Stone Walls, Stout Hearts

Breedlove was a climbing bum, as in ski bum, or surf bum. Many climbing bums manage to live on as little as $2,000 a year. They may teach climbing to support their habit and stay near the rocks, but a climbing guide doesn't earn much. It is not a satisfactory way to make a living; it is a summer job at best. It sounds to many like such a romantic way of life, but climbers don't think it particularly romantic at all.

In the foreword to Climbing in North America , Lito Tejada-Flores says, "The American climber has always been a maverick, often an eccentric, at times a virtual social outcast."

Breedlove's opinions on the personalities of American climbers are even stronger.

"Anybody who has an inkling of what goes into climbing probably has a great deal of respect for climbers," he says. "But not many people do, because climbers don't look respectable, not in the way they dress, the way they live. Climbers are generally far removed from anything neater than a pair of clean khakis. They don't look like they could do anything that requires any special talent. Most of them have a real iconoclastic sense to them. They won't knuckle under. They don't feel there's any higher power than themselves. They don't believe in anything. They create their own world and their own kinds of rules.

"As a group they tend to be interested in no other sports than climbing, although some of them are, or have been, gymnasts. They're not dedicated athletes. Their diets are normally atrocious because most of them don't have enough money to be particularly fussy about what they eat. Physical conditioning is merely a means to an end for them; they only stay in shape because of the climbing. If they didn't climb, I'm not so sure they wouldn't be in poor shape. They're not team players, and they don't care about winning. Most of them are a little crazy—probably maladjusted would be a better word to describe them. There are a lot of alienated intellectuals climbing.

"If 10 climbers could hear me right now, eight of them would scoff. They would say, 'Man, what a wooden bastard he is. We just climb for fun.' But where does that lead you? What is fun? Why is it fun? I don't believe people climb for fun; that's too crazy an answer. Climbing's not fun; it's too much work to be fun.

"It may be presumptuous of me to try to explain what makes other people climb, but I think climbing is something only somebody fairly smart could do, not because you have to be so smart to climb up a rock, but because you have to understand yourself enough to appreciate climbing as a method of expressing dissatisfaction with things. They may not consciously recognize it, but climbers have had to say to themselves, 'I need this. I need to go off and do this very personal thing. It's meaningless, it's not going to get me a job, people even may look down on me for it, but it's what I need right now.' "

Climbers were regarded as riffraff by the Yosemite Park and Curry Co.—the organization that provides most of the visitors' services—until 1969, the year Yosemite acknowledged the popularity and legitimacy of the sport by establishing the mountaineering school. "It's nice that today a climber is somewhat respected," says Breedlove. "Now you can introduce yourself as a climber. Fifteen years ago you didn't."

They may be able to introduce themselves as climbers, but they still don't like to. For one thing, they don't need to; their egos do not seem to require the adulation, the looks from others that say, "My, aren't you brave." Says George Willig, the man who climbed Manhattan's World Trade Center, "If a man wants to be famous, rock climbing isn't the way to do it. That's the wrong motivation, because when a climber starts competing with something other than himself, he loses touch with how to deal with certain situations on the cliffs. When a man gets into a tricky situation, he has to know exactly how he wants to overcome it and what he's willing to do to overcome it. A desire for glory gets in the way of that effort."

A lot of climbers will find it ironic that those words come from Willig, who is the most famous rock climber ever, although it was hardly a rock he climbed. The reaction to Willig among hard-core climbers ranges from indifference to downright bitterness; few climbers have cheered him. Following his Trade Center climb the July-August issue of Climbing magazine ran a facetious, first-person account of a climb up a brick wall, written with enough sarcastic references to suggest a put-down of Willig.