1968: Freight Train to Yosemite
By 1968 the Kor era was over – he and his phenomenal protégé, Larry Dalke, had given up climbing and become Jehovah’s Witnesses. Pat Ament and Bob Culp were still active, but aside from them, most of the best climbers in Boulder were in high school, led by Tom Ruwitch and me. Arguably, for a moment, the center of gravity in Boulder climbing was at Boulder High.
Yosemite Valley was still Mecca for every climber in the world, and I needed to make my first pilgrimage. As spring approached my friends and I started to make plans for a trip, but no one had a car, or much money, so the only way to get there was to hitch hike and ride freight trains.
On a sunny morning in late May, six of us and our massive army duffel bags were dropped off at the Denver freight yards, and we were soon directed toward an empty car carrier on a stationary westbound freight train (no, you don’t “hop” onto moving trains!). Part of the art of riding the freights was to gain the trust of a yardsman - they knew what was going on in the yards. Pat Ament was particularly good at this.
My companions were Tom Ruwitch, Roger Dalke, Steve Tandy, Danny Smith, and Pat Ament. We climbed aboard and waited for the train to move. Then we were giddy with excitement as the train began to move west towards the the promised land. But the incessant clanging and high pitch screeching of steel wheels on steel rails, the rude jostling, and the diesel fumes would soon remind us that this was a most unsavory form of travel. In the photo we are about 30 minutes outside Denver just entering the mountains. Like a band of goofy boys, we were running all over the car having fun. But notice in the picture that we were just a few cars back from the engine. It never occurred to us that the engineer would see us and radio ahead to have us removed. What we were doing was not only dumb and dangerous, but blatantly illegal.
We wound our way up Eldorado Canyon, in and out of tunnels, and finally cleared the Moffat Tunnel. By late afternoon we were in western Colorado and slowed to a stop in the Grand Junction freight yards. To our surprise, a police car appeared to our right, cruising in parallel with the train. We looked to the left, briefly considering escape, but there was a companion police car blocking that possibility. We stopped and the nice policemen escorted us off the train and over to the police station. They assumed we were runaways, so we explained that we were climbers trying to get to Yosemite. But we were met with puzzled stares. So, we gave them our parents’ phone numbers and they confirmed that we were not runaways. After learning this the police were not really wanting to hold us or charge us with anything, so they let us go on our promise that we would get on a bus and never ride freight trains again. We scraped together enough money to buy bus tickets – but only to Green River, Utah, the next town about two hours west.
Sometime in the middle of the night we started hitch hiking in front of a 24-hour diner on the main drag of Green River. Soon a monstrous, junk-heap Cadillac swerved towards us and screeched to a stop. The driver rolled down the window and, with slurred speech, told us he could take us to Salt Lake City if someone would drive. He was roaring drunk, so we were doing him a favor. But there was only room for four of us, so Pat and Steve volunteered to stay behind. The rest of us loaded up our gear, climbed in the car, and Tom took the wheel.
We sped through the night and the drunk kept saying to Tom, faster, faster, you sissy girl! Tom was doing the speed limit and tried to tune out the chiding. Not to be ignored the drunk slid way down and extended his leg completely under Tom’s seat until his foot stomped on the gas pedal. Tom freaked out, as we all did, but we managed to subdue this maniac. After seeing that we were no fun, he finally dozed off to sleep.
It was early morning when we arrived at a diner in Salt Lake City and said goodbye to our very-hungover friend. As people walked out from breakfast we asked if anyone was headed west, and soon we got another ride to Wells, Nevada, four hours closer to Yosemite. By late morning we were in Wells manning our familiar pose with thumbs pointing outward. But no one stopped; hour after hour no one stopped. We were stuck in Wells. By early evening we were pretty depressed, so we gave up on hitch hiking and spent more of our precious money on a bus ticket to Winnemucca in western Nevada. We arrived in pitch darkness and walked to the freight yards (the only ones between there and Salt Lake City) and found a westbound train.
Rolling westward into the night we passed Portola where the railroad crosses the Sierras. We made it to California! Rumbling down from the mountains into the hot Central Valley, we came to the end of the line by mid-morning – the Stockton freight yards. This was as close as the railroad came to Yosemite, and we had to hitch hike the rest of the way. Five rides later we finally arrived at Camp 4 in Yosemite Valley well after dark. There we found an empty site, set up camp, and fell into exhausted sleep. We awoke the next morning to bright sunshine and the rowdy cacophony of birds singing, trying to grasp the reality of finally being in the place of our dreams. A few sites away who should be stirring but Pat and Steve. They had arrived almost simultaneously with us the night before.
We settled into the life of climbing bums for the next weeks, doing short climbs in the mornings, swimming in the Merced River during the heat of the day, and people-watching in the evening at nearby Yosemite Lodge. Camp 4 was the climbers’ ghetto filled with renegades from all over the world. In the Boulder climbing scene we were celebrities, but here we were nobodies. We knew that would be the case – this was the center of the climbing universe.
After a few days someone came through camp looking for climbers to ascend 1000 feet of fixed ropes on the Nose of El Cap, carrying supplies to Dolt Tower for a film project. They were paying money, so I jumped at the opportunity and got a wonderful, up-close experience of El Cap. The only climb of any note I did during our stay in the Valley was an early ascent of the Chouinard-Herbert Route on the North Face of Sentinal Rock. My partner was Cliff Jennings, and we did the climb in a single big day – a respectable effort at the time.
After we had been in the Valley for about a week, a scruffy, wild-eyed climber came through camp looking for someone (anyone) to go with him to do an “incredible” new climb he had spotted in the Sequoia area of the Sierras. Looking for a change of scenery, and perhaps lured by the first ascent, I accepted the invitation, and spent the next few days with Fred Beckey, a famous (unknown to me) climber who lived out of his car and was obsessed like Ahab with first ascents in remote places. He is acknowledged today as having done more first ascents than anyone in history. On the long trip in his beat-up Chevy down to Visalia and back up into the Sierras he drove me crazy with incessant chatter about possibilities for new routes. We got to the end of the road, crashed for the night then hiked in to the fabulous rock formation he promised. It turned out to be a junk pile. We made our way to the summit with me doing most of the leading, and somewhere it’s recorded: first ascent in 1968 by Fred Beckey and Roger Briggs. As we hiked out and headed back to the Valley, I appreciated Fred’s authentic enthusiasm and good heart, and also realized that I didn’t want to be “just a climber” like him.
Eventually Danny Smith and I decided to head back to Colorado together. Retracing our journey, we hitch hiked to Stockton and found an eastbound freight train late in the day. By the middle of the night, we reached Portola in the Sierras and the train came to a stop. Freight trains stop often on sidings to let other trains pass, so this was not unusual. But in the black silence we noticed two things – we could hear some young people on the car just behind us, and we could see flashlights moving towards us from the front of the train. Turns out these were sheriffs looking for the runaway kids who were behind us, but they reached us first. Next thing we knew we’re being blinded by flashlights and told to get off the train.
Two sheriff’s cars took us to Quincy, home of the Plumas County jail, where we were searched, fingerprinted, photographed with a number on our chest, and booked into jail (how I would love to get hold of that photo!). The authorities soon found that we were not the runaways they were looking for (we informed them that they were on the car just behind us), but better still they found Danny’s first aid kit with some pills in it. They were sure they had stumbled onto the drug bust of the decade, even though Danny told them the pills were Vitamin C and Darvon (a synthetic version of morphine Danny got from his mom, a nurse). The drugs had to be sent off to the big city (Sacramento) to be analyzed.
Because Danny was eighteen and I was seventeen we were separated – I was locked up in a cell in the juvenile area of the jail, which was mostly empty, and Danny was thrown into the drunk tank with a steady stream of traffic in and out. I was sure we would be released the next day, but no one came with that news. Meals were delivered by trustee prisoners who “knew nothing”. I asked if I could talk to someone about what was happening and when we could leave, but no one came. I was helpless and frustrated as days and nights passed. Finally, after three days the results of the drug tests came back, and they found they we had been in possession of … Vitamin C and Darvon. They had no reason to hold us any longer.
Our parents had been contacted and they wired money for plane tickets home, so on a good morning for freedom a sheriff dropped us off at the Reno airport. Boarding an airplane was luxurious after all the hitch hiking and freight trains, and I was very happy to be heading home. I never wanted to ride a freight train again or sit in a jail cell. My first trip to Yosemite and back had been an epic journey, and the climbing was our just reward.
The following spring in 1969 when I was supposed to be attending high school graduation I was once again on my way to Yosemite with my friends Dan Swenson, Steve Kentz, and Danny Smith, but now we had upgraded to Dan’s VW bus with a top speed of 45 mph. This was really living, in the summer of Woodstock.