Wall of Early Morning Light
In 1971, Robbins completed the second ascent, with Don Lauria, of the Wall of Early Morning Light on El Capitan, with the (controversial) intention of erasing the route as they climbed it.
Their ascent closely followed the 1970 first ascent by Warren Harding and Dean Caldwell, completed with a heavy-handed reliance on bolts - a method that offended Robbins and other clean climbing advocates. Harding had left all his bolts in the rock; Robbins and Lauria used the bolts to repeat the climb; and Robbins then chopped the heads off the bolts behind them. After two pitches, Robbins stopped chopping the bolts because (according to Lauria) "the quality of the aid climbing was much higher than he had ever expected of Harding or Caldwell and, of course, it was also taking us an awful long time to chop all those goddam bolts."
Read more about this topic: Royal Robbins
Famous quotes containing the words wall, early, morning and/or light:
“Mountain, mountain, mountain,
marking time. Each
nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering
redefinition of
horizon.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)