Most Natural Pursuit Even for City Folk

To climb is almost as instinctive a human endeavor as to breathe.

Think about it. We start to climb as soon as we’re born. The kid wants to climb a tree as soon as he can walk. Social climbing should be an Olympic sport.

An adventurer wants to climb the mountain. The scientist wants to climb the moon. What were the Wright brothers but climbers?

No one wants to stay in the valley.

Climbing may be the fastest-growing sport in America today. In the world, in fact. What better way to get away from it all than to get above it?

I visited a climbing facility in West Los Angeles the other day. It is, you might say, a driving range for rock-climbers. It has sheer walls with indentations cut in them with colored codes so the whole looks like El Capitan with M&M;’s pasted on.

It’s called “Rockreation.” It’s object is to train the hordes of would-be Sir Edmund Hillarys before they go out and dangle from an Alp or a cliff.

The sport crosses gender lines, race or religion. Its lure is unmistakable, universal. It is the ultimate adventure. To stand where no man ever stood before is, well, a real high.

The men and women who throng the Rockreation facility will probably never challenge the North Face of the Eiger or the Khumbu Icefall of Everest. Their challenge will be the high boulders of the Central Valley. But even Sir Edmund Hillary began with a stepladder. There are now more than 250 climbing gyms across the country with simulated mountains approximating rope climbs, handholds and footholds you might encounter on a real slope.

The great glory of the climb is, you bet your life against the mountain. Mostly, the mountain wins. The literature of the sport corroborates it. This, from a book of reflections by the late Detroit sportswriter Doc Greene:

(“From the balcony of Hermann Steuri’s chalet, you could look up the 13,083 feet of the Eiger, nicknamed the Ogre. You look directly into the dread North Face of this treacherous Alp where, until a few days ago, the body of Stephano Longhi, an Italian rock climber, dangled for two years. He had tried to climb the North Face in August 1957 and failed. ‘Longhi and his friend, Claudio Corti, seemed to be excellent rock climbers and they handled their ropes well but I don’t think they’d had enough training,’ said Steuri. ‘It is the impatience of young people. They perhaps have a 3-week vacation. Conditions are not good. But you cannot deny young people the right to climb. So one morning, they shrug and off they go. [But] we are nearly always able to recover the bodies.’ ”)

Mountaineering is a blood sport. This, from Newsletter No. 6 from the Everest climb of 1963 by Norman Dhyrenfurth’s team:

“Tragedy, sudden and violent, has struck the expedition in the death of John E. ‘Jake’ Breitenbach on March 23rd.

“In the early afternoon of that day, Jake was at work in the Khumbu Icefall above base camp, improving a route that had been pioneered the previous day. Without warning, a large wall of ice, towering above him, collapsed and descended upon him, and death was instantaneous. Recovery of the body was attempted but proved impossible because of the huge amount of ice that covered it. “

The gym climbers of Los Angeles or Kansas City may never brave the icefalls of the Himalayas or dare the white hell of Dhaulagiri. The boulders of Bakersfield may have to do. Jeff Clapp, one of the principals (vice president) of the West L.A. climbing center, was a member of a 1993 American team that scaled Everest.

The Sherpas of Nepal once believed the top of Everest was the dwelling place of Lord Buddha himself and, for all we know, maybe it is. But Katmandu, which had not changed much since Marco Polo’s day, has gone from the 16th century to the 20th in a generation. It is now a footstool to the Lordly Himalayas, awash with men from all over the world with their walkie-talkies, truckloads of photo equipment and videotape. Mountain-climbing is definitely In. Some think it should be in the Olympics.

Not everyone who grabs a piton or a pulley and practices on the steel-reinforced epoxy and cement of the gym will one day traverse the Matterhorn or dangle from the Jungfrau, just as not everybody who hits nine-irons on a practice range will one day tee it up in a U.S. Open. But everyone has to start somewhere.

It used to be a political battle cry in this Golden State “O, give us men to match our mountains!” In a sense, that’s what the gyms are trying to do. And this is a case, in a sense, where they did bring the mountain to the man.