger of the Denali National Park in Alaska, where he was shaken to witness the deaths of seven climbers in a mountaineering accident. The experience inspired him to return to California to found the Yosemite Mountaineering School and Guide service in 1969.
Soon, however, Merry moved back north, to the Canadian hamlet of Atlin, where he had little money so lived off the land, growing vegetables and hunting moose to feed his family – he and Cindy having had two children by then, Scott and Kendall.
Merry also wrote for climbing magazines and kept up a steady business in mountaineering courses.
He gave training to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Rangers and Parks Canada, among others, led camping trips and helped to set up Arctic College on Baffin Island, near the Northwest Passage.
As he got older, Merry found that his desire to scale vertiginous rock faces ebbed steadily away. As he told one interviewer: ‘‘That phase of life slowly became less important and other things became more important.’’
While climbing El Capitan he would write Cindy love letters, seal them in a tin can with a ribbon attached, and drop them down the wall for the support team to ... post to her.