[Photo] Glen Denny
“I will often stand at the places I looked down at from the wall
during those days and those twenty-one nights–during the
deadening frost of morning, the searing heat of day, the nostalgic
shades of evening, during the hours of starlight, moonlight and
storm–and from those places I will look up at that shimmering
sea of granite, and remember how it was upon that sea.”
–Glen Denny to Steve Roper, December 29, 1962,
after establishing the third route on El Cap
“It is my feeling that in no other area of the country, with the
possible exception of the Northwest, do so many of the climbers
climb quite so much for personal publicity…. Increasingly, in the
past few years, there have been those whose primary motivation in
climbing is an excessive, overt desire for notoriety. Obviously, the
American public does not appreciate such a climber, nor do most of his
contemporaries, who are easily able to see through such braggadocio.”
–Roper, A Climber’s Guide to Yosemite Valley, 1964
IN SEPTEMBER 1958, Glen Denny drove to Yosemite and found himself
stuck in a traffic jam. El Capitan reared above, towering over the
Valley floor for more than three thousand feet. Ropes hung from the
lower flanks of the wall. Tiny dots moved across the rock like ants: climbers.
Warren Harding and a handful of partners were inching their way
up the Nose. Tourists stopped their cars to gawk, gumming up the road.
Denny was one of them. He’d just dropped out of college to learn how to
climb. “I looked up, and it just blew me away,” he recalls.
From that moment on, Denny wanted nothing more than to climb
El Cap. He got a job at Yosemite Lodge and met Harding, whom he
recognized from the newspaper photos. Harding took Denny up After
Six. Denny led the second pitch, not really sure how to place pitons, and
climbed himself into a dead end. He tried to reverse a move, fell, ripped
two pins, and plummeted past the belay. He hung off his one good piton
just above the ground. “Beautiful form,” Harding said. “Especially on the
way down.” Harding suggested they try a friction climb next. Denny said
he thought his fingers were shot. “Don’t worry,” Harding reassured him,
“there won’t be any handholds.”
Harding and Denny went on to make a series of classic first ascents that
to this day remain legendary climbs: Washington Column, the Southwest
Face of Mt. Conness, Keeler Needle, Leaning Tower and the Rostrum.
In 1962 Denny got his shot at El Cap. The Big Stone had only been
climbed three times by major routes, twice by the Nose, once by the Salathe
Wall. That spring, two brash outsiders–Seattle’s Ed Cooper and the
Canadian Jim Baldwin–arrived in Yosemite and laid siege to a new line
on El Cap. They called the route the Dihedral Wall. The project dragged
on for weeks. As Baldwin was climbing a fixed line, his prusik failed, and
he slid to the end of the rope where an anchor stopped him from continuing
to the Valley floor. His hands were like hamburger. Then the feds
arrested Cooper, who’d bragged to a newspaper about an illegal climb
on Mt. Rainier. When Cooper and Baldwin were able to return in the
autumn, Denny joined the effort. The trio finished the route, topping out
after a six-and-a-half day final push. “The wall was my greatest aesthetic
climbing experience yet (as well as physical),” Denny said to his friend
Steve Roper. “The exhilaration at the summit was absolutely incredible.”
Denny’s bliss disappeared once he saw the crowd of reporters that
Cooper had summoned. “The summit was dead,” Denny told Roper.
“Cooper had contacted the world of sensationalism, and the goddamn
thing ruined the summit. And so the uncomprehending newsmen were
there, and it was terrible…. I walked away from the summit down the
trail last, and sad.”
It wasn’t the only time Denny would have his heart broken on El
Cap. For a decade, the wall dominated his life. After he put up the
Dihedral route, Denny returned to make the third ascent of the Nose
(with Roper and Layton Kor). “Why can’t we be faster than anyone
ever has been?” Denny wrote to Roper before they set off. “An amazing
four-day ascent, one which will amaze the hell out of everyone. Just
think–almost twice as fast as the second ascent. This is what can make
the Nose an almost immortal thing for us…. Five will
be OK–a fine performance, which will be historical also.
But four would be an amazing breakthrough in speed. I
am consumed with this idea…. Three and a half days. We
can do it man. Someone will do it someday. To hell with
waiting for it to happen gradually.”
They did it in three and a half days. After going back
to college, Denny decided he wanted to make a film about
climbing the Nose. He put together a strong team of
climbers, enlisted his filmmaking professor Fred Padula,
raised some money, rented a helicopter and spent two
months shooting El Cap from every conceivable vantage
point. Then Denny walked away–disgusted that the project
seemed to be veering toward commercialization. It was
the Dihedral Wall all over again.
Denny’s footage languished for a decade until Padula
edited it into El Capitan, which won the Grand Prize at
the 1979 Banff Film Festival. “Amongst climbing films,
El Capitan is without peer in poetic beauty,” the jury
wrote. “The best climbing film I have ever seen,” added
Yvon Chouinard. Recently I was talking to Royal Robbins
about cinematic efforts to portray the sport. “El Capitan,”
he tells me, “is my favorite climbing film.”
Few people have seen the movie in recent years. But
now Padula is releasing a digitally re-mastered DVD version of the
work–forty-four years after he first walked up to the base of El Cap and
shook his head at the impossibility of making a movie on the wall. Filming
El Cap, as it turned out, would be the easy part.
To view the Kickstarter Project for El Capitan CLICK HERE.
[Photo] Glen Denny
YEARS BEFORE I EVER THOUGHT ABOUT CLIMBING, I was hiking
a trail in Yosemite high above the Valley floor. The path ran through the
trees, turned a corner and came out into the open. There it was, sudden
and immense: the southwest face of El Capitan. I’d seen it before, of
course, but that was the first time I realized El Cap’s power to startle
and seize the imagination. When I did start climbing, in 2004, it was in
Yosemite. I always assumed that someday I’d do the Nose, but big-wall
climbing was fairly low on the list of what I wanted in the sport.
Then a couple of years ago, I began researching a book about the
1968 Fun Hog expedition to Fitz Roy, during which Yvon Chouinard,
Doug Tompkins, Dick Dorworth and Lito Tejada-Flores drove a van to Patagonia, picking up Chris Jones along the way. Tejada told me about
the epic history of a film he and Tompkins had been working on just
before they took off for South America: El Capitan.
I couldn’t find the movie for sale anywhere, but Steve Roper lent
me his VHS copy. Tracking down a VCR was even harder. The video
quality was wretched, the color so washed out that it looked black and
white, yet the film itself was captivating. There was no narration, just
gorgeous shots of water slowly running off El Cap, birds swooping along
its endless flanks, a huge moonrise behind the prow of the Nose. Three
men rack up and start climbing. They joke and banter and sleep on the
wall as though a bivouac on the side of El
Cap was the most natural thing in the world.
(“Colliver,” Richard McCracken quips while
belaying. “First, you pee on me this morning,
then you drop dirt on me. I’m a patient
man, Colliver, but even I have my limits.”)
There’s a lean muscularity to the film, the
primal sound of hammers striking iron. Life
on the wall is reduced to its raw essentials,
the famished climbers spooning out tinned
rations with pitons.
Last autumn, I decided I finally needed
to climb El Cap. My partner abruptly bailed,
but I met a kid in Camp 4 who was game
to give the Nose a go. On a beautifully still
late October evening, we started up in the
dark, and twenty-five hours later, we finished
in the dark. For weeks after, I could think
about almost nothing besides climbing the
Nose again. Denny, I imagine, must have felt
the same way.
[Photo] Glen Denny
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1965, Denny went
back to school, enrolling at San Francisco
State University to study photography.
Denny had been taking pictures for a few
years–hauntingly composed photos that
captured not just the daredevil acrobatics
high off the deck, but also the subtle, quotidian
moments back in Camp 4 where the tilt
of a head or a furrowed brow told you more
about the experience than a 1,000-word trip
report ever could. Working as a bartender at
the Ahwahnee Hotel, Denny earned enough
in tips to buy a Nikon and four lenses.
“Going in so much for photography is ruinously expensive,” he wrote
to Roper in 1964. “But aside from climbing and women, it is to me the
most worthwhile thing to do.”
Fred Padula, a young teacher at SF State, knew nothing about climbing,
but he knew a good picture. “You have a dozen people in your class,
and one or two stand out,” Padula says. “Glen was my star student. He
had a real good eye and was a careful printer.”
Denny took Padula’s experimental moviemaking course in the
autumn of 1966. “Padula had the most interesting film class,” Denny
says. Denny’s class project was filming his friend Steve Miller soloing a
steep face on Cathedral Peak–no words, just the act of climbing, with
guitar music in the background. He called the short film Nyala (after
the African antelope), sent it to the Trento Film Festival, and it won an
award. In the summer of 1967, Denny shot a documentary for the Sierra
Club about Miner’s Ridge in the North Cascades, where the environmental
group was fighting an effort to open a pit mine.
More than anything, Denny wanted to
make a film as beautiful as El Cap itself.
He admired Padula’s award-wining 1965
film Ephesus, a twenty-four-minute 16mm
movie about an African American church
in Berkeley where the choir rocks and the
worshipers speak in tongues. It’s the kind
of film that transports the viewer to a foreign
place. If only Denny could take a
viewer up a big wall. Denny asked Padula
whether he wanted to collaborate on a
movie about climbing the Nose. Padula
drove to the Valley, walked to the base
of El Cap and looked up at the rock that
blotted out most of the sky. He couldn’t
imagine how anyone could climb it–or
film it. “I said it looks like a pretty impossible
project,” Padula recalls.
Before 1968, the Nose had only been
climbed a dozen times over the course of
nearly a decade. Denny’s idea was to put the
fourth ascent team–Gary Colliver, Richard
McCracken and John Evans–back on the
route and film them. Denny would go with
them to shoot. But he also wanted to film
the team from a helicopter. And record their
climbing banter.
To view the Kickstarter Project for El Capitan CLICK HERE.
[Photo] Glen Denny
“It’s going to be very expensive,” Padula
said. Denny said he knew a businessman
who might fund the project–Doug
Tompkins, who’d just sold a climbing store
in San Francisco called The North Face.
Denny invited the two to his apartment.
Tompkins drove his red Ferrari to Denny’s
place. There, he parked sideways across two
driveways so no other cars could scratch his vehicle. “I expected to see
some hotshot businessman with grey hair,” Padula says. “He was probably
two years younger than I was. But he was no bullshit. He never
questioned whether we could do it.”
Padula was turning thirty-one. Denny was twenty-nine. Tompkins
was twenty-five. He’d started climbing in the Gunks as a teenager, ski raced in the US and South America, then tried one business after another
until he seemed to find success with The North Face, which had two
stores and a mail-order business when he sold it in late 1967 for $50,000.
But what Tompkins really wanted to do was make movies like his friend
and surfing buddy Bruce Brown, whose 1966 film The Endless Summer
almost single-handedly re-invented the adventure picture genre. Brown
put $50,000 into The Endless Summer, which grossed $20 million. You
weren’t going to make that kind of money selling tents and sleeping bags.
Padula showed the investor some hand-drawn titles he had made
for the film. Tompkins didn’t like them. Tompkins was an aesthete. His
father was an antiques dealer, and The North Face catalogues were laid out
better than most magazines, with stylized line drawings of famous climbing
photos. “They had a knock-down, drag-out argument about what the
print for the titles should look like,” Denny recalls. “Tompkins kept getting
up and looking out the window to make sure no one was messing
with his Ferrari. That was a bad sign that we didn’t have the same values.”
[Photo] Glen Denny
But Tompkins was nothing if not enthusiastic. He brought in
another partner, his friend Peter J. “Cado” Avenali. “He got Cado to put
up his life savings,” Padula says. “Doug put in [some money]. Glen got
some money from his grandmother. I put in my savings, $5,000. We
had about $30,000. You could buy a really nice house for that much.”
The four signed a partnership agreement. Tompkins opened a bank
account for the film. “Fred and I would have complete creative control,”
Denny says.
The filmmakers went to David Brower at the Sierra Club, who’d just
finished a film of his own. He had 15,000 feet of 16mm film left over,
which he donated to the project, as well as some seed money. “He was
very encouraging,” Padula says.
Denny and Padula looked at other climbing movies. There weren’t
many. The most recent was Roger Brown’s Sentinel: The West Face, which
followed Yvon Chouinard and Royal Robbins up the side of the monolith.
It won best film at the Trento Film Festival in 1966. The climbing
footage (shot by Tom Frost) was gripping, but the voice-of-God narration
only served to underscore the distance between the filmmakers and
their subjects. “We thought narration was deadly,” Denny says.
(In 1966 Steve Roper, Allen Steck and Dick Long made an 8mm
home movie documenting their ascent of the Salathe route on El Cap.
Long showed up with the camera the night before the climb–the third
ascent of the route–and the climbers studied the instruction booklet by
headlamp. The color film had no audio track until Roper and Steck got
together in the latter’s kitchen in 2008 and recorded their recollections of
the experience, which they turned into a DVD.)
What would it take to make the best climbing film ever? Denny
and Padula came up with a daunting list of requirements. They needed
wireless microphones, which cost a couple of grand apiece, to record the
actual dialogue of the climbers. Tompkins talked an electronics company
into donating four mics to the film–and a sound technician. They
needed a four-track recording machine. Tompkins found a place that
built one to order. They needed a mobile sound studio to house the
gear. Tompkins convinced the National Park Service to allow him put
up a shed at the base of El Cap. They needed power for the equipment.
Tompkins got the NPS to install (for free) a transformer to tap into
the high-tension power lines running into the park. They needed good
16mm cameras. Tompkins flew to Hollywood and rented thousands of
dollars worth of professional equipment–all on credit. “Doug was a
very persuasive salesman,” Padula says. “Tompkins kept coming up with
stuff I couldn’t imagine.”
In May 1968, Padula parked his VW van at the base of El Cap
(in those days the road ran closer than it does now) and started
to unload gear. Denny had a friend who worked for the Curry
Company, the park concessionaire, who loaned the film crew a house
to use in the employee village. “I knew the guy in charge of Curry Company advertising,” Denny says. “Padula was
always for a big budget. I was always for a small
one. I said, ‘We’ll stay in Camp 4.’ Fred said, ‘No,
they’ll steal all our expensive gear.’ I mentioned
it to the guy at Curry and he got us an employee
house for two months.”
Even before the climbers were on the wall,
Tompkins and the filmmakers began to have differences.
“Tompkins wanted the climbers in bright
clothes, probably North Face designs,” Denny
says. “I wanted clothes to look like what we wore
all the time–drab.”
To view the Kickstarter Project for El Capitan CLICK HERE.
[Photo] Glen Denny
JOHN EVANS COULDN’T MAKE IT, so Denny
had to find another climber. He asked Chuck
Pratt, who’d done rigging on the Sentinel Rock
film, but the tedium of moviemaking didn’t
appeal to him. Tompkins suggested Argentine
alpinist Jose Luis Fonrouge, who was staying
with Tompkins and climbing in Yosemite that
spring. Although Fonrouge was just twenty-six,
three years earlier he’d made the second ascent
of Fitz Roy–putting up a new route, alpinestyle,
on that fearsome peak. (Fonrouge died
in 2001.) When they filmed a screen test of
Fonrouge climbing, the rest of the team was
unimpressed. “Colliver and McCracken refused
to climb with Fonrouge,” says Padula. “They
thought he was too cavalier.”
“I liked that Fonrouge was from a different
place,” adds Tompkins. “It would put some
spice into the film. But he wasn’t very good.
He didn’t talk much.”
Tompkins next pushed for his friend Yvon
Chouinard. Denny and Padula shot some
footage of Chouinard as well, but he didn’t
seem interested in the project. Tompkins then
suggested including himself.
“Tompkins said, ‘These guys aren’t interesting
personalities,'” Denny recalls. “‘Let’s
get Fonrouge in there. And I’ll be the other
guy.’ I said, ‘No. I can’t slap these guys in the
face.’ I wasn’t going to kick my friends out.
Doug didn’t like that.”
“I wanted to be up there with guys who
had already been up there,” Denny adds.
“Doug said, ‘It’ll be more fresh.’ I said, ‘It’ll
be fresh enough.’ Then Tompkins was heavily
pushing Yvon.”
Finally, Tompkins suggested Lito
Tejada-Flores, a jovial climber who’d been
McCracken’s college roommate years
before. “Lito blossomed the whole project,”
Padula says. “He was full of energy
and enthusiasm. It was contagious. Lito
was a miracle. He saved the film.”
THE SHOOTING WAS SCHEDULED to
begin in May before the Valley heated up.
But Padula had problems with the sound
equipment. The range of the wireless mics
was limited. The transmitting hardware
that each climber had to wear was the size
of a coffee-table book. After some cajoling,
the electronics tech was able to shrink the
hardware down to the size of a cigarette box.
They hid the mics in tubular webbing that
the climbers slung over their shoulders. Denny’s
girlfriend Ellen Fry sewed up the battery
packs and transmitting boxes into vests for
the climbers to wear. To boost the signals,
they trailed aerials down their pant legs.
Tejada hung hardware off the webbing hiding
his mic, which ripped the wiring off. It never
worked quite right again. They needed someone
to change tapes in the recording shed,
but they couldn’t afford a real sound tech. A
young man named Art Rochester, who was in
the Valley recording birdsongs, volunteered to
help out. All the tinkering delayed filming by
weeks. “Denny begins his film of the El Cap
Nose,” Roper jotted in his diary on May 20.
Over the next few weeks, the climbers
fixed lines to El Cap Tower, about halfway up.
Denny filmed the climbing from below, then
ascended the fixed line, pulled up the rope and
asked the team to re-lead the pitch so he could
film from above. He also hung from ropes and
filmed a third lead from the side. Denny was
so absorbed in filming that more than once he
forgot to attach himself to his Jumars, jugging
the fixed line with nothing securing him to the
rope except his grip. “It wasn’t like normal climbing,”
says Colliver. “It was a job.”
Denny shouldered an Arriflex 16mm camera
with a heavy belt of batteries around his waist.
The camera shot 100-foot loads of film, which
would normally translate into fewer than three
minutes of film time. But you had to change film
in absolute darkness, which was impractical on a
wall, so Denny shaded the camera with his body,
knowing that part of every roll would be ruined
by light exposure. “I’d get about two minutes of
usable footage from each roll,” he says. “We could
get thorough coverage of about two pitches a day.
We thought it would take a month, but it took
two. We were learning as we were going.”
At night, they rappelled back to the ground.
After every day of shooting, someone had to drive
the film nearly 200 miles to San Francisco, wait for
it to be processed, and drive it back to Valley for
viewing in the crew house. When one batch came
back, Padula couldn’t find Denny. It turned out he’d hiked to the top of El Cap to photograph Royal Robbins finishing
a ten-day ascent of the Muir Wall, the first time anyone had soloed the
Big Stone.
“Doug got very discouraged seeing this stuff,” Padula says. “I saw it
as problems we could correct. Doug said, ‘Oh God, I got all this money
tied up, and it’s not working out.’ There was friction between Glen and
Doug. Doug had visions of another Endless Summer. Glen was going to
make this beautiful art film. Doug said, ‘These guys don’t know what the
hell they’re doing.’ He was right.”
“I didn’t like the way it was going,” Tompkins says. “It was going to
end up being flat. The conversations recorded between the climbers were
boring and repetitive. In five minutes, the audience is going to be bored.”
ON MAY 25, Fonrouge and Rick Sylvester decided to climb the Nose
on their own. The two had done a handful of routes in the Valley, including
an attempt to link up Royal Arches with the South Face of North
Dome–a climb that included a bivy and ended with a retreat from
North Dome. On another occasion, Fonrouge failed to tie a tagline correctly
and dropped the rope halfway up the pitch. Sylvester himself had
never done a big wall and had only a few pitches of aid under his belt.
For the Nose, Fonrouge showed up with some unexpected equipment:
a 16mm camera. He had an assignment, he told Sylvester, to film the
ascent for Argentine television. The first part of the climb didn’t go well.
Fonrouge got off route in the Stoveleg Crack and took a whipper, which
put a deep rope burn in Sylvester’s hand. The duo failed to make it to
Dolt Tower by dark, and Sylvester spent the night trying to sleep standing
in slings. Fonrouge plucked a hammock out of the haulbag for the
bivy. Near the Great Roof, Fonrouge, according to Sylvester, pulled a
large block loose. “We had been warned about it,” Sylvester says. “I
heard shouts from below. I waited for sounds of an ambulance but I
didn’t hear anything.”
Low on El Cap, the film team was jugging their fixed lines.
McCracken was 300 feet up, followed by Denny, Colliver and Tejada,
who was just leaving the ground. McCracken heard an explosion. High
above him, he saw a block the size of a fridge hurtling through space.
It fell like a bomb, not touching the wall for hundreds of feet, until
it struck the slabs above McCracken. The rock exploded into pieces,
sounding like canon fire and filling the air with the smell of sulfur.
“We all had to clean our pants out after that,” says McCracken. “It
really should have wiped us out. It’s a miracle that no one was hurt or
the ropes cut.”
FROM EL CAP TOWER, Colliver led up the Texas Flake and climbed
Harding’s decade-old bolt ladder toward the Boot Flake. A bolt snapped.
Colliver fell, landing on his side and badly bruising his ribs. The fall was
captured on audio but not on film. Even Denny wasn’t going to ask
Colliver to do that again. They retreated to the ground. Colliver wanted
to quit the film. “Gary told Glen, ‘How could you expect Fred to make
a film about this? He doesn’t know anything about climbing,'” Padula
recalls. “I was asking myself the same thing.”
Denny kept filming with just two climbers. McCracken lowered
Tejada half a ropelength to do the King Swing: the huge pendulum that’s
one of the most thrilling–and scary–moments of climbing the Nose.
Denny filmed it on the wall and from a helicopter. It was exhausting
running back and forth along the blank stone trying to grab the elusive
crack on the left. When Tejada finally caught the edge, Denny flew past
in the helicopter holding a white piece of paper on which he scrawled
in Magic Marker: Do it again. Denny did that about a dozen times that
day. “I drove Lito crazy asking him for take after take on the Boot Flake,”
Denny says. “I kept asking the helicopter pilot to get closer and closer.”
Tompkins suggested they film the whole thing from the helicopter.
Denny just shook his head.
Tompkins had a lot on his mind. His wife Susie was expecting their
second child any week now. And, more pressingly, Tompkins was weeks
away from leaving for a six-month expedition to Patagonia with Chouinard
and Tejada. He issued an ultimatum: He wanted to direct or he
was out. “You guys don’t know what you’re doing,” Tompkins said. He
handed Padula the checkbook for the project’s bank account and walked
away. “They had a vision,” Tompkins says. “I had a different one.”
When I go to visit him, Tompkins and I sit in the living room of one
of his many homes, this one on a hill in Patagonia, Chile, overlooking
the national park that he’s building in the Valle Chacabuco with his new
wife, Kris. Herds of guanacos graze outside the window. Tompkins made
a fortune in the business world before cashing out in 1990 and devoting
his considerable energies to conservation work in South America.
“We could have really made something,” he says wistfully, as if the
movie were never made.
To view the Kickstarter Project for El Capitan CLICK HERE.
[Photo] Glen Denny
THE KING SWING ended the first part of filming. Denny thought the
middle part of the route was less interesting visually. He planned to skip
that section and continue the shooting on the last third of the climb.
Denny offered Steve Roper and Dick Erb $60 each to hike to the top of
El Cap and fix ropes to below the Great Roof.
On June 18, Roper looked over the edge at the top of the Nose, terrified
of rappelling the summit overhang, especially since he’d be tottering
under a huge pack stuffed with ropes and bivy gear. But sixty bucks was
sixty bucks. They reached Camp VI, where they spent the night, before
continuing down below the Great Roof the next day and then jumaring
to the rim. “My arms cramped horribly on the last few hundred feet,”
Roper wrote in his diary.
Tejada and McCracken talked Colliver into returning to the project.
The team rapped ten pitches down and then spent four days filming the
upper part of the route. Padula hired a porter to haul a watermelon to
the summit. Tejada and McCracken tore into the juicy fruit with abandon.
Padula filmed it–the final action scene.
Denny came back to the Valley in the autumn to jug fixed lines on
El Cap and shoot scenes of swifts darting off the side of the cliff. Padula
used a telescope to film a full moon rising over the Big Stone. The following
spring, Denny trained his camera on Horsetail Falls. He thought
the water glinting off the side of El Cap could make a lyrical opening for
the movie. If it ever got made.
AFTER TOMPKINS LEFT, Padula expected that most of the money
raised for the film was unspent. Upon returning from Yosemite with
the checkbook, Padula discovered that Doug had withdrawn his money
from the bank. “Doug said he was quitting,” Padula says, “but he didn’t
say he was taking his money. The contract allowed him to back out up to
a certain point. Doug’s a businessman. He saw that things weren’t looking
good and cut his losses.”
Padula picked up the last batch of film from the lab. Would he mind
paying the several thousand dollars he owed? He apologized, but said he
didn’t have the funds. “The helicopter company was calling every day,”
Padula says. “The camera rental company called. The creditors were calling
weekly for two years.”
The filmmakers managed to get a grant of $15,000 from the American
Film Institute, but the money disappeared as soon as it appeared,
paying off creditors. Avenali remained a partner, but not a happy
one. He threatened to sue the filmmakers to get control of the movie.
(Avenali died in 2008.)
Like a married couple, Denny and Padula began to bicker about
money. “Fred said we need to rent a studio to edit,” Denny says. “I said
let’s use your bedroom or mine. The cost escalated without any way to
get it back. It seemed the only way to get out of the financial hole was to
make the kind of film that from the beginning I didn’t want to make.”
Padula wound up renting a basement room for $25 a month to edit the
film. Denny and Padula put together a rough cut. It was more than three
hours long–longer than it takes to make a speed ascent of the Nose today.
“The vision we had talked about from the beginning was fading,”
Denny says. “Originally, the concept was it would be as long as needed.
In the art film world, it comes out as long as it should be. Fred and I
always agreed on that. Because of the unfortunate example of The Endless
Summer, 16mm films could make a fortune. But the film had to be
feature length with clean language. I said we didn’t have enough good
stuff. Padula and Avenali insisted it had to be an hour and a half. They
started to get cold feet about the four-letter words. When it came down
to making money, those words couldn’t be in there. Cado said he would
only kick in more money if it were cleaned up.”
“I felt a real responsibility to make good use of [the money invested],”
Padula explains. “You just don’t take people’s money and kiss it off.” (He
says he didn’t insist about the length of the film.)
One day in late 1969, Padula and Denny were working on the film
as usual. Padula went home. By the time he got there, he found a typed
letter from Denny. “He was basically resigning,” Padula recalls. “He
didn’t want to finish the film and hoped that I wouldn’t. If the film is a
success, it will popularize climbing. That would be terrible.”
“Glen and I were very close friends,” Padula adds. “I was crushed.
I felt like I had been stood up. It’s like your girlfriend leaves you with no explanation. It was his concept and dream. I didn’t know what to do
without him.”
To view the Kickstarter Project for El Capitan CLICK HERE.
[Photo] Glen Denny
Denny was always a purist. When newspapers wanted to buy his
pictures from the Dihedral Wall, he refused to sell them on principle.
When Robbins made the first solo climb of El Cap, Denny had the
only photos of the event. Robbins asked Denny to sell them to a newspaper.
Denny, holding Robbins to his own frequently voiced criticism
of bringing publicity to climbing, declined. Denny took photos for
historic or artistic purposes; commercialism was anathema. “I cannot
prostitute such a meaningful thing…,” Denny had written to Roper
after the Dihedral Wall. “I am not opposed to seeing my name in print
as such, but not to sell some bastard’s rag to a totally ignorant audience.”
If he couldn’t make the movie he set out to make, Denny would
rather not make any movie. Denny asked Padula to destroy the footage.
Padula and Denny went to a lawyer’s office to dissolve the partnership.
Padula got custody of the film. “I didn’t have a clear picture of what to
do,” he says. “I dropped it. It took me three years to pay off all the debts.”
TOMPKINS, IN THE MEANTIME, made his own movie. In July 1968,
Tompkins and his fellow Fun Hogs drove to South America. For months,
they surfed and skied their way down to Patagonia–filmed by Tejada,
whose previous cinematic experience consisted of one day of filming
on El Cap when Denny handed him a camera and asked him to shoot
some footage (which was never used). The Fun Hogs dug a snow cave on
the shoulder of Fitz Roy where they waited for two months for decent
weather to make the third ascent of the peak–by a new line that would
become known as the Californian Route. Tejada put together a twentyeight-
minute film called Fitz Roy: First Ascent of the Southwest Buttress,
which went on to win best film at the Trento Film Festival in 1969.
Tompkins, however, still wanted a commercial success like The Endless
Summer. He gave the footage to a Hollywood producer who reedited
it into a longer film, with voiceover narration, a rock soundtrack and
an added fantasy sequence, in which the snow-cave-dwelling Fun Hogs
dream about climbing in Yosemite with a scantily clad blonde. The new
movie, Mountain of Storms, was shown on television but never earned
any money. “A corny, total piece of shit,” Tejada calls it.
“We were going make this film and make a bunch of money,” Chouinard
says. “To get the film finished,” adds his wife Malinda, “it finished
off our savings. It was a lot of money for us.”
Chouinard, like Denny, viewed climbing as something sacred.
Although he sold pitons for a living and invested in the Fitz Roy film, he
felt conflicted about doing anything that could popularize the sport. After
he returned from South America, Chouinard created the outdoor clothing
company Patagonia, which eventually became an enormously successful
business. I went to see Chouinard at his cabin in Moose, Wyoming.
The house itself is modest, the view outside the living-room window is looking
close enough to approach from the backyard.
“I felt it was irresponsible to make more climbers,”
Chouinard continues. “I didn’t want to see more climbers,
just like I didn’t want to see more surfers. It was
something special. We didn’t want it to become mainstream.
The idea of promoting climbing to make more
money was really anathema.”
TEJADA CALLED PADULA every so often, asking him
how the El Cap film was coming. McCracken, too,
kept pestering Padula. McCracken wound up living in
a cottage in Padula’s backyard for a couple of years and
helped him edit the sound, but the project seemed to
drag on without any end in sight. “Finally,” Padula says,
“my wife said, ‘Get rid of it or finish it.'”
Padula put together an hour-long film. He set up a
projector on a lawn to show it to his friends in Nevada
City. The poet Gary Snyder came. After the movie,
Snyder stood up. “Fred,” he said, “it’s done. Don’t touch
it. Don’t fool with it.”
The official premiere took place in 1978 at the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The final print was
made at a lab in Los Angeles. Padula flew down to pick
it up on the day of the screening. A storm threatened to
cancel his return flight. He made it back to San Francisco
just in time to get the print to a full house.
Tompkins walked up to Padula with a smirk. “You
finally finished it,” he said. Denny, too, was there. Padula
had called Denny to invite him to the premiere. “I finally
got the call I was waiting for for ten years,” Denny told
his wife (who told Padula’s wife). Originally, Denny asked
Padula to keep his name off the movie. “It wouldn’t be a
film without Glen,” Padula says. “No one else could shoot
it like he did. I wasn’t going to let the footage
go to waste.”
Padula insisted that Denny at least get
credit as a “climber who filmed.” Denny
stroked his beard, thinking. “OK,” he agreed.
In 2007 Padula screened an early version
of the digitally re-mastered film at the Banff
Festival. Denny was in the hall outside the
theater signing copies of his photography
book Yosemite in the Sixties. The space cleared
as the crowd filed into the theater. Denny
stayed at his table in the empty hall. Padula
and Denny spent a couple of hours riding the
bus together back to the airport in Calgary.
“He was open and friendly, but he wouldn’t
discuss the film at all,” Padula says.
Denny was more talkative when I spent
a long afternoon with him recently. “Imagine
my surprise when it appeared as an hour-long
film and with the four-letter words still in,”
Denny told me. “I don’t know if I won or lost.”
It has been forty-three years since Denny
started the film–and thirty-three since the
premiere. Denny and I are sitting in his small
dining room in San Francisco. We’ve been
talking for hours, mostly about other things,
especially climbing. It has grown dark outside,
and Denny seems too absorbed in our conversation
to turn on any lights. I can barely make
out his face across the table in the gloom.
What did he think about the final film? I ask.
“I thought it was very good,” Denny
says. “I think it would be better five minutes
shorter.”
To view the Kickstarter Project for El Capitan CLICK HERE.
[Photo] Darcy Padilla
Michael J. Ybarra had many
incarnations during his brief, intense
life: photographer, writer, aesthete and
adventurer. He was a lively and mischievous child, inevitably wandering
off to the dismay of our parents, always found again with a twinkle
in his eyes and a smile. Even then, his exploration of the outdoors
was a search for a deeper understanding of life. As he grew into early
adulthood, his writings about adventure sports sought to convey the
transcendent quality he found in nature. When Michael started climbing,
he discovered his vocation. As with everything he pursued, he undertook
it with unparalleled passion and devotion. He relished planning his
ascents, carefully studying routes, reading copious amounts of books
and compiling just the right gear. Though Michael’s time on earth was
far too short, I was blessed to have known him for forty-one years. His
legacy will live on through the many lives he touched during his quest
for truth–and through the prolific body of his published work. In the
words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Do not go where the path may lead, go
instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Thank you for leaving
a trail, Michael.–Suzanne Ybarra
High on Bugaboo Spire, Mike Ybarra once explained to
me why he found alpinism to be the most rewarding type of
climbing. What drew him in, he said, was the way that alpine
routes challenge the climber on so many different levels. To
succeed in this realm, one must have stamina and skills for
moving on rock, snow and ice, and perhaps most importantly,
possess what Mike often called a “general mountain sense.”
Mike seemed to extend this philosophy well beyond the world
of climbing to fine food, wine and the arts. The last time I saw
him was at an event in San Francisco where he read excerpts
from his upcoming book about the 1968 “Fun Hogs” trip to
Patagonia. Afterward, we enjoyed a glass of Burgundy, had
a nice dinner and talked about literature. One thing led to
another, and we finished the evening by buildering through the
city’s Mission District. Several days later, I received an urgent
email from Mike. He’d provided detailed topo diagrams of
several of the “routes” we’d climbed, complete with standard
YDS ratings. What a complete individual; the climbing world
has lost a great one. Onwards, Mike.–Eric Gafner