It’s More Than Sheer Thrills for Hill

Lynn Hill was 13 when she caught her first glimpse of majestic Yosemite Valley and, by her account, the view “stunned me like no other landscape before.”

She had no idea at the time that she would be forever drawn to Yosemite National Park, and to other places in the world where towering rock walls were part of the landscape.

Nor did Hill realize that years later, in 1993, she would stun the climbing world by becoming the only person, man or woman, to perform a “free ascent” of the treacherous “Nose” route on the face of El Capitan. During a span of four days, she negotiated 3,000 feet of sheer and even overhanging rock, using only her hands and feet.

It was an amazing feat, as anyone who has gazed up at the awesome mass of granite might conclude. Though she had ropes and a belaying partner to catch her if she fell, the petite woman who harbors within a colossal amount of will and determination, made it to the top without any support from her gear.

More amazing, Hill returned a year later and negotiated the same route, again using only her hands and feet, in only 23 hours. It was an intense climb completed in the dark of night, and it left her trembling with fatigue, spent mentally and physically.

In her words, “My mind swirled in an otherworldly state, yet I felt an underlying sense of peace and serenity. In my dreamlike trance, I knew it was not possible to comprehend all that I had just experienced on that journey. In fact, it has taken me years to fully digest what took place that day.”

What took place was the climax of a globe-trotting career that began not long after Hill--who grew up in Fullerton--and her family made their first camping trip to Yosemite, when the view from the other side of the Wawona tunnel opened her eyes to a vertical world in which she would excel like few others.

So implausible was her free ascent of the Nose--the route is daunting even for experienced “aid” climbers who rely on pitons, cams, bolts, and such to support their weight and assist their upward progress--that Hill was left with nothing else to prove.

So, she sat down and wrote a book.

“Climbing Free: My Life in the Vertical World” (W.W. Norton, $24.95), tells the story of a woman who became immersed in her sport to the point where it was the driving force in her life. But it also provides an inside look at the rock-climbing community and some of its more interesting characters, leaving readers with a greater understanding of an obscure sport that instills such passion among its athletes.

For Hill, solving problems on the rocks “has to do with feeling more alive, doing the best we can by learning from our mistakes, and constantly seeking to achieve a higher level of consciousness, and by taking care of our bodies and our minds.”

She has been spider-like pretty much since birth. In her baby diary reads a passage, “Lynn climbs the monkey bars like a pro.”

As a young teenager, having been introduced to rock climbing by her brother and sister, Bob and Kathy, and by her sister’s boyfriend, Chuck Bludworth, Hill made her way up routes even the veteran male climbers had trouble with.

It was a humbling for them, in that not only was Hill a girl, she was a bug of a girl--she eventually topped out at an even 5 feet and weighs only 100 pounds--with no experience and perceived to be too short to reach the holds necessary to ascend such routes.

“Almost from the first days when ‘Little Lynnie’ tied into a rope, the common refrain was, ‘Who the hell is that girl?’ ” recalls John Long, a renowned climber, in the foreword chapter of her book. “The macho ones among us ... were left to watch and weep as Lynn breezed over what often cost us several layers of skin and a few of our nine lives.

“We normally would have growled like wolves at having our male luster dimmed by a woman. But Lynn shattered the gender barrier so thoroughly that no one could put the pieces back together again.”

Hill got her start, as many local climbers do, crawling up the faces of rocks jutting from the desert floor within sprawling Joshua Tree National Park.

Deeply affected by the divorce of her parents, she came to consider her weekend forays “as a life raft, and the act of climbing as therapy.”

The life raft supported many like Hill; they clung to it as fiercely as they clung to the sides of 1,000-foot cliffs; they felt more at home in such an environment than in their actual homes.

“What began as a small group of friends expanded into a community of people from all walks of life,” Hill writes. “Quite a few were students majoring in esoteric fields like astrophysics, math and archaeology. There were also a lot of unemployed vagabonds, and even a few whose lives hovered on the fringe of legality.”

Long was founder of a 1970s clan called the Stonemasters, “a loose collective of incredibly fit, daring and talented Californians who led the world in rock climbing during the 1970s,” Hill explains. “The name said it all: mastery over the stone, and mastery over being stoned.”

At Yosemite’s Camp Four, a seasonal mecca for climbers, collecting aluminum cans for cash provided a meager existence that also involved siphoning gas from cars of tourists and plucking food from abandoned trays in the cafeteria.

The unkempt climbers were (and still are) looked at by tourists in much the same way as Yosemite’s bears: They were given a wide berth but at the same time provided entertainment as they dangled from the faces of towering granite monoliths.

Hill’s first trip up the Nose was an aid ascent in 1979 with Mari Gingery, another of only a few female climbers on the Yosemite scene, and Dean Fidelman. Loaded with pitons, carabiners, slings and ropes, and with a stuff sack carrying sleeping bags, food and water, they began their ascent with the plan of alternating the lead on each pitch, a section of rock between belay points, no more than the length of one rope.

Fidelman developed a serious case of vertigo about 500 feet up and chose to follow the lead of his female companions. “We slept [on ledges] still wearing our harnesses, the rope tying us to the bolt anchors in the wall above the ledge--just in case someone rolled overboard or went sleepwalking,” Hill writes.

One of El Capitan’s most challenging features is the Great Roof, a smooth wave-like outcropping that seemed impassable to free climbers.

“At the time, no climber in the world imagined that such a feature could be free-climbed,” Hill explains.

No climber, perhaps, but Hill. She was starting to imagine it as she made her way up and over the Great Roof, resting back on her ropes, probing narrow cracks with her tiny fingers, storing mental notes.

Their three-day journey was successful; it was a route Hill would complete eight times in all, the last two being the free ascents.

Between these ascents, Hill traveled frequently, climbing anywhere and everywhere--the Gunks, New York; Verdon Gorge, France; Taipan Wall, Australia ...

During her U.S. travels, Hill worked odd jobs and enrolled in small colleges while working toward an eventual bachelor’s degree in biology.

In her book, which was co-authored by Greg Child, she tells of the people who influenced her life.

There was Bludworth, her sister’s fiance, who perished climbing Argentina’s Mt. Aconcagua, at 22,000 feet the tallest peak in South America.

There was Long, during the ‘70s and early ‘80s one of the world’s top rock climbers, for years her boyfriend.

There was John Yablonsky, or Yabo, a troubled soul whose obsession with Hill, who wanted to be only friends, prompted him to threaten suicide more than once. Yabo, who survived so many daredevil climbs on the rocks, eventually followed through on his threat.

Then there was Russ Raffa, a strong East Coast climber and the man Hill married. They drifted apart, however, during Hill’s hectic days on Europe’s World Cup climbing circuit.

Hill dominated the World Cup, winning often enough to afford a home in France.

But competing on man-made arena walls eventually got stale. In 1992, the North Face climbing team member decided to return to the U.S. and “to the cliffs that nature had made.”

There was one cliff in particular. “Freeing” the Nose of El Capitan was the most obvious challenge. If anyone could do it, it was Hill.

And while the three-day ascent was fulfilling, the 23-hour ascent, a feat that might never be matched, was overwhelming.

In the final chapter of her book, Hill recalls that for several months afterward, “I fell into a state of post-climax depression that left me feeling aimless and empty.”

Today, at 41 and living in Moab, Utah, the feeling is much the same.

“Writing this book was kind of like putting a cap on my restless life,” Hill says, with a hint of sadness. “Not that I’ll ever get over my interest to travel, or my curiosity and playfulness and climbing itself. I’m not ever going to leave climbing behind. But I crave more stability in my life. A home. A family. I’ve always thought I’d like to have a kid or two.”