A pilot project started this year requires climbers to register for a free permit if they plan to spend the night on Yosemite’s walls. Yosemite overnight climbing permits, (209) 354-2025. Stocks route maps, ropes, carabiners and the requisite sticky-rubber boots - as well as that chilling compendium of climbs gone terribly wrong, “Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite.” Mountain Shop at Curry Village, 9020 Curry Village Drive, Yosemite (209) 372-8396. T-shirts with the school’s “Go Climb a Rock” slogan remain one of the park’s top-selling souvenirs. Guides for individuals and groups are available. Founded in 1969, the school offers lessons in the park for beginners (climbing 60 feet up the base of a cliff and rappelling down), intermediates (crack climbing) and experts (big-wall climbing). Yosemite Mountaineering School and Guide Service, 9020 Curry Village Drive, Yosemite National Park (209) 372-8344,. Call (209) 742-1000 or email information on when the museum is open. Yosemite Climbing Museum, 5180 Highway 140, Mariposa, Calif. (Dean Fidelman / Yosemite Climbing Museum) He taught me to drink - not wise to try and keep up with him.” He looks like he’d just as soon murder you. Looking at him, I can’t believe I did that. “He was also,” Yager added, “the first hitchhiker I ever picked up.
It took 45 days over two years, with climbers eating a Thanksgiving dinner in a bivouac on the wall. Harding and his team used extensive aids to do so, Yager said. “That’s Warren Harding, the first man to make it up El Cap,” he said. On a recent visit, Yager pointed to a photo of a hairy man with bloodshot eyes who glares from one wall. Yager and his fellow docents, mainly also climbers, have the stories to help make the photos come alive. The museum also focuses on the outsize personalities who have pitted themselves against the valley’s high walls. One shows Patagonia founder Chouinard climbing, paired with a display of equipment he hand-forged in the 1960s.
The climbers who founded the big gear and clothing businesses are featured in the photos on the walls. Leaning against a plexiglass case is the jumar, the clamp that attaches to a fixed rope, worn by Mark Wellman, the first paraplegic climber to make it up El Cap in 1989. There are the early hemp ropes and then more high-tech ones, so much lighter and stronger. Here are the pitons forged from steel by a climbing blacksmith who developed them to work in Yosemite’s distinctive long vertical cracks. The artifacts show innovations that have helped climbers succeed up ascents once thought impossible.
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