Literate Matters: Royal Robbins biography traces ascent of a climbing legend

I’ve never been much of a rock climber — blame geography or opportunity. Nonetheless, the exploits of climbers always draw me in. Stories of high walls, dangerous decisions and wild places make for great reading.

A new biography of Royal Robbins by David Smart is a solid addition to the catalog of climbing books. Robbins, “a paint salesman and high school dropout” climbed his way to fame, primarily by putting up first ascents in California’s Yosemite Valley spanning five decades, from 1962 through 2003.

Coming up in California in the years just before the Vietnam era put Robbins in the cultural crosshairs of America’s conflicted aims. He was a “dirtbag,” scrounging meal money and drinking cheap red wine in the fraternity of Yosemite’s Camp 4, the epicenter of climbing’s elite, as well as Robbins sometimes climbing partners including innovators Yvon Choiunard, Tom Frost and others.

Camp 4 allowed access to bouldering sites, as well as Half Dome and El Capitan, where he helped put up the first continuous ascent of The Nose in 1960. His list of first ascents, the grail for big wall climbers, includes not only Yosemite, but New York’s Shawangunks, Wyoming’s Wind River range and more.

Born in West Virginia, his father Shannon “was a poor excuse for a husband” to Royal’s mother Beulah, as “he drank to excess, smashed furniture in fits of rage, and had affairs.” Beulah moved to California with her second husband Jimmy Chandler. Navigating all this trauma, Royal proved a poor student, finding solace instead at the YMCA camp at Bear Lake in the Sierras. He first visited Yosemite on a Boy Scout camping trip in 1949 when he was 14 years old. Back in Los Angeles, “he stole manila ropes from a trucking yard to use on his own adventures,” imagining the climbs to come.

In high school he joined the Rock Climbing Section of the Sierra Club, topping the cliffs at nearby Stoney Point, where he cut his teeth on rock with older, more experienced climbers like John Mendenhall and George Harr. These collaborations, sometimes agreeable and sometimes combative, helped Robbins hone his skill as well as recognize the possibility of more grand opportunities ahead.

Smart, an accomplished climber and founding editor of “Gripped” magazine, revels in the details of Robbins' many climbing exploits, as well as his relationships, including those with other notable climbers and the women in his life. He unravels climbs that forged Robbins’s ethos while cementing his legend. The Robbins here is forceful, aloof, but always dependable. Smart also traces the climbing’s trajectory from the early but more cumbersome methods of protecting on big walls with fixed ropes or pitons hammered into place then left behind, through the modern, some say dangerous, methods which lean more heavily on skill or strength than on gear.

Robbins, who died in 2017 at age 82, was more than a climber, though. He excelled at skiing, learning the rudiments in California before teaching students at the Leysin American School in Switzerland, where he also led climbing and other outdoor adventures. He was also a prolific writer, sometimes, to the chagrin of other climbers, waxing poetic about the allure of high lonely places.

He once sold paint at his father-in-law’s paint store in Modesto, California because climbing didn’t pay. Eventually however he imported European climbing gear, which provided some financial ease, and he lent his name and designs to climbing equipment before founding the outdoor apparel company, along with second wife Liz, that still bears his name.

Some who watched him work at the height of his abilities concluded “‘he was not a natural climber, not beautiful to watch, he was brutish. But he was effective.” They also witnessed his “‘Sphinx-like inscrutability,’” but discovered a pioneer along the way, which you will find too in “Royal Robbins: The American Climber.”

Good Reading.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Literate Matters: Royal Robbins biography traces ascent of a climbing legend