My Life, Volume Three: The Golden Age

Royal Robbins, in the third volume of his autobiography, tells us that this will be his account of the Golden Age of Yosemite climbing, beginning in 1958 with his induction into the army and ending in 1963 with the f irst ascent of North America Wall. Those epochal years saw the emergence of American leadership in climbing, as it did in so many f ields of endeavour, and it was during that time that Robbins made the irrevocable commitment to a life of outdoor adventure – having previously worked as junior bank manager with a taste for clothes and women. It’s the stor y of casting off, whether from Hollow Flake Ledge to the upper unknown of the Salathe headwall, or from a short-lived marriage involving unclear patrimony. Central to Robbins’s decision to pursue the climbing life in its totality is the belief that it would form an organizing principle, one that would hold steady in the face of adversit y.

The causal crossroads of the partners that would make the def ining three ascents of big wall climbing (The Nose, Salathe Wall and North America Wall) alongside Robbins was a rented house and the end of a long driveway in Berkeley, Calif. Known as Krehe’s Pad, it became a cultural antipode to Camp Four, a day’s drive away. In the early ’60s there were typically 10 to 20 climbers somewhere between jobs, Yosemite and Berkeley. Robbins worked as ski instructor in the Sierras to support himself and was never without a girlfriend who climbed or shared his existential values.

Pitch-by-pitch accounts of the notorious Ear (Salathe) and the Black Cave (North America Wall) share space with all-night parties atop an untrammeled El Capitan and steamers to Morocco to climb in the Alps. Robbins’s writing sometimes suffers from too much pitoning and too little personality. Wash away the granite patina of

and you get a meditation on freedom as intense and sincere as that which found expression in the following years of the counterculture.–