Photos: The stoned outlaw climbers who conquered Yosemite in the 1970s
Meet the Stone Masters. You will want their life.
“Just because you get to the top,” says Lynn Hill, “doesn’t mean that you should celebrate your success. It’s how you get there that’s really very important.”
And she should know: Hill was the first person to free climb The Nose—one of the hardest lines up El Capitan, the 3,000 foot granite face looming over Yosemite Valley and the climbing culture it spawned.
That culture was the focus of climber/photographer Dean Fidelman’s camera in the 1970s. His images from the time encapsulate the freedom of young climbers living on the edge (literally), whose indifference to protective equipment and hard-partying lifestyle would set the blueprint for the rise of extreme adventure sports we know today.
They called themselves the Stone Masters.
Free solo climbing, or free soloing, is the holy grail of mountaineering. Like big wave surfing, the sport is pure dialogue with nature. Alone with no ropes or helmets, a soloist is constantly forced to reckon with the rock and their own mortality.
The Stone Masters cut their teeth bouldering in places like Joshua Tree before gravitating to the unique walls of Yosemite. But they found a spiritual home against the park’s towering walls, especially on the varied routes of El Capitan: Wall of the Early Morning Light, Zodiac, the Shield, and Mescalito.
Many of the climbers were still teens when they arrived in the park, but within a decade they’d established themselves both as pioneers and outlaws of the sport—free climbing radicals who shattered records far more often then they did bones. Often while high.
And they did it in style.
Fidelman remembers: “All of us were aware of what was going on in surfing and we all thought that those guys were bitchin’, you know. They had style…and that’s what we started bringing to climbing — a certain style. And it first started with the clothes — the white painter pants and the chalk bag and then the headband. It also went to the way you climbed….You know, you’d show how strong you were and how fluid you were. And then you wouldn’t use a whole lot of protection to show how big your balls were.”
Photographs courtesy Dean Fidelman and Stonemaster Press from The Stone Masters: California Rock Climbers in the Seventies.
