| This is, I believe, a 5.3 with a roof on it. |
I first learned the word "historicity" while reading Philip K Dick's Man in the High Castle. In the book, a dealer in antiquities holds two identical Zippo lighters, one of which supposedly belonged to FDR, and says "One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object has ever had. And one has nothing. Can you feel it?... You can't. You can't tell which is which. There's no 'mystical plasmic presence,' no 'aura' around it." I thought, while reading that, that maybe while we can't reliably detect historicity in objects, we certainly seem to be able to detect it in places.
And if any climbing place has historicity then it's the 'Gunks (Shawangunks) outside of New Paltz, New York. Old iron pitons left by early climbers jut out of cracks; we clip them out of habit but hold no illusions about their integrity. Bolts and rappel rings omitted at the tops of routes, in homage to the tree-slinging first ascencionists. The rope-burned trees look worse for this practice. Short, wandering pitches accommodate old-fashioned 50 meter ropes; our 70 m rope removes some of the adventure as 3 pitch routes become a single push to the top of the cliff. The rating system is a dinosaur; while climbs in the western states seem to start at 5.6, Gunks climbers took to heart the 5. system as being constrained on the left by 5.0 and on the right by 5.9 and so use all the digits in between. I climb my first 5.3 and find my hands sweating and my heart racing as much as they would on any tahoe 5.8.
can we feel the history of the place while we climb? Probably yes. On Shockley's Ceiling, a 5.6 with a formidable roof (the 'ceiling') I imagine william shockley, nobel prize winning physicist, struggling under the 3 foot roof on his first ascent (reputedly done naked?). There are 4 iron pins and pitons below the roof- I have to imagine Shockley and his compatriots in their clumsy mountaineering boots fearing the roof and trying to hammer in an insurance policy. Both G and I scurry up quickly in our sticky rock slippers, using taped-hands to jam the crack that stumped many climbers before invention of this modern technique. But I have to admit, at the menacing roof I added my own gear, bringing the total number of protective pieces up to 5.
Later, feeling smug on a 5.6 called Frog's Head, I skip clipping the old pitons entirely and use my own medium-sized stopper at the crux. I pull hard on a greasy finger-lock but in that weightless moment before I grasp the next hold I look down to see my stopper sliding uselessly down our rope, my only barrier between me and the boulder-strewn ground. The deep brain takes over and I find myself moments later atop the crux, breathing hard. I almost laugh to think of the old gunks climbers shaking their heads at my unreliable modern equipment. There's an argument to be made that we're no safer than they were, at least if you take into account accident statistics.
But for the most part, with a few exceptions, modern gear and techniques have taken much of the teeth from the gunks. Committing routes now can be climbed with a single rope; places of sparse protection can be protected with modern small camming units; crack technique has softened the difficulty of some of the old classic test pieces.
Our first day at the gunks, I couldn't help comparing the place to Yosemite. The Valley has its own historicity: its walls are scarred by the marks of first ascensionists and a complex set of rules ('ethics') govern how to climb and protect its most famous routes. I think the miracle is that despite climbing's technical advances, Yosemite resists softening. The routes are too big for the extra 20 meters of rope in a 70 meter cord to make much of a difference; long runs of polished slab remain impossible to protect; the cracks are too varied and slick to accept sloppy crack technique. I wonder if in some future a mediocre climber (like myself) will walk into Yosemite Valley with a rack of futuristic gear and find the old trade-routes to be charming rather than formidable and awe-inspiring. I hope not.
