How Do Climbing Careers End?

This story, originally titled “On Ending,” appeared in our 2024 print edition of Ascent. You can buy a copy of the magazine here.

The stratigraphic process of arthritis turned Royal Robbins’ fingers to stone. He took up adventure kayaking. Charlie Porter, sailing. Jim Holloway got on his bicycle. “To go fast on two wheels was the point,” writes the poet Frederick Seidel. “To go fast on two wheels is the point of life, isn’t it?” Seidel’s father was disfigured by a fall, at age twelve, off a bicycle into a coal cellar. He walked home with a broken back and refused, thereafter, a therapeutic corset. Seidel Sr. matured into an athletic handball player and competitive golfer. Quinn Brett became an adaptive cyclist.

Kurt Albert fell from a via ferrata, and Wolfgang Güllich, returning home from an interview, crashed his motorcar. John Bachar crashed, too, in Utah, but he survived. Beverly Johnson, a feminist icon and a member of the first all-female team to climb El Cap, died in a helicopter accident. Her death was overshadowed in the news by the death of Frank Wells, a Seven Summits aspirant and the president and COO of the Walt Disney Company, who was on the same aircraft. Clint Eastwood was also heli-skiing with Wells and Johnson but had gone home an hour before. Isabelle Patissier turned to motorsport.

Beleaguered by scandal, Walter Bonatti quit. He became a journalist for Epoca. The Italian media, which celebrated his K2 teammates Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli, vilified Bonatti for stealing oxygen designated for a summit attempt. Thirty years later, Bonatti produced evidence that he had not done so. In fact, Compagnoni and Lacedelli, in the face of competition from Bonatti, may have hidden a tent from him and the porter Amir Mehdi, forcing them to bivouac at 8,100 meters. Mehdi lost his toes and became a government servant of Pakistan. The Italian government awarded him a pension. His son says that the checks never arrived.

People are never still, and they are never finished, writes the impeccable Hugh Raffles.

Aleister Crowley, between expeditions to the Alps and Nepal, encountered in Sweden ceremonial magic, occultism, and philosophy. He was already familiar with, as a student at Cambridge, drugs, prostitution, gonorrhea, chess, and poetry. His mother called him “the beast.” In Sicily, he founded the Abbey of Thelema to usher in the Aeon of Horus. The Italian government expelled him.

John Salathé abandoned his family for his native Switzerland, where he became an initiate of the medium Beatrice Brunner. He returned to the U.S. ten years later to life as a vagabond, vegetarian, spiritualist, and preacher. Louis Lachenal lost his toes and (according to Lionel Terray) his mind to Annapurna, on the summit of which he felt “a painful sense of emptiness.” Maurice Herzog, who lost fingers and toes to the same mountain, felt indescribable happiness. Don Whillans turned to drinking and bar brawling, which were also his pastimes before his momentous partnership with Joe Brown. Brown opened a climbing shop in Wales. Herzog became a politician. Lachenal skied into a crevasse.

Jim Bridwell died of complications from a tattoo he got in Borneo.

Catherine Destivelle married and had a son, Victor, dearer to her than climbing. Robyn Erbesfield married Didier Raboutou and had two prodigious children. Ron Kauk doubled for the actress Janine Turner.

Lynn Hill taught David Letterman how to belay. “Do most guys when they climb wear ties?” Letterman asked her. Albert Mummery collaborated on an economics text that argues for government regulation of private economic spheres. Sylvester Stallone adapted John Long’s novella, and Josune Bereziartu sold insurance. Fritz Wiessner shilled F. H. Wiessner Wonder Red Wax for skis.

Fred Beckey never stopped. Nor did Wiessner. “You must be climbing pretty good,” exclaimed an aged Wiessner to a cocky kid who had soloed the route they were climbing together. Then Wiessner, on lead, climbed the next pitch without placing one piece of protection. “I must be climbing pretty good, too, eh?” he said.

Vandals broke holds in Little Cottonwood Canyon, and Meadowlark Lemon was chipped. Rock art in Arches was bolted over to aid disabled climbers. Ice claimed Lakeview. A storm toppled Beach Crack. The Gendarme fell over as expected. “I have never stayed for such a short period on a summit,” said one climber. The National Park Service introduced a climbing permit system in Yosemite.

The Adirondack orogeny continues, but the Rockies are eroding, “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” blown to the plains of Kansas. Eurasia will crash into North America, and in Spain mountains rise. A swelling sun will torch the earth, and the Milky Way will collide with Andromeda with minimal damage. The universe will convert its matter into heat and cool, black holes will evaporate, and, in the infinite darkness, time will stop. Without time, Penrose says, distance has no meaning, and that which is vast will be indistinguishable from, will in fact be, that which is small.

From such a compact nothing, it may begin again. All of it. Volver. To return.

Nothing dies as slowly as a scene, writes Richard Hugo. Gyms close. Friends move or move on. People uncouple. Bodies, like old cars, no longer feel trusted to the task. It hurts just as much as it is worth, says the novelist Julian Barnes to the novelist Zadie Smith. I climb now with a friend whose ambition exceeds his competence. “What if something happens up there?” I ask. “What if you need to self-rescue?”

“I’ll look it up on YouTube. Why?” he says.

I am often frightened. I ask myself whether any of it, whatever climbing has become for me, is worth it anymore. I do not know. I really don’t.

I wonder how it will end.

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