The First Wasatch Climbing Guidebook Was a Joke
The Guidebook Wars Part 1, Desperate Grace
By John Flynn & David P. Carter
They rode down toward Marker River.
Just then Gunnar’s horse stumbled, and
he had to leap from the saddle. He happened
to glance up towards his home and
the hills of Hildarend.“How lovely the hills are,” he said
“more lovely than they have ever seemed to
me before, golden cornfields and new-mown
hay. I am going home again, and I will
never go away.”— Njal’s Saga
Granite’s the stuff
I can’t get enough!
— Anonymous Pipe-fitter
…thus opens Desperate Grace: A Book of Climbs, the first guidebook to climbing Utah’s Wasatch granite, published in 1975. The longer opening quote is a translated verse from the thirteenth-century Icelandic saga “The Story of Burnt Njál”. The second–two pithy lines attributed to an anonymous plumber–was the brainchild of one of the authors himself. Collectively, the epigraphs reflect the combined tongue-in-cheek humor and reverence that characterize the book.
The origin of Desperate Grace is one half of the story behind the earliest Wasatch climbing guidebooks; a tale of rivalry and sarcasm.¹ Among the motivations driving coauthors Dennis Turville and Marshall Ralph was knowledge that their competitor, Dave Smith, was hard at work on a guidebook of his own — a more serious text named Wasatch Granite. Although Desperate Grace was first to be released, Smith’s book (which came out two years later) promised more first ascent information and route beta. The tome’s relative comprehensiveness was due to Smith’s possession of the “holy texts” — the Alpenbock Scrapbooks — arguably the original unpublished guides to climbing in the Wasatch.
It was more than competition that shaped Desperate Grace. Guidebooks were beginning to pop up across the country–guidebooks that Turville and Ralph aimed to poke fun at for taking themselves too seriously and freely dolling out locally-held climbing secrets. Turville confirmed as much when we spoke to him for this story, describing Desperate Grace as “a book that itself was a parody of guidebooks,” and quickly adding “although very few people figured that out.”
On the cover, Ralph adopted the nom de plume “Rex Green” after his favorite ski wax, and the book’s contents were dosed liberally in opinionated humor — although at times it can be hard to distinguish comedic from earnest comments. The book’s title presumably stems from the poetic line: “We believe that rock-climbing at its best is a weld of courage and desperate grace, a discipline shaped for finding a way where no cheap way exists.” Sarcasm is more apparent, in contrast, in the authors’ commentary on the topic of pitons versus nuts for the classic moderate Schoolroom:
“Those routes on which nut protection has been found adequate will usually be noted. This is not dogma, but a gauge of prevailing art. Schoolroom, for example, can be safely climbed without pitons. There is plenty of empirical evidence for this — quavering beginners regularly climb it armed with only nuts, runners and strong language. Shall your art be less than theirs?”
Throughout Desperate Grace, first ascent names are missing, route descriptions are enigmatic, and beta of the sort we’ve become accustomed to in contemporary guidebooks is limited. While some missing information was due to Smith’s proprietorship of the Alpenbock Scrapbooks, Turville told us that some of it was intentional: “We decided to make fun of guidebooks because they shouldn’t be that serious. And [we thought] they should maybe point you in a direction, but not try to tell you every damn move.”
The authors pushed the parody even further. In Turville’s words: “And then we invented a route that does not exist. . . There is a dotted line on The Fin called Fin Rosé that doesn’t exist . . . But yeah, we threw a few things in there just to make people understand that this was supposed to be fun. And not just to draw a catalog of climbs.”
As luck would have it, at least one of the made up routes ended up getting climbed. “We didn’t think it ever would turn out to be a real route,” explains Turville, “because it was so difficult.” Although he isn’t sure of the route’s name today, the description Turville gives (“a route that goes off to the right from Becky’s wall in a fierce little corner”) suggests that the route is very likely Split Fingers (5.11c; first free ascent by Brian Smoot in 1979) or possibly Baloney on White (5.11a; first climbed by Lynn Watson and Jim Hall in 1988).
In a final reflection on co-authoring the first published climbing guidebook in the Wasatch, Turville (somewhat) laments Desperate Grace’s absence of first ascent information. The opening pages of the book first published in 1975 explain “[We] have not routinely credited first ascents of the climbers who made them. Climbers know best what they have done, and, for the rest of us, the climbs themselves are the fairest record of the interior adventure that took place there.” Forty-seven years later, Turville remarks: “I kind of fault myself for not including it. Because I really do think the first ascent information is something that people want. And I think that it also preserves history.”
Copies of Desperate Grace are rare commodities today. We’ve reproduced a short section of the book’s opening section below, but encourage you to get your hands on the whole thing. If you’re hard-pressed to find a copy, one is preserved in the archives at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library. Look it up–it’s well worth a read.
Granite’s the stuff, and sizeable chunks of it live in the canyons running out of the Wasatch to the Salt Lake Valley. For some years now, people who have had better things to do have been climbing these rocks instead, and this book is a comment on their comings and goings there. For every pioneer ascent there were ten bush-battles and a snake-whack or two, but these tales — tales to make a strong man weep — must wait for another book. Our concern is with climbing routes, and canyon climbers who went before. This book is for them, then, and especially for Mark McQuarrie.
Rock-climbing is a frivolous pastime, but there are worthy things in it, and even a few worth writing books about. We believe that rock-climbing at its best is a weld of courage and desperate grace, a discipline shaped for finding a way where no cheap way exists. Fine, bold leads have grown here, and we aim to celebrate the seed of adventure that brought them forth. If we celebrate anything else at the expense of this, we have missed the mark.
We have paid aims to conscience in making this book, and have not routinely credited first ascents of the climbers who made them. Climbers know best what they have done, and, for the rest of us, the climbs themselves are the fairest record of the interior adventure that took place there. Some climbs, though, cross a special, elusive frontier of beauty and difficulty, and their makers are named. This is a catalog of marvels, and a few artisans have consistently wrought fine things out of the common stuff. Names like Ellsworth, Lowe, McQuarrie, Ream, Spencer and Wilson appear in these pages, but the climbs they mark speak more clearly than any book about the art spent there.
NUTS!
The past several years have seen a modest revolution in protection technique. The sounds of hammering are now relatively rare, and nuts have become correspondingly popular. In fact, the exclusive use of nuts has become an object of religious fervor for many. This practice, like flagellation, or resting on a bed of thorns, is apparently thought to heap virtue upon the sufferer.
Though nut protection as radical orthodoxy may seem silly, the widespread use of hammerless anchors makes genuinely good sense, and helps delay the local onset of Yosemite Crack Blight. Nuts are also lighter, and since most climbs in the area swallow nuts as readily as pins, the climber can usually move as timidly as ever and wear a lighter rack and a halo as well.
Those routes on which nut protection has been found adequate will usually be noted. This is not dogma, but a gauge of prevailing art. Schoolroom, for example, can be safely climbed without pitons. There is plenty of empirical evidence for this — quavering beginners regularly climb it armed with only nuts, runners and strong language. Shall your art be less than theirs?²
RATINGS
The National Climbing Classification System will be used in this book. If the reader doesn’t know the system, no amount of explanation will enlighten him. We refer him to the other, more audacious guidebooks which explain the system in tedious detail and which are no help at all. Rating of difficulty, after all, are necessarily a matter of convention. NCCS F9, for example, only conveys its full and terrible meaning to one who has met if before in all of its hideous guises — slab, crack, and groove. It must suffice to say then an F6 pitch is one you can hang on to, and an F7, one you fall off. This is not a formal distinction, by the way, or one implicit in the rating system — it is merely true.
Of the string of ciphers following route names, the Roman numbers mark the climb’s grade — its length and overall difficulty. A Grade III, like the Black Peeler, usually devours a day, and a Grade V will demand a bivouac from the typical party. A Grade I is proportionately short, usually holding less than four hard pitches in store.
To the initiate, the second glyph — an “F” followed by a number 1 through 11 — reveal the difficulty of the hardest free move on the climb. It doesn’t reliably reflect exposure, shortage of resting places, and scarcity of anchors or other misfortunes — only technical difficulty of the moves. F1 through F6 moves, though in ascending order of difficulty, are usually with the powers of the conscious human of athletic tendencies. F7 moves are usually esoteric, or strenuous, or embarrassing, or all of these; through F11 it gets steadily worse and worse.
Aid difficulty is rated by the third cipher — a capital “A” followed by a number from 1 through 5. Aid climbing, of course, takes place when a climber pulls on his runners even when he knows his belayer is watching (if no one sees, the move is considered to have gone free). The number following the A predicts the odds against the anchor staying on long enough to allow the leader to place another anchor higher up, and hang on that one in turn. A1 anchors generally cooperate, while A5s are said to be treacherous characters indeed. So a climber considering Tarzan, I F6 A1, can expect a short romp requiring moderate free climbing and easy aid. Clear enough?
A CAUTION
Many of the routes noted here rest on private property, and climbers occasionally collide with the wishes of the owners. Threats of reprisal against trespassers seem to ebb and flow — immutable as tide — but never so predictable. But where rock is privately owned, climbers are trespassers. Overnight camping in the City watershed outside designated campgrounds is illegal.
[1] As indicated by this essay’s subtitle, this is the first in a two-part story about the rivalry that produced the two earliest published climbing guidebooks in the Wasatch region. Stay tuned for the second!
[2] We took the liberty of omitting a sentence here in the interest of fostering a more inclusive and welcoming environment for all climbers.
