THE DIVING BOARD,
ELDORADO CANYON

This became one of Dudley’s more famous pictures from the book Climb!, which came out in 1976. This image was made into a poster that graced many a wall in the decades ahead, including a giant version that used to be on the east wall of the Boulder Brewery (now gone).

Dudley took this photo in 1974, when I made a repeat free ascent of the Diving Board. In the summer on 1971, I free climbed each of the two wild, overhanging pitches separately, but had not yet linked them in one climb. The first pitch was desperately hard for me, with little protection and some horribly bad rock that has since cleaned up after many ascents. Later that year, Jim Erickson and Duncan Ferguson, fresh off their historical first free ascent of the Naked Edge, attempted to scoop the first continuous free ascent of the Diving Board (no hard feelings), but they failed at the final crux, shown in this picture. In that situation I would have simply used a point of aid and gotten up the dern thing, but Jim and Duncan were such purists they refused to do that and retreated all 600 feet back to the ground, rappelling into the night.

The following year Jim and I returned and, as the guidebooks record, did the first free ascent of the entire climb. The modern rating of the Diving Board is 5.11b, but when I first did it free I rated in 5.9+. But this was not meant as a sandbag - the use of 5.10 was still very rare, and I didn’t think I was good enough to climb 5.10.