Valley Walls: A Memoir of Climbing and Living in Yosemite by Glen Denny

Author:Glen Denny [Denny, Glen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781930238695
Publisher: Yosemite Conservancy
Published: 2016-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

Party in Camp 4

12

Climber Central

I woke up, crawled out of the tent, and hobbled over to my table on crutches. The cast went from just below my knee to my toes, and I wiggled them in the early morning sunshine.

Notes from Mort Hempel’s guitar drifted over. He was sitting up in his sleeping bag, playing something new that had come to him in the night.

Aromas of bacon and eggs filled the air, and I could hear clanks of hardware, as equipment was sorted out for the day’s climbs. Camp 4 was bustling. But some of the denizens were moving more slowly, like marmots emerging from their burrows. They sat at their tables, slumped and blinking, waiting for the coffee water to boil.

One tent remained closed, but I could hear giggles and incoherent noises coming from the occupants. The tent kept changing shape, as if they were wrestling or kicking at it.

Some couples were coming down from the boulders above the campground, with sleeping bags draped over their shoulders. They had needed more privacy. There were some surprising pairings. One friend noticed that I had seen him with his companion. He grinned and put a finger to his closed lips, signaling, “Shhh . . . Don’t tell.”

The campground was beginning to fill up. My campsite was high on the slope, and I looked down at the flats below, where the tourist campers stayed. Camp 4 was the only free campground in the Valley, but it was the last one to fill up. It was thought to be a slum because its facilities were old and substandard. The bathroom lights didn’t stay on all night, sometimes there was no hot water, and the toilets were cramped, shabby, and smelly. The tourists hated it, but the climbers loved it.

There were two zones—the flats and the slope. Back then, you could camp anywhere on the slope, up to the horse trail, which was the upper boundary. There were no designated campsites, and the tables were not anchored to the ground. To get away from the crowded, noisy flats, the climbers dragged tables up the slope. There you could find a secluded spot among the boulders and trees, and that would be your home for as long as you wanted to stay. All you needed was a spot big enough for your tent and table, and a tree limb to hang your food bag where the bears couldn’t get it.

The flats were messy, but even high on the slope the ground was covered with innumerable bits of garbage that had built up over the decades: broken glass, rusty tin lids, nails, used razor blades, wads of aluminum foil, pop-tops from beer cans, gum wrappers, and charcoal from campfires that had been built everywhere. It was futile to try to pick it all up because there were more layers of trash below. Instead, we walked across the road to a grove of pines and stuffed our hauling bags full of long, dry pine needles. These were

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