Notes from the Top
His remote Big Wall climbs, Expedition to Alaska, and his attempt on Annapurna
Remembering Tom Frost
When Frost passed away at 82 from cancer on August 24, the world lost one of the last voices from Yosemite’s Golden Age. We talked with Frost’s climbing partner Jim Mccarthy to learn more about the American climbing icon.
By now most have read about the loss of legendary American climber Tom Frost, his influence on the future of big wall climbing in Yosemite and beyond; his beautiful photographs; and how he was instrumental in designing the rurp and Hexcentric. For those who don’t know the importance of his legacy, visit Flatlanderfilms.com to see how much his life impacted – in their words – Lynn Hill, Tommy Caldwell, Yvon Chouinard, Royal Robbins, and many others.
Yesterday I spent hours on the phone with one of Frost’s lesser-known, but no less important partners, Jim Mccarthy, who lives in Jackson, Wyo. Eighty-five-year-old Mccarthy barks at you when he’s speaking and he’s not shy of dropping f-bombs when he deems them appropriate. Perhaps these are the former New Yorker’s leftover signs from his many decades of lawyering – he’s taken some 500 cases to court. Personality-wise, at least over the phone, Frost and Mccarthy couldn’t be more different. Frost’s return to a greeting such as “how are you?” was always an affirmative “wonderful!” or “fantastic!” no matter how he may have felt inside. You could almost feel Frost’s trademark smile radiating through the receiver.
I didn’t get the feeling Mccarthy was smiling on the other end of the line. He was there to tell me of his late friend Tom Frost. In addition to climbing together over the decades, in the late ’90s Mccarthy worked with Frost to save Camp 4 when it was at risk of being razed and replaced with triple-story employee dorms.
Back in 1968 – in one of four trips to the Cirque of the Unclimbables in the Northwest Territories, starting with Proboscis in ’63 – Mccarthy returned with Sandy Bill and Frost to tick off the Southeast Face of the Lotus Flower Tower, a near 2,000-foot slab of white granite peppered with chickenheads.
Frost writes on his website Frostworks Climbing.com: “[It] was as exquisite a rock as we had seen. I had dreamed of finding a perfect 1,000-foot long (A1) crack. It was here. I made a mental note to be sure to follow the center of the nine parallel cracks I counted on the upper face. The climb looked perfect in every way.”
Though Frost recalls the brilliance of the route, Mccarthy remembers the struggle. The night before reaching the top his hammock split in half leaving him awake and shivering until dawn. “When Tom and I joined Sandy on the summit I remember being very moved. Tears came to my eyes. During the past two days each of us had entertained fantasies of climbing endlessly into the clear sky. Regretfully, the climb did end; perhaps it was just as well. It was still early in the day and we were able to indulge ourselves for an hour or two on the summit.”
Then things went south and the team almost died during the descent. Instead of rappelling the same route as climbers do today, the trio descended the horrendously loose gully left of the route.
“Big mistake. Without Tom we probably wouldn’t have made it… The crack only allowed for ¾ inch angle pitons and so, very rapidly, we were doing one-piton rappels. I made Tom set everyone of those. We blew through our whole rack getting off that thing. Totally scary. You never want to get near that gully – it’s a dangerous place. It was way too loose and steep to down
climb so we had to rappel the whole friggin’ thing. I remember being quite concerned. I was very pleased to have Tom Frost set those pins.”
Without a hitch, Mccarthy starts on about their next (even more out there) expedition, a climb he selected by viewing images by Bradford Washburn – an attempt the East Face of Moose’s Tooth. He continues:
“I saw a direct line from the bottom of the face straight to the top. 5,500 vertical. We would climb in two teams. I climbed with Chris Bonington and Tom climbed with Galen Rowell.”
The four made it 2,000 feet up and had to do a complicated traverse through a gully to reach the next system. There they were, some of the team hanging on their jugs, when… “A serac the size of a railroad car came off the summit,” Mccarthy says. “I saw and heard this fantastic ice object hurling through the sky.” Because the wall was so steep, the block cleared the team by 100 feet but the explosion from the impact scattered debris at them. Then a storm came in and they bailed.
“Tom and I were the first ones to think of the big walls of the Ruth Gorge. I mean the really big walls. In a certain aspect of history, Tom and I were probably the first people to really set foot on those walls in Alaska. However we did not succeed.”
Mccarthy also filled me in on why Frost didn’t end up summiting Annapurna (26,535) by its South Face in 1970. Frost, while fixing lines for the team, reached 25,000 feet with Mick Burke who grew ill and had to descend. This left Frost alone.
Continued Mccarthy: “So Tom is there and is looking at the summit late in the day. He had a conversation with himself as to whether he should proceed – it was certainly within his reach, but he would need to bivy by himself. Only Herman Buhl had ever bivied that high.” Frost chose to opt out.
He also shares that Frost worked with Sir Edmund Hillary, building schools for “a few seasons in Nepal. Tom was a man of many parts.” There was one last story – an unique life-changing climb for him and Frost – that Mccarthy brings up but would not expand on.*
“I won’t tell you anything about Nanda Devi. Tom and I made a promise to not speak about it.”
*(Pete Takeda wrote a book in 2007 called An Eye on the Top of the World: The Terrifying Legacy of the Cold War’s Most Daring CIA Operation. His piece “The Secret of Nanda Devi” appears in Rock and Ice.) Takeda also did a twopiece story on the climb in Alpinist 62 and 63.