Doug Robinson - Father of clean climbing gives away the dirty secrets

we came up with this wedge-shaped design and i got to name them stoppers which was fun and you came up with the name stoppers yeah okay got it and so there's this little rivalry going on within the company which like hexes are better stoppers are better well i would modestly point out that hexes have disappeared and stoppers are still around pitons were revolutionary at some point in history and then very ropes in literally nuts were revolutionary yeah uh when did they really take off well in the mid 60s is the short answer to that but of course i have a longer answer for you let's hear it here's my trad rack that's way too nice of gear well this is this is modern this is like right up to the moment what i carry when i go climb it and i'm going to show you some stuff on it that's not so much for instance how about where'd it go never find anything on my rack anyway sandcast moak chalkstone from england 1967 i got this and it was my first commercial piece of clean climbing gear i was um you know i already bought a bunch of brass machine nuts and i filed the threads out of them because i thought they might cut the runners and and was carrying those around my neck like the old literal machine nut off the snowden railway well in 1966 royal robbins who was pretty famous by then went on a slideshow tour to england and he went climbing and he found out about clean climbing from the brits who were good at it and he brought back some tools including this sandcast moak and several others that were being commercially made then in england and he grabbed his wife liz and they went up and did a climb called nutcracker in yosemite which to this day is the most popular route in the valley the line up for it now still really cool climb but they did it without carrying a hammer radical they were only putting nuts into cracks in the rock with their fingers and they were trusting that radical um but it worked do you know how strong that nut is with that rope the way it is uh i should probably replace the rope but uh it's pretty strong so like it'll hold thousands of pounds the normal nuts were only like what 8 to 12 kilometers this thing was like 20 plus you tested one of these no not one of those it was a saddle mesh oh it's a saddle nut but the way the rope goes through yeah the rope's so strong because it's in a loop right it's twice as yeah single strand and yeah that's funny that that was sketchy back then but it actually is stronger than the climbing rope itself yeah the sketchy part of course was the nut in the crack because you didn't hammer it in that's right it was no force involved and we were used to hammering harder the more scared we got so this is felt sketchy to like slide this into the crack and then your rope is leveraging it maybe not so we quickly started the practice of putting about one-third more nuts in the rock than we thought we needed or then we would have used with pitons because some of them were going to get pulled out after so nutcracker really good climb royale's friend chuck pratt who had been on the north america wall with him and the salafa and you know their good buddies in the hottest wall climbers in the world and pratt was becoming the best free climber in yosemite along with frank sacker pratt showed up out there at and he shakes his head and goes nuts to you and that became the title of the article and royal played off that in talking about doing that well i've been climbing in the valley and for years at that point i'm pretty serious about it i love this thing and my imagination got fired up by what royal had brought back from england and demonstrated on you know five eight plus climb good stout climbing so i immediately went out and as i said i got a bunch of brass machine nuts different sizes filed the threads out put them on runners i was starting to try clean climbing myself well as it happened i began guiding about that same time in the palisades now out there there's alpine rock with the cracks have nice well-defined edges and they're more shapely so you could practically throw nuts into the cracks and they would they would work they would hold so very quickly they began guiding without carrying a hammer and the other guides saw this and liked the idea so pretty soon the whole palisades is alive with what hasn't yet been coined as clean climbing but that's what we were doing and royal was using them some in yosemite they were being added to a piton rack and used occasionally and the cracks in the valley are a lot more difficult they're flared often and climbing's harder too so so it wasn't advancing as much there but we were getting a lot of faith in clean climbing techniques in the palisades and then we would go to yosemite spring and fall when we weren't guiding and and take our clean gear with us and we're trying to do it so like by 1971 i did the first clean grade four the east betrays the middle cathedral rock without carrying a hammer and then the next year after that they did the stexalotha without carrying a hammer so we're trusting this technology we're advancing the technology about that time i went to work for um schnart equipment company and what year is this this is well like 1970s when i started working there i started out as what i call an assistant blonde bender like a bongs are these big three four inch pitons for um wide cracks and the name comes from they sound kind of like a cowbell even on your on your rack they're if you have a distinctive sound when you're coming through the forest with them so they needed a little bit of straightening and tweaking before they could be sold from after they got riveted anyway there um you could sit out barefoot in front of the tin shed and with a cardboard box of bongs and a wood block and and just straighten them and pretty them up a little bit before they went and got sold so uh that was my first job there just a grunt job and i but tom frost was working there and he and chenard were starting to get interested in clean climbing and of course being gear makers they started thinking about developing gear for it so gennard went off on one tack and frost and i went off on another and i can show you what those were see these are hex centric this is like an improvement on the old machine nut generator was hot on this design and they came in all different sizes and frost and i though were fans of this um wedge shape so we came up with these boy this one's well worn a lot of use in a lot of places um we came up with this wedge-shaped design and i got to name them stoppers which was fun and you came up with the name stoppers yeah okay got it and so there's this little rivalry going on within the company which like hexes are better stoppers are better well i would modestly point out that hexes have disappeared and stoppers are still around they got pretty small this is this is a number two in fact it's not even the smallest one these would only hold about 600 pounds before the wire broke so they were more of an aid thing but i actually know of a 30 foot well glacier point apron so it was not a fall but a slide that was held on one of these probably dynamic delay involved but you know you get the idea and we were really having fun with this i mean you put a blob of aluminum in the bench vise and file the sides until it got an angle that was about what you wanted and take it out and test it and then bring it back and modify it again talk about the testing oh the testing yeah once upon a time a dynamometer was this thing with its dial on it and a needle still have them actually oh radical so yeah we would take those take the dial dynamometer out and attach it to a nut or a piton whatever an ice screw we were big on ice testing at the time because you know that seemed sketchier than anything else and a hydraulic ram and pull it out slowly you know there wasn't these are not terribly dynamic tests but and then you were watching the dial and you just got to watch how far it went before it snapped to zero as the hardware failed and you go yeah that was about 3 200 foot pounds this is back before kilonewtons were invented isaac newton hasn't been around yet yeah right oh my god no i mean the euros stall under the umbrella of not black diamond yet not black diamond equipment making this stuff in the company um yeah i mean all dozen of us at the most i'm a guide so i'm off in the mountains i come down and i work for a few weeks it's fun it's exciting to be part of this development of stuff and then you know i take the latest prototypes and go back to the mountains or or we load them in the company van and put a hammock in the back and drive across the mojave in the night and spend a weekend and you know it's the same old dirtbag lifestyle that's always existed we just happen to be working for a hardware company instead of doing whatever construction instead of writing software in the 50s yeah yeah right clean climbing continued [Laughter] there i was no well i was actually at working at gennady equipment once in a while and running back to the mountains to guide i was really lucky to have a career that would keep me climbing god so lucky and i got to lead all the time you know ty on behind me i'm lead and as always like five seven stuff which is to me still the most fun kind of climbing because it's it's easier to get into the flow state when you're climbing moderate stuff and you're climbing all the time so it's you know 5'7 is not a problem you're throwing nuts into the rock every once in a while and anyway reminiscence yeah cool cool life still in my 20s so we developed clean climbing hardware the stoppers the eccentrics for a while and they were actually coming out commercially they were being sold a little but you know nobody basically believed in this stuff they're cute but why trust them how could you trust them so that being the question um i had the answer because i'd been guiding with them for years i did trust them so you're living the dream yeah and i try to convince the world trusting clean yeah protection and trust is infectious contagious so meanwhile yvonne and tom are starting to think about putting out their first real catalog for the china equipment company and god what a beauty they they did i mean the aesthetics you know you could tell just looking at those pitons that aesthetics are really an important part of the vision of these guys frost by the way was an aerospace engineer and quit doing that in order to make climbing hardware and so that he could go climbing more often very smart decision dirt bag to the core all right so they're getting ready to put out this catalog and the catalog is going to have in it all this new clean climbing hardware where is it come on stoppers hex-centric radical stuff and those guys were totally sold on it by then so they bet the farm on this new hardware they're a piton maker that's where their money's coming from they put all their money into dies i mean that's an expensive die each size and it's easy to get dirt bags to cut them off with a hacksaw and polish them and stuff but but you have to have the dye first to make it happen so they bet the farm on clean climbing and this is like really an exciting people period they're maybe a dozen people working there but most part time and is this the biggest climbing company around at this point oh yeah yeah oh yeah so so we're talking about this whole thing and they decide that it's really it's going to be a good idea to have a to explain themselves explain ourselves so i wrote some of my dad's notes in here just kind of sweet now that he's gone but um he's an engineer an aerospace engineer too so he really understood what we were doing anyway i got to write the manifesto for clean climbing the and janard named it the whole natural art of protection which i thought was really cool name this is a team effort a lot of ways but i got to write this thing that um i just read you a couple lines this is the way it starts out there is a word for it and the word is clean climbing with only nuts and runners for protection is clean climbing clean because the rock is left unaltered by the passing climber clean because nothing is hammered into the rock and then hammered back out leaving the rock scarred and the next climbers experience less natural clean because the climber's protection leaves little track of his ascension clean is climbing the rock without changing it a step closer to organic climbing for the natural man goes on it's mostly technique like how to place nuts how to know that they're strong um doing things like uh you got a horizontal crack at your belly ledge you're a thousand feet in the air all you can do is put one nut in this that's pulling this way and one nut in that's pulling this way but you can figure out how to wire them together and pull them towards each other so that you get an omnidirectional anchor by very directional pieces that are pulled in the wrong directions so you know i'm just like gleeful where we're inventing this how to make it work stuff that truthfully was a lot harder than than then once cams came along but i'm jumping ahead a little with cams because where this is still 1972 but we're um pulling off the north face of sentinel rock the stexalotha without carrying hammers and feeling pretty bold about ourselves and the catalog came out the bet is working out because people are starting to buy this stuff a little we need some impetus along comes galen rowell he's not a famous photojournalist yet he's a greasy chevy mechanic and he bet the farm too actually he sold his chevy shop he had enough money he figured to make it 18 months he had two kids at this point i mean this is like he did bet the farm and luckily he got a you got an assignment from national geographic not bad to do a sidebar to an article about yosemite so they're doing a major article about yosemite yeah do a big wall and we'll give you a couple pages and stuff so he came to me and to dennis haddock and said hey you want to come along well dennis hennig and i happen to have been doing first ascents five tens only with nuts for protection so he i don't know if galen was even aware of this but but we went sure as long as we can try to do it clean and galen goes yeah whatever um we'll put some pins and a hammer in the bottom of the hall bag and in case you guys can't pull off this clean thing you know clean that's what you call it we'll be able to get up the wall and i'll get my my story so okay giant steamer trunk arrives from national geographic it's full of nikons and film and you know ah well we don't know about that stuff galen you sort out the cameras we'll sort the hardware and we left out the pins and the hardware and the hammer and we didn't tell him till the third pitch he was really a good sport about it i gotta say because he knew that we were had faith in this and we knew that we had it totally wired which it turned out we did and we got up the thing in three days and his photos landed on the desk of the photo editor at national geographic and suddenly it became the cover story and the the major story about yosemite is sort of added on to it because his photos were so good you know these photojournalists he's um even then he was good at what he did and he wrote the story too even said doug's ideal as a mountain goat okay i guess that works because they're pretty damn good climbers um yeah anyway that's dennis hennik on the cover and there's me long hair starting to lead one of the crocs pitches uh halfway up the wall which we did three we we freed 81 of the climbing up to 10a or so which wasn't being done on walls then but you know i wasn't a wall climber i didn't know that you weren't supposed to climb like that [Laughter] i thought free climbing was fun so we were doing it and okay one more tiny story before i give you the punch line on this because they national geographic is so good they sent around the proofs of this to us to look at and said you know any any questions any concerns and i said the article is really good the photos are good the captions are good but your title and they had conquering half dome the hard way and said you know the idea of conquest is anathema to climbers we never claim that we feel lucky if we can slip through the defenses of the mountain and get up something in and approach it humbly or if you're not humble you might get chopped so they changed the title you know that's really responsive i've worked for a lot of magazines it doesn't always happen okay so the punch line is that doesn't hurt to have a circulation of 15 million or so and it this slam dunked the clean climbing revolution not what we did but the publicity generated by it right it and within a few months you literally could not be caught slinking out of camp four with a hammer on it was that fast people everybody got on board thank you national geographic when did you create your stoppers to the point of when did this take off oh well the stoppers were we had them pretty dialed by 70 maybe 71 and in 74 this comes out and and hex centrics by a year later because the molds were more expensive for them so 74 we had all that stuff and i will show you one other piece of hardware that turned out to be crucial that tom frost genius guy invented hold that thought though so 74 the clean climbing revolution was over by the end of that summer um everybody had bought into it and we can get into cams which are huge and i mean i have the best camps ever invented and five tens in yosemite scare the [ __ ] out of me yeah that's amazing me too because your shoes back then yeah your shoes back then were what still boots well they were boots yeah when we started um literal boots when did eb's come out my first season was that i spent all summer in yosemite i was climbing in mountain boots you did tens and mountain boots no no that was eights and nines oh eights and nines yeah in mountain boots i mean they were pretty damn good for dime edges they rock on that to terrain but and then we had clutter shoes which was like a a one layer boot ankle high with a thin rubber sole still was a lug sole but you got more feel of the rock through those and they were really the hot ticket they were the best that we had clutter shoes austrian good ones zoller talls and there were two or three different kinds robins had a different one that he liked better and pratt had another different one and since he was the leading crack climber and i was trying to apprentice to him then i immediately went and bought the same the shoes he had which were the same shoes that my mom chose to hike in i mean this is not high tech here except we bought them tighter okay so back to half dome for a moment you ever seen one of these no i mean they're very few of them were made it's oh look it says diamond c on it cool this is a crackin up this is a tom frost invention the idea was and this is the fat one you can see but it's got a little bit of a tapered face on the end of it and you can see it on the big one but on once you get down to the to the tiny one you can hardly see the taper but it's a little bit ground on there the idea was that the smallest stoppers would fit down to where you could get a wire through them but that's as small as they could get but there are cracks smaller than that frost could see this and so mainly for aid climbing he developed cracking ups and you slide this into the crack in the rock it's a little bit offset so it's got some caming action and it's got the nut face but it's really clever towards the top of half dome the last difficult pitch was an aid pitch it's free now at 5 12 and there's alex honell tells us an incredible story about working on soloing that the 12 moves up there but you know this was back in the easy days when we we could aid stuff and nobody cared um these proved crucial it was the old a4 pitch you know that's downgraded now it's probably a2 plus but but it was hard at the time and it was hard partly because the best parts of the crack had leftover bashes in there with rotten slings on them well we weren't touching any of the pitons on the route you know we were being purists and so to get in the pieces of the crack that were in between these old bashes we had to use frosts cracking ups and it's the only thing that allowed us to get all the way up that wall without touching a piton actually galen clipped a piton and the zigzags he didn't know any better and we we didn't feel like at that point we needed to pull a rope and go down and climb it clean because whatever but um anyway yeah cracking up's brilliant and but only made for a little while and this was a product that let's say did not make a million dollars what what replaced these like they're obviously valuable oh what made them not continue well what replaced them is unfortunately kind of retro because big wall climbers kept using pitons because they were used they were working shallow cracks and flared cracks and they were stacking pitons i mean they were it was a different game than free climbing with clean gear so they had a thing i forget what it's called but it's like half of a cracking up like this with a hammer phase speaks yeah and you could tap it in with your hammer which makes you feel better certainly does and they work with the number five if you hit them with the number five that's all you have it makes you feel better yeah yeah i mean hitting them with things was certainly going on and i had i would i climbed with a few people who after a climb or two i didn't climb with anymore because they bashed on my rack beautiful nuts they didn't know you good enough to not hammer in your nuts like you're the clean guy mr father of clean climbing i'll just bash on your nuts [Laughter] you've heard of simultaneous invention in like science and engineering where times are ripe and people come up with the same idea but they don't know each other well clean climbing turned out to be the same thing although it took us a long time to know it but in the chewing gunks in new york the good old gunks a brit actually in the late 50s moved to new york city for his work and i don't know what it was but his name was michael westmacott he was on the famous 53 everest expedition the first one to succeed so he was an all-around mountaineer but he knew nuts from england and brought them to the gunks so we're talking the early 60s when they got to the gunks now there's no communication between the east coast and the west coast so we had no idea what was going on out there but um he was quietly climbing stuff clean and john stannard who became one of the stars of that era and free climbing in the gunks pushing 510 got really into nuts also and so he was doing clean protection on his hard new routes and we didn't we had no idea here so we're developing it here they're developing in the gunks it took well just before while i was writing in fact the clean climbing manifesto if you will shannara had hands me this copy of a thing called the eastern trade was just a few pieces of paper but john stannard wrote it and it was proselytizing for using clean protection in the chihuahuan guns and i wow looked at this thing wow this is really cool these guys are doing it too this is reinforcement for what we're about what we're trying to push and i unfortunately did not mention it in the manifesto i wish i had now because i i take every opportunity i can to give john stannard and michael westmacott all the credit that they are due for simultaneously inventing this way cool technology and pushing it so hard they were climbing this hard like 510 was as hard as it got then you know yosemite the gunks same difficulty ratings clean protection pretty cool were you living in bishop i was living in bishop and i remember reading about this years ago and something about lynn hill or something was with you basically you guys were looking at that east coast pamphlet that you got really and yeah i remember reading this and essentially you were just like you had summit and summit was basically a mountaineering magazine not a climbing magazine right so to get this little pamphlet just like re-emphasized everything you were doing yeah and it said you didn't even meet him until decade or two later or something i still haven't met him but we've corresponded a little and [Music] we're going to do a video interview together maybe in the next year i'm hoping and because i'm really anxious to talk to him about this stuff like i heard about michael westmacott only in the last year from joe kelsey who was one of the bulgarians who were active in the gunks at the time or i wouldn't even know that part of the story the british connection there the british connection to royal robbins come bringing clean gear to the valley you know it's it's really cool this is coming together so i'm really looking forward to talking to john stannard about it face to face on tape and see what he has to say wow yeah simultaneous invention the simultaneous invention happens so often in high lining often a high lining and uh it's hard to know who gets credit for stuff actually because it's happening all the time to even today we invented something for the world record project we just did huh that somebody else is like oh this is my design i'm currently working on is like these z drags it's like you mean the not really a world record because it's only one tenth longer 300 feet long not a world record yeah right [Laughter] well i can't wait to hear what you think of this as somebody who really pushed clean climbing well yeah clean climbing was was advancing yosemite climbing because it was faster to be able to get a nut off your rack and slot it instead of taking a piton off putting it in the crack until it just barely holds and then where's my hammer and hitting it and hoping the first hit doesn't knock it out of the crack so nuts were faster and with energy dependent climbs these the harder and harder crack climbs are getting done in the valley and now we're edging into 511 in the 70s it's an advantage well 1977 there was a guy ray jardine who came up with these things spring-loaded camming devices his name for him was friends was brilliant you know almost as good as stoppers it uh i shouldn't say stuff like that um because because jardine was brilliant i mean he really and but he didn't have his patent yet so he had his rack of handmade friends under his coat leaving camp four and his partner sworn to secrecy and they were going out and what's faster than putting a stopper into a crack it's plug and play and so jardine interestingly enough upped the standards more than anyone else could at the time and training had come into the valley the backer ladders were all set up people were injuring their elbows trying to train too hard and it was a tech advancement that actually upped the standards more than you could by being ruthlessly strong which had really come in you know in the 60s we thought training was on sporting and behaved that way but whatever um jardine was not only training but he had invented friends and was slinking around with them until his patent came out and he could be sure that well thanks to that patent he bought a sailboat and sailed off to the south seas after raising the standards to 513 in the valley unheard of i mean he literally added a number grade not just another letter or two but a number grade from 12 to 13. it never happened before never happened since in yosemite or anywhere else that i know of and it was thanks to this the solid stem is like a t he now it looks so retro but the genius of it is not the stem it's not the trigger it's the shape this is a logarithmic spiral and i don't know to this day i guess i don't know enough math but to understand why you could get a holding angle when it's all the way compressed or when it's almost all the way open that it holds equally well that's because this is a logarithmic curve on the cam okay this stuff i'll never understand but for what it's worth there it is that's the genius of this thing it's one of the well it's fast it's plug and play 1977 revolutionized yosemite revolutionized climbing all over the world but yosemite is where it happened and you know it's the coolest climbing area on earth so it's a good thing that it happened there and that jardine did it and hats off i don't even have my hat on but hats off to you ray jardine for doing this he did some other stuff that was maybe sketchier like chip and holds on the roosevelt cap because he was a little too eager to make the first free ascent and he didn't anyway genius thank you left the valley sailed off to the south seas you know what else happened nobody knows this in the climbing world he came back quit sailing it's kind of boring being confined to a sailboat i guess i've heard that from a bunch of people um he came back and he invented ultralight backpacking he became a through hiker and he published a book where he was urging you to get out your sewing machine cut nylon you can make way lighter gear than any of this stuff like the seven pound internal frame pack was a big deal in and everybody was carrying them because nobody knew any better with jardine knew better and he gave patterns for this stuff he didn't start go light or you know whatever company and make more millions because he'd already made his millions on friends he didn't need the money and he was smart enough to go for experience instead of dollars so he is considered a god among through hikers he literally wrote the book about how to make that gear and then other people like golight for instance um actually made the gear the some of it wasn't such hot gear wayne gregory my pack making friend i made stuff for him like the first carbon fiber stays that were put in the backpack and we had fun together doing that but i couldn't talk him into ultralight he was still the king of the seven pound backpacks oh sorry wayne but um these other guys were smart about it they were sort of smart about it they did what what gregory called a pillowcase with shoulder straps and yeah they were light but they didn't carry well at all but it didn't matter if you had 14 pounds on your back and you got a resupply every three days it actually made no difference because through hiking is this whole different thing than like backpacking into a month-long expedition where you actually need a hefty carrying system so i guess i'm a pack designer so too so i guess i had to tell that story because i actually have made ultralight packs that that really carry and that you can carry 40 or 50 pounds in but um that's a whole different story and not part of what we're doing here so friends um and the improvement on friends thanks to black diamond formerly chinard equipment company same trigger same plug and play same curve especially after the pattern wore off uh i mean and and the two axle design that's actually how they got around the patent and it does have a larger throw than friends did so as an improvement like one piece will fit a wider selection of cracks so pretty genius and yeah these are the latest ones they got here where's the bigger one the the hole patterns in them this this is brand new they're lighter but they work in exactly the same way flexible stems are handy very handy in fact flex in any direction big improvement but essentially the same kind of device right the camelots they called them they're half a dozen different manufacturers i don't know maybe they're only two or three now a lot of shakeout and people in garages like like these oh not that one aliens in garages aliens are really cool because they managed to make them i mean look how small this guy is this is a barely much range of fitting size but i bought these two as soon as they came out because i knew the exact place that i wanted to put them and there was a 40 foot run out if you didn't have this guy and they flex [Music] they flex in fact they flex too much because the axle flex bent under some falls and guys in the garage went wait wait we're gonna get sued and so they quit making them and sold the name to somebody else and don't i forget who's making them now but you can't keep track of all the garages out there um but anyway this like as small as a cam gets so you still need the small stoppers and i guess just to finish up the story of clean climbing tom frost comes back after going off and having a very successful company called chimera that was doing lighting for hollywood like soft lighting get that chick looking good um and he sold that company came back and started making stopper-like things again they're called sentinels they have uh a steeper angle to them we debated back and forth so much on the angle but steeper angle than than the um than a stopper does you can see the difference it's only one or two degrees um sentinel nuts because everybody's so fond of sentinel rock and the stixxal if they climb that was the big deal in our history and still a high water mark in anyone's climbing career to get up that sucker bad ass clown um let me show you there's like got some larger there we go there's a bigger sentinel he put all of his out on wire but he actually okayed me to cut the wire drill them out put cord on them see i like the flexibility here because the problem of it being leveraged out of the crack behind you is the same old problem that we always had with wires so i just nobody else does this but i just had to say this because i think it's cool and i kind of like it when my pro stays in the crack behind me it's a good thing um gosh i think that brings clean climbing protection all the way up to the present it's mostly cams nowadays even i use them a lot because i get lazy and it's plug and play well it's they stay in the rock even better than the stoppers do ray jardine made he was a rocket scientist too wasn't he he was some super i think he was yeah he was a rocket scientist yes doesn't surprise me no kidding oh my god and then he used right the climb that the hardest climb in the world grand illusion it's only possible because of those friends suzuki would have been a headache yeah but he didn't put it up that was tony um yeah tony put it up and then suzuki got it and yeah and he trained at kasumes son dinkum for it really yeah he said if 40 pound pack and would just do laps on dinkum whack that kasumis that was his training for grand illusion oh that's so i'm just gonna get good enough doing that yeah nine to a thirteen like yeah maybe that pack really does something boy how many years were friends the only cams out there because of the packing i'm not going to be able to give you a good answer to that it was like it was five or more it might have been ten um but i mean ever you had to have friends right away it was as revolutionary as sticky rubber was in 83 so what did sticky rubber and friends do for your personal climbing level were you able to just jump oh yeah because you were strong with yeah i was strong boots and nuts well i had rock shoes by then i had eb's but man as soon as the fee race came along the eb's went in the trash because because the sticky rubber was was like a a one-hole grade jump in some people's estimations i don't think i jumped a grade but i was getting old by then it must have been in my 30s that's a 75 year old is 30s old should i be concerned [Laughter] be afraid half you're right you're very afraid i'm less than half your age and i'm old yeah no nothing about that but i mean i'm joking but it sort of i guess if you're a sport climber and you're trying to climb 15s you know maybe 30 32 is to cut off now i don't i don't even know i don't care i still get to climb i get to climb five sevens all day long and it pulls me into the flow state which is really why i climb because it's like um the headspace it's not the headspace of pulling off a 511. anymore or whatever your limit is you want to try highlining 11 for me i'm scared because if you like flow state i got something for you i actually have tried you know like slack landing two feet off the ground and it it really is it's big respect for what you guys do big response well i can't climb five tens if my life depended on it so big risk in boots look at this yeah or alien cams you know in the end it doesn't matter what your discipline is it's doing a discipline and having maybe enough discipline to go out all the time and i probably climbed five seven only three times in the last week and not very many pitches of it but but immigrant wall was one of those times you know and yeah we did did the 5 8 route out there i had to put on my rock shoes not my approach shoes [Laughter] yeah so about shoes like what was your history on that well started climbing in mountain boots then i got clutter shoes which were way cool and partly because the toes were thinner and like you could fit them into narrow narrower cracks you know side light on that this is like a conceptual thing but hand cracks were the deal in the 60s and then off hands and fists and off width especially mainly because chuck pratt liked him and he thought of that as a frontier so it was because he was the best in the valley and we all followed what he did but you know we couldn't see we couldn't see finger cracks nobody was trying to climb finger cracks until the 70s and then all of a sudden i don't know who did this and how it came about i'd actually have to think about it but but the point is conceptually finger cracks were like piton cracks okay nailing it here and yet now they're one of the coolest crack climbing things you can do so it's like conceptual breakthrough it's like going from a bowline to a figure eight you know it's somebody figured it out it wasn't about being a good climber so let's segue into having you show us uh piton in this random rock here and then placing stoppers from the stopper guy placing friends yeah and watching your face light up while you do it yeah being a big kid is always an advantage i wanted to say one more thing about shoes because we were talking about that progression and you know eb's came along and they were just sucked on your feet they're so hard on your feet because they were real narrow and i have square feet that anyway enough of that but i wore them for a decade and then these spanish guys showed up in camp four and they had some spanish shoes that looked funky so people sort of laughed i mean you always laugh at somebody who comes in and they don't know how to climb yosemite style and plus they have weird gear john bakker didn't laugh he had the beginner's mind and when they showed him their shoes he goes can i try those and he put them on and the rest is history because i mean he became the importer for fires and then he became the designer for a coppa and i'm still climbing on a copa shoes and they just came back into this country they're making them again so i'm on the fourth resole of my chameleon shoes and i get to have new ones because they're genius and it's it's because he turned out to be such a good designer you know he was a jerk in a lot of ways and very egotistical but he was starting to get over that toward the end of his life he really was making some progress but i'll never forget that like 1983 i'm pretty sure that was the year when these spaniards showed him their shoes and he goes i'll try those everybody else is laughing in camp where yeah silly looking boots within a few months they're all wearing them because the sticky rubber on them the boots were nothing special but the rubber was incredible um and you know that like i said maybe a whole number grade for me maybe two or three letter grades but like i was already getting old didn't matter so much to me was cutting edge it disappeared over the horizon that's fine that's what it's supposed to do but yeah that's that's just this shoe story i wanted to share a little bit because because it's such a good beginner's mind story like okay i'll try that this is such a fascinating history lesson from from the source so that's really fun i i'm glad you brought the uh magazine and there were the catalysts i actually somebody gave me those i'm like what are these for yeah now i know yeah but um yeah let's make uh the end of whatever episode we made this into uh about finding a rock and playing around so mr clean has a hammer in his hand that's right we're going to drive iron steel actually very fine chromium molybdenum steel alloy an aircraft quality ally all right so a beautiful thing too i gotta say takes me back so here's a crack in the rock the piton goes in about a third of its length is about the right fitting before you start hitting it okay okay now especially listen to the sound of this all right because it's starting to tighten up now and the sound is rising oops sound went down something happened maybe i i think we're hitting on the back here yeah we are um that's unfortunate let me find another spot you can redo okay but this by the way is how you take them out you're hitting them back and forth and this is what destroyed the cracks because the granite is chipping away as well as the wedge action of the natural taper of the piton for the last 60 or 70 or 80 years yeah and now we have to have fancy cams just to fit these weird shapes that the pitons created actually because the back of the teton against the rock there we is this what it's like establishing new roots yeah and we're looking at it's a rock here that no climber is ever going to look at so i don't want really to create a new piton scar just to show how this works ah here we go okay that's about tight enough and you could always tell by hammer bounce off it instead of it's actually moving a little but the hammer bounces off instead of moving the p time hear that sound that's what you want to hear and if you had a caribbean i don't have one on me but um oh thank you yeah so everybody's carrying carabiners you come upon a fixed pin and you can tap on it and you can hear the sound not about the same pitch as you were hearing when i was hitting with him so you can tell with just a carabiner if a fixed p time is strong enough to trust i'd whip on that okay take it out hear the sound going down and of course you're just holding a hand jam on an overhanging 510 totally well doing this two-handed job i mean standing here i'm like yeah cool but then i'm like realizing the context of where you do this and it's like yeah that's where it gets like that's kind of like made a limitation in why grades maybe didn't climb right you need two hands to do some of this crap yeah yeah or you know maybe we'll just stick to aid climbing today i don't need to free this [ __ ] [Music] the next piton demonstration is going to require a bigger piton yeah but that's the way it worked too i'm pretty sure you're into an angle piton in the because it's a pin scar yeah and it's ugly yep and that's where and then you need cracks i climb or i can only climb because they've got pin scars finger lock the holes that didn't exist in the past yeah futons ancient technology i'm going to place a stopper here so you can see how that works there we go it's pretty strong would you whip on that yeah do you like having it near the outside here or do you no i i would put it inside but this is just for so you can see it gotcha put it inside let's see what it the camera picks it up because if i was scared i would bury that thing yes all right now yes oh yeah because this is not gonna fall out behind me as i'm working the hard movement aren't you just like super curious what that would break at very curious of what that would break up maybe we can find out i would guess the rock could break first ah yeah 100 because even this skinny wire because yeah skinny wire will give us about eight ish kilonewtons and that rock you can see it's rated here for only three yeah it's really great yeah it's uh the labels on the back side the mbs of this granite it's not because we've tested this specific area of rock before this granite you'd be surprised it it has that decomposing vibe yeah oh it definitely does we actually tested i forget where we tested ketones we tested pitons actually the pull out strength of pitons with the pinging sound and everything yeah i think it was like three kilonewtons three is all you got is all you get when you pull straight out of a pinky yeah yeah i mean you put in an angle yeah you get it don't even really have to hammer it in 50. yeah slot that thing in there it was like in the 60s the rumor was the ultimate aid pitch you didn't have to hit the pins [Laughter] click like and they'll let me out of here you

Channel: HowNOT2

Views: 89,437

Keywords: Highline, highlining, highlines, slackline, slacklining, slacklines, ryan jenks, how not to highline, hownottohighline, highliner, slackliner, tutorial, how to, rope, webbing, weblocks, rigging, rig, balance community, extreme, SlackSnap, Dynamometer, slow motion, break test, bolt buster, boltbuster, break tests, stunts, world record, slo mo, Slacktivity, climbing, science, mythbusters, carabiner, daredevil, rope swing, rope jump, jackass, alex honnold, big wall, gear, climb, rappel, spacenet, cams, anchors

Id: o4LywkHdDUM

Length: 63min 38sec (3818 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021