Where did Johann learn to climb like that? The 16-year-old Finnish exchange student was working his way up the vertical 3-foot-wide crack in the Yosemite Valley wall as if there were steps in the rock. Finland is as flat as Florida.
Johann attended high school for our junior year in 1972. No one knew anything about Finland. We were classic small town guys. My buddies met Johann in one of their classes and invited him to hang around with us. He was our age and spoke accented English very well, and he had a quick wit with an infectious laugh. You could tell he was from someplace else at a glance. In that era we all wore a uniform of sorts: loose-fitting Levi 501 blue jeans, the old fashioned ones with metal buttons instead of a zipper, tee shirts and tennis shoes. Johann wore blue jeans too, but tight and with bell bottoms. We all wore our hair long, looking like California surfers. Johann’s was cut like Sonny Bono’s, a shag.
My friends and I were a pretty open, friendly group and absorbed Johann in as new member. Our routine was class, after-school sports, and weekends. He and I clicked pretty well, developing a close friendship. Eventually he opened up a bit and shared that his sponsor home was not good. I didn’t know how the foreign exchange program worked, but I learned through Johann that a family would sign up to be a host for a student for the school year and get paid for it. Johann described his host family as being very strict, classless and unhappy.
As his friend, with a cheap car and permissive parents, I decided to take Johann out of his host house for weekend trips to show him California as often as possible.
Johann described Finland as being a pretty flat place. When I told him about the Sierra Nevada mountains, Johann’s eyes lit up and we decided we would spend the weekend in the Yosemite Valley, one of my favorite places in the world. My folks were into car camping and we had plenty of gear for the two of us: sleeping bags, tarps, a stove and cookware. As I was thinking about what to bring, I had an idea.
My father had a pint of tequila that he had bought the previous year when we were in Tijuana, Mexico. Now this wasn’t your normal gringo tequila. Resting at the bottom of the bottle in the tequila was an inch-long dead worm. The label had a cartoon picture of a grinning red worm standing next to a cactus, wearing a sombrero. Apparently, this little reddish worm tends to live in agave plants, which are used to make tequila. When he bought the bottle, my father told me a story of when he was a young man growing up in San Francisco. He and his friends didn’t have much money during the Depression. They liked to have parties out at the beach and could only afford cheap booze. Low-end tequila was about the cheapest alcohol there was and this brand, with the worm in it, was one of the favorites for his group. Not only was it cheap, it also provided a party game. As my father described their beach parties during the early 1930s, he and his friends would build a large bonfire with driftwood. They would stand around the fire in a circle, telling stories and passing the tequila bottle with the worm in it. Each in turn would take a pull from the bottle, then pass it on. The game was that when the bottle neared empty, when there was one gulp left, whoever’s turn it was to take a swig had to swallow the worm, too.
When my father bought this pint of tequila and told me his story about his young life on the beach, he seemed to give me a look, with a smile in his eyes, that said, “Give it a try!” Maybe I’ve become an apologist for some of my indiscretions, but I packed that bottle in with my gear, planning to have Johann and I reenact my father’s drinking game. After all, he bought that pint a year earlier and hadn’t touched it. Meant it for me, right? Maybe I should have asked…
We finished pulling our gear together Thursday and packed up my car on Friday night. Johann spent that night at my house, as he and I planned to leave early Saturday morning.
Yosemite was the most special place I had ever been, and I couldn’t wait to see Johann’s reaction to seeing El Capitan, Half Dome and Yosemite Falls. So for dramatic effect, I drove the longer route to the southern entrance, which involved going through a tunnel that shot you out high up on the vista point that Ansel Adams made famous with his black and white photos. Johann was always quick with comments.
When we dove into the final tunnel, I went silent. I hadn’t told him what to expect and that we were almost there. That tunnel is just long enough to allow your eyes to adjust to the dark. Then, when you blast out on the Yosemite Valley side, your eyes are shocked a bit by mere light, and then the incredible scene that has opened before you hits you. It’s a one-two punch and its vast scale inspires slack-jawed awe. When it was our turn to experience this, I immediately pulled over into the vista view parking area and shut the car off. Johann was silent as we got out of the car. He was speechless. I was grinning at his reaction. We stood there for a quite a while, soaking in those surreal giant cliffs of bare granite.
“I want to climb those cliffs,” Johann said simply.
“Fat chance,” I responded. “They are straight up and really tall.” I didn’t share that the walls of Yosemite Valley are thousands of feet tall and that only the world’s best climbers, with extensive gear, dared climb them.
Johann gave me a hard-to-read look but didn’t say anything more, and we drove down to the floor of Yosemite Valley and entered the park. Once in, we scouted out a campsite and set up our tent, bedding and stove. The sun was going down by this time so we made dinner and a campfire. We had a pretty uneventful evening that first night. The next morning, during breakfast, Johan brought up climbing again.
I thought he had no idea what the granite walls of Yosemite Valley were like, but what the hell; I had no hard and fast plans for what we would do during the day anyway.
“Let’s check it out,” I agreed.
So after breakfast, in our standard American teenager attire of the era — blue jeans, tee shirts and sneakers — we walked north from our camp to the nearest wall of the valley. During our walk I re-learned how surprisingly far away really big things tend to be. It took us quite a while to reach the wall, but when we did, I also realized that while I had backpacked and camped in Yosemite several times, I had never actually walked to the giant walls of the valley. The solid rock is thousands of feet tall and appears absolutely straight up. The immensity of the exposed rock took my breath away. When I put my hands against the rock, I had the most incredible feeling, of somehow being connected to this massive piece of the earth. Looking up the wall I felt vertigo, as if the wall was now leaning over me.
I turned to Johann and saw wonder in his face, but also excitement. I told him that now he knew why I thought there was no way we could climb. But he surprised me.
“There must be a way up! Let’s walk along the base of the wall until we find it.”
His enthusiasm was intriguing. Why not? I clearly don’t know this part of Yosemite as well as I thought. So we turned left and started walking along the wall towards the west. There were large trees growing out of the valley floor and close to the wall, so the walking was slow. Eventually the foliage thinned and we could cover more ground. The wall to our right was one solid block of rock with no cracks. I was more and more convinced of the futility of this adventure. Johann kept charging forward, convinced there was a way.
Amazingly, when we came through another stand of tall trees and looked up at the cliff, we saw a gnarled pine tree growing out of the wall a few hundred feet up! I wondered how a tree could grow out of solid rock as we walked closer. As we neared the part of the wall below the tree, we finally understood. At this point in the mighty walls of Yosemite, two giant plates of solid granite met and overlapped, leaving a vertical crack several feet wide at the base of the wall where it met the ground. Looking up, I could see that the crack gradually became narrower. Perhaps a hundred feet up the crack, maybe more, a boulder had lodged in the crack, half in and half out. The boulder looked to be maybe four feet in diameter. Because of the boulder, I couldn’t see the crack farther up, but apparently growing out of the crack above the boulder was the gnarled tree.
I stood for a while studying this interesting feature of the wall, wondering if such a crack could be climbed. Then I noticed that Johann had already walked over to the base of the wall and had climbed into the crack. By the time I walked over, Johann was already 20 feet high. He had his back against one side of the crack and his sneakers on the other, using both to shimmy up.
“Don’t just stand there, Tim!” he shouted. “Follow me, this is our chance!”
I’ve always been a pretty good climber, at least going up, and this looked fun, so off I went climbing up after Johann. Initially the climb was easy. The crack was wide enough to get good leverage between my feet and back and we went up quickly. However, as I had seen, the crack grew gradually narrower, and climbing inside the crack became harder. Just before the crack would’ve been too narrow to remain in, we came to the boulder stuck in the crack, blocking it. From below, I watched Johann work his way out of the crack and start to find handholds on the boulder or in between the boulder and one side of the crack. He managed to pull himself out of the crack and up, over the boulder, his feet hanging for a moment in mid-air before scrambling onto the top of the boulder.
“Tim, wait for me to check out the climbing above the boulder before you come up,” he called.
In a few minutes, Johann yelled down that it looked good and I should come up. As I started to get my hands and arms up and around the boulder, I realized that what Johann made look pretty easy was challenging and scary. I had to leave the safety of the crack and climb up and over this large rock that stuck out from the crack, half in and half out.
As I left the security of the crack, our height and the vertical drop below hit me. I’m guessing we were over 100 feet high at this point. My heart started pounding and I was sweating. I had done a little free climbing before, and memories came flooding back. But I had never done anything like this! Luckily I am tall and have long arms, so I was able to get a grip on the topside of the boulder and pull myself up. I was so focused on getting to the top of the boulder that I didn’t think at all about how we would climb back down, if we had to come down this same way. I didn’t think about a descent at all until it was too late.
Sitting on top of the boulder, over a hundred feet straight up from the valley floor, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to climb down past the boulder because I wouldn’t be able to see where I might be able to put my feet. At the same time, I noticed that Johann was already climbing up the next stretch of the crack, all the way up to the gnarled tree which we could now see clearly. I decided to follow Johann and hope that we would find another way down or maybe we might be successful in climbing right out of the valley. Without a better plan, I put my confidence in Johann’s enthusiasm
The next part of the climb above the boulder required a different approach. The crack was now too narrow to fit our whole body in, so we had to have one foot and one hand inside the crack and the opposite hand and foot outside, on the face of the wall. This climbing was slower, but we made headway, and after a while we reached the tree.
When we got there, we realized that the tree was growing out of the crack, but its base was also resting on a narrow rock ledge that continued to the right of the tree. The ledge was maybe two or three feet wide and was the top of the giant plate of granite that overlapped the adjoining plate, forming the crack which was our climbing route. Above the ledge another sheer rock face stood straight up. To the left of the tree and above the adjoining lower plate there was a stretch of solid granite that was angled at a shallow enough degree that it could be climbed by walking while leaning against the slope. We could see more vertical cliffs farther up but couldn’t tell if there were opportunities to climb further or not. Johann offered to check out the possibilities and suggested that I wait at the tree. Looking back on that time from the perspective of an old man, I suspect that Johann correctly assessed that I was far outside of my comfort zone by this point.
A while later Johann came back and reported grimly that there was no way to go further up. He had climbed the angled rock face to the point where the next vertical face began. Johann seemed awestruck. He said that the next cliff was not merely vertical. The rock face was actually tilted out, making climbing impossible. I told Johann that I didn’t think I could climb down the way we had climbed up.
The only other route we hadn’t yet explored was the narrow rock ledge that extended to the right, curving out of sight so that we couldn’t see where it went from our spot at the tree. So together we crab-walked carefully along the ledge with our backs tight against the rock wall. Our height above the valley floor was amazing. I’m not sure how high we were, but large trees on the valley floor looked very small. I felt so exposed and tried to hug the wall behind me with my back. I couldn’t look straight down, as it was too scary, so I looked out across the valley floor.
We got 10 or 15 feet along the ledge to a point where we could see ahead and were dismayed, but not surprised, to see that the ledge didn’t continue too much further. Then something caught my eye down by my feet. There was a pack of cigarettes on the ledge with a book of paper matches stuck inside the clear plastic wrapper. Johann and I looked at each other, and we both shrugged and grinned. We gingerly sat down on the ledge, our backs to the wall, our sneakers hanging out over oblivion, and we lit up. Sitting on the ledge somehow seemed much more secure than standing, and we starting chatting and actually appreciating the incredible view in the late morning sunshine. There were mountain birds wheeling in the open expanse above the magnificent valley. With my butt on the rock ledge I could actually look down. I didn’t want to think about what we were going to do from here, as the moment was too beautiful, but in the back of my mind I knew we were in big trouble.
It was very quiet high up on the ledge when we weren’t talking. So it really caught us by surprise when we heard scraping sounds and grunting noises of exertion from back at the tree. Johann and I both turned to look, with smoking cigarettes in each of our raised hands, when a hairy, burly arm swung over the trunk of the tree. The arm pulled up a large, bearded rock climber, fully decked out with an extra rope across his chest and a belt bristling with metal climbing gear. He didn’t look to his right at first so he didn’t see us a few feet away on the ledge, having a casual smoke. With some effort, he worked his way to the uphill side of the tree trunk and braced himself between the tree and the rock wall behind him. Then he started yelling instructions down below him and we noticed that he had another rope wrapped around him that extended down the wall. It then dawned on me that this guy was the lead climber of a whole climbing party who must be climbing up the same crack that Johann and I had climbed.
While he was getting into position and yelling to his fellow climbers, Johann and I didn’t say a word. We were fascinated and the scene was kind of surreal. Then, something in his peripheral vision must have triggered him to turn his head towards us. He was shocked. His eyes went wide and he lost his balance for a moment.
“What the hell are you two doing up here?!”
“Climbing.” I was a young man of very few words.
The climber eyed us critically and shook his head in disbelief. He yelled down to his mates to stop climbing and secure themselves where they were.
We stood up and crab-walked back along the ledge towards the tree where the climber was stationed. Now Johann took over. Johann explained to the climber in the most humble tone that we were just two adventuresome boys seeing what we could do and now we were in trouble, as we couldn’t get back down. His tone and approach were so endearing. He was really good, smooth beyond his years. Finally Johann asked the lead climber if we could borrow their climbing rope to get back down. This made the lead climber shake his head a little in disbelief again. But amazingly, he agreed.
The climber yelled down to his team that we were going to be coming down the rope so everyone else had to get themselves positioned so they could let go. Then, with Johann going first and me following, with the rope merely sliding through our bare hands, we started walking our way backwards down the cliff, trying to mimic real climbers rappelling. With no climbing gear it was hard, but we were both strong young guys, and I was so relieved to have an escape route that I didn’t mind my hands burning as we went. We worked our way down the wall, around the boulder and alongside the crack we had climbed up. We passed four or five other climbers in the party on the way down. The other climbers looked fascinated to see a couple teenage boys in sneakers and no gear coming down their route.
When we finally reached the valley floor I had such a feeling of euphoria, so happy to be down safely. We yelled, “Thanks!” up the wall to the climbers and hiked our way back to camp, laughing and joking along the way, and then we made lunch.
At this point, one would think that survival instincts should have prevented a repeat adventure. I don’t really remember debating the issue much at all, which I find very troubling. I’m now reminded about insanity being defined as doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome. Perhaps there is something about young men, testing each other for bravery. But after lunch, Johann had fully recharged and was convinced that we just picked the wrong route. That there must be a way to climb up and out of Yosemite Valley and we should look for it. I can’t explain my failure at self-preservation, but after lunch off we went, east along the north wall this time, towards Yosemite Village. We had clearly learned a lesson about adventuring with no gear; this time we brought a water bottle to share. After all, the afternoon was getting warm.
Suffice it to say that Johann and I made another attempt to climb the giant walls of Yosemite that afternoon. While we failed again, at least we didn’t get ourselves killed trying.
Finally back in camp, we were very tired but felt satisfied. We had had big adventures, and while we weren’t successful in climbing out of Yosemite Valley, we gave it our best shot, had new stories, bragging rights, and thankfully made it back without getting hurt. So after a ‘tasty’ dinner of canned chili — food always tastes better when camping — I decided that we should celebrate. After dinner we made a campfire and brought out my father’s bottle of tequila. I told Johann the story my father told me about his teenage days and the game of the worm in the bottle.
“Let’s do it!” Johann’s enthusiasm was contagious. I was a shy teenager and envied his style of exuberance.
I took a first swig and passed the bottle to Johann and he took a small gulp. We both started coughing. This stuff was awful. Luckily we had some 7-Up with us, so we changed the game a bit. We used paper cups and took turns pouring ourselves a glug of tequila and then a glug of 7-Up and then downing the mix. The drink was still bad, but at least we could get it down. We had a great time that night, more fun as the bottle emptied. We talked and laughed and told stories. Eventually, I realized that we were down to one more pour of tequila and it was going to be Johann’s turn. I couldn’t let him take the worm alone. We had become good friends and in addition, he was a guest in our country. So I split the remaining tequila between our cups and then tapped the worm onto a plate. I cut the worm in half and put part in Johann’s cup and the other part in mine. We held up our cups to each other and toasted to a very good day. I closed my eyes, opened my throat as wide as possible and tossed the drink, worm and all into my mouth. I don’t think the liquid even touched the sides of my throat on the way down. I opened my eyes and looked across the campfire at Johann. He was actively chewing something obviously tough.
“Johann! For God’s sake, swallow it!”
Gotta love boys…