Soul men

A big silver tour bus pulls into a parking lot in Yosemite Valley and idles next to a green and purple tour bus that sits beside a bright fuchsia tour bus. Ten feet away, a fourth bus--this one red, white and blue with the word “Rejoice!” splashed across its side--disgorges a few dozen Japanese tourists carrying tiny, prepackaged bento boxes. The lot is crawling with people. Not a promising start to a great outdoors adventure.

It’s a crystal-clear Saturday afternoon in late September, and I’m here for a weeklong foray into rock-climbing culture. At least 650,000 people in this country participate in the sport; many of them are “trad,” or “traditional” climbers, who prefer the house-size boulders or big walls of nature to the pre-bolted surfaces found in climbing gyms. This is climbing for purists, and its birthplace is Yosemite National Park, which remains a mecca for the thousands who flock here every year.

Autumn is hard-core season, when Yosemite plays host to the climbing world’s international elite. They arrive each September, driving beat-up vans and SUVs, and stay for a month or two before moving on to the warmer climes of Joshua Tree or Thailand, or to the ice zones of Pakistan or Canada’s Baffin Island. Most of them come to Yosemite to climb El Capitan, the 3,000-foot monolith that looms over the valley, as well as to “put in their time,” a prerequisite for achieving respect within the climbing community and attracting the attention of potential sponsors.

All of which means there’s not a campsite to be found. Fortunately, an encounter with Bullwinkle--a.k.a. Dean Fidelman, a wizened 45-year-old climber--brings a solution and salvation. He stares at my fancy dome tent, then at me. And laughs. “You won’t need the tent,” he says. “There are plenty of places to bivvy.”

Bivvy?

“Camp. If you’re going to hang with us, you’re going to have to learn the language.”

“Bivvy,” I’m told, comes from the word “bivouac,” which means a “temporary campsite.” It’s a synonym for “booty camping,” “booty” being anything found that wasn’t yours to begin with--a camera, climbing gear, a sweater or two. Bivvying is all about throwing your sleeping bag in a meadow, on a slab of rock, a cave, your car, anywhere that isn’t an actual campsite.

Bullwinkle has been bivvying in the valley for 27 years, along with a few dozen other climbers--some top pros; others quasi-homeless rock rats. They make up a subset of the rarefied climbing elite known as “soul climbers.” Their credo: Yosemite, heart and soul of the climbing world, should be free. In every way. To this end, they climb and hang out. And they don’t function the way most of us do, preferring instead to live off the land, which they call groveling. They shun the noise and the dust of the low-rent campground at the far western edge of the valley known as Camp 4 (not to mention its nightly $3 fee). Instead they bivvy in the woods, “living” (i.e. parking their cars) across the road from Camp 4 in the Yosemite Lodge parking lot. Grovelers scrounge condiments from the deli and coffee from the cafeteria, forage for food by swooping in on abandoned lunch and dinner trays, and scam the occasional free shower by befriending National Park Service employees. To be one of the miscellaneous Gods of Rock is to live untethered from most of the worldly comforts that postmillennial society has to offer. To be one of the Gods of Rock is to live on a budget of about $4 a day.

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Groveling Rules.

#1: Understanding geography is the key to navigation.

#2: Geography is also the key to avoiding the park rangers (rangers like flat; they don’t like rocky).

#3: Always bivvy in places that require a nasty hike (see Rule #2).

It’s Saturday night and Bullwinkle, my spirit guide, has been AWOL for six hours. Behind Camp 4, where I’ve gone to look for him, I meet a scruffy-looking guy in a wool hat and several layers of clothing. He looks at me suspiciously as I introduce myself, then shrugs and goes back to rifling through a rusty bear box. Bullwinkle, he tells me, is probably at The Party. “It’s kind of a rave,” he says. “On El Cap.” Which is a bit like saying, “There’s a party on Mt. Olympus.”

“On El Cap?”

“At the base. You don’t have to climb the rock or anything.” Then he smiles. The speaker is Chongo, a 30-year denizen of the valley. Unlike many of his fellow soul climbers, Chongo does not have a crash pad in the desert or a house in Los Angeles; he has a tent and a lawn chair at the base of El Capitan’s North American Wall. He’s there, ostensibly, to climb the route known as “Sea of Dreams” (a route that takes most climbers a week or so but one that Chongo has been working on for a year, maybe two, climbing a few feet and then retreating to the base whenever he feels like it). His primary role is to serve as a kind of “wall guru.” Climbers meet him, sitting troll-like at the base of El Cap, where he might get them stoned, loan them some rope or dole out climbing tips. Most return the favor by taking some of his gear along with them and depositing it at his makeshift “camp”--a massive haul bag that’s hanging about one-third of the way up the wall. Others leave him food or water. When he needs to replenish, Chongo heads to the valley, where he collects cans for recycling money. In the winter, he goes to Mexico. Or stays in the valley. No one really knows.

After inviting me to the party, Chongo disappears into the woods, leaving me to make my own way to the base of El Cap.

Rule #4: Know how, and when, to vanish to avoid the annoyance of waiting for people.

To get to the party, I have to climb over a series of boulders the size of refrigerators, which I scale awkwardly, slowly, by grasping tree branches and other rocks until I arrive one hour and 800 feet later. After all of that, the rave is relatively mellow. Bullwinkle and Chongo share a joint on a log. About 10 other climbers sit around a fire, drinking tequila and listening to a Moby CD. No one seems to worry about the consequences of getting caught smoking marijuana on federal land; some rangers say that getting caught with less than an ounce wouldn’t even merit a citation.

That’s good news for Leo Houlding, a.k.a. “His Fierceness,” who is alternately sucking on a cigarette and a joint. Houlding is Britain’s Wunderkind of climbing: a blond, blue-eyed, 20-year-old prodigy known for his daring exploits on rocks and elsewhere (he’s famous for his lemur-like ability to jump between trees and boulders). He is also a tireless partyer. “All I need,” he says, with a whacked-out grin, “is some pot, some booze, a sleeping bag and the rock.”

Houlding has all these things and more, courtesy of Berghaus, the British outfitter that supplies him with much of his gear and foots the bill for his trips (a climbing expedition can cost $2,500 to $60,000 per climber). One of the youngest climbers on the pro circuit, Houlding has traveled to Madagascar, Norway, the Czech Republic, Thailand and the United Kingdom, as well as Yosemite, twice, in the past two years.

The one thing Houlding doesn’t have is a pillow, and by the time he passes out, about 2 a.m., he has appropriated my fleece jacket--a minor infraction compared to the antics of Houlding’s climbing buddy, Sorry ‘Bout That Pat. Pat has lost his sleeping bag and plans to steal mine--with me still in it. He crawls next to me while I’m asleep and pretends he’s about to throw up. Horrified, I jump out of my bag and Pat climbs in. Within 30 seconds he’s snoring. I’m left with my sweater.

Rule #5: Know how, and when, to acquire what you need.

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For many, the word “Yosemite” conjures Ansel Adams’ images of moonlit mountains, waterfalls and white-tailed deer. But those images are largely chimera, thanks to Ted and Betty’s Yosemite: a clog of smog, overpriced hamburgers and 10-mile RV traffic. With its two hotels, six campgrounds, three bars, seven restaurants, snack bars, gift shops and convenience stores, Yosemite is one of the most popular parks in the national park system, drawing 4 million visitors who collectively spend more than $100 million per year. Few of them, though, will ever be welcomed into Underground Yosemite: the no-bad-loafers-allowed haven of bivvy camps, late-night beer fests and blissed-out soul climbers. This is Yosemite by invitation only.

On Sunday I find myself sitting atop a large rock at an exclusive climbing spot known as the Rostrum, on the western edge of the valley. Under the late-afternoon sun, climbers listen to Tupac Shakur on a portable boombox, drink Olde English and do bong hits under the trees.

Dean Potter walks back and forth along a slender tightrope made of nylon webbing. He is barefoot and deeply stoned. The webbing, called a “slack line,” is tied between two rocks and extends about 15 feet over a 700-foot crevasse that looks down upon a snaking one-lane highway. This is a balancing exercise, which Potter, a 28-year-old climber with Zen-like concentration (particularly when high) says he finds relaxing. This is a high-risk activity in the extreme despite the safety leash he wears around his ankle, but the danger of it, he says, puts the rest of what he does “into perspective.”

Potter is one of the foremost rock climbers in the United States, known for “speed climbing” monolithic rocks without any rope at all. In the summer of 1999, Potter climbed both the Nose, or prow, of El Capitan and the northwest face of Half Dome in 23 hours and change. It was a combined climb of more than 5,000 vertical feet, which Potter performed using a rope only sporadically, some of it at night. The average climber needs three days to a week to complete each feat. Potter has also been expelled from Yosemite several times--for staying beyond the park’s two-week maximum, for sleeping in the meadows and--the final straw--for snapping the stems off a head of broccoli in The Village Store. (“The attractive thing about rock climbing,” he says, is “there are no rules.”) Not surprisingly, Potter has god-like stature within climbing, thanks to stunts such as these and his acquisition of a handful of sponsors, including Patagonia.

Rock climbing is still in its infancy in terms of mass-market appeal and income. “Very few climbers actually make direct funds from their sponsors,” says Kevin Thaw, a member of the North Face climbing team. Climbers are paid in gear, travel, speaking fees and, to a small degree, in cash. Potter refuses to disclose how much he’s paid, and Patagonia spokesman John Wason insists, “It’s a lot less than you and I could ever imagine living on.”

But you get the feeling that Potter could be a millionaire and still live like a nomad. “Dean’s a soul climber. Give a soul climber $25 and he’ll come here and pick food out of the dumpsters so he can climb every day,” Bullwinkle says.

Bullwinkle, Potter and their peers are adept at getting what they need, and they generally get away with it. It’s basic supply and demand, according to the park’s chief ranger, Bob Andrew. At any given time during the high season (April through August), 20,000 people visit the park. The numbers drop significantly after Labor Day, but the number of law enforcement officers on duty year-round remains constant at two, perhaps three, in the valley. Their duties run the gamut: from triage to rescuing stranded hikers from the back country to basic policing. Last year, climber arrests accounted for less than 1% of arrests in the park. “You’re talking about a handful of guys,” Andrew says. “We simply don’t have the time nor the inclination to target them.”

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Bullwinkle is feeling nostalgic. In the ‘70s, he says, “you didn’t have any money and you scammed as much as you could. It was all good karma.”

It’s Tuesday. Another day, another mildly treacherous hike in the woods, another chance to grab free coffee refills and eat in the Garden Terrace restaurant without paying. Another day of following Bullwinkle as he shows me where to buy 50-cent sodas (employee break area at the back of the Lodge), grab a free shower (Housekeeping Camp) and park (in the Yosemite Lodge parking lot, a.k.a. the Center of the Universe, where I leave my car for a week and never get a ticket, even though long-term parking is technically illegal). Ripping off the park, Bullwinkle says, is still good karma.

“Do climbers rip us off? I’m not aware,” says Karen Hales, spokeswoman for the Yosemite Concession Services. YCS is the park’s major concessionaire and has a monopoly on everything from bottled water to hotel rooms. Unofficially, YCS employees don’t seem to care whether a few climbers are ripping the service off.

Bullwinkle would like to do away with tourism altogether: no campgrounds, no cars, no hotels, no $60 dinners. “If you can’t get into the raw environment, you don’t deserve to be here,” he says. He accuses the National Park Service of “raping the valley for commercial gain.” Park spokesman Scott Gediman points out that the park service supports a federal plan to restore the valley to a more natural state by eliminating certain roads and limiting the number of visitors. “It’s a delicate balance,” Gediman says. “Our mandate is to protect this park and to serve the needs of the visitor, which includes climbers.” But then he asks: “What would climbers do if the restaurants, bars, parking lots all totally disappeared? They rely on our services as much as anyone.”

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The Yosemite Lodge cafeteria is the melting pot for nerdy straight-arrows and miscreants alike: where Ted and Betty meet the grunge kings who snag their toast or leftover fruit plate or their newspaper and then retreat to the window tables, where they cluster like black flies.

It’s Wednesday morning and Bullwinkle and I are watching a procession of European climbers, armed with coffee mugs and climbing books and covered with a few dead leaves--remnants of last night’s bivvy--make its way across the room. Its destination: a corner table whose sole occupant, a grizzled, raven-haired climber, nods and then goes back to studying a map of El Capitan. This is Alex Huber, 32, who, with his 34-year-old brother, Thomas, established the difficult “El Nino” route on El Capitan in 1998. Alex is known as “The Prince.” He also, reputedly, wears leather pants when he’s not wearing Gore-Tex, and doesn’t talk to anyone he doesn’t know. Earlier, Bullwinkle had approached Alex and said hello, and Alex had said hello back. This made Bullwinkle smile.

At its heart, Underground Yosemite is a lot like high school. It’s an honor to talk to Alex, or people like him. It means you’ve paid your dues. Paying your dues means climbing even if your heroes tell you you’re worthless, even if you gash your fingers, and sometimes a lot more, on the rocks. It means you’ve suffered for the sport. Paying your dues is caring less about looking the part than about showing your face often enough for the soul-climbing community to consider you sufficiently committed. Bullwinkle has earned the right because he has been climbing in the valley so long that he knows everyone. And he makes a contribution to the general welfare of the climbing subculture that Alex particularly enjoys. Bullwinkle is a photographer, and for two years he has produced a black-and-white calendar titled “Stone Nudes.” Shot almost wholly in the desert, it features naked (except for boots) women climbing on the rocks.

“If you want to be a soul climber, you can’t just take. You have to give back to the community,” Bullwinkle says, accepting a half-eaten plate of French toast from another climber. A few climbers in new neon fleece strut by. They look clean and unscarred. Bullwinkle-- whose own attire consists of pilled navy fleece, T-shirt, jeans and hair that looks as if it hasn’t been cut since the ‘70s--scowls. “You think those guys have paid dues? They’ll be gone in a year.” He shrugs. “They’ll never be soul climbers.”

it’s Thursday--i think. spend a few days in the valley and the days merge into one another. Which isn’t to say that business isn’t getting done. Over in the Center of the Universe, Jason Smith, a.k.a. “Singer,” his cell phone headset firmly in place, is talking to his agent about an upcoming appearance on “Dateline.” Singer, 22, is Yosemite’s resident celebrity, having been kidnapped in Kyrgystan while on a North Face climbing expedition in August. He was held with three other climbers for a week before they escaped by pushing one of their captors off a cliff. For this, Singer and his climbing partners received worldwide press, and the four are working on a book. The screenplay has already been sold.

All of this is a little much for Singer, who’s been climbing since he was a teenager and has lost several friends to rock climbing during the past two years. Singer spends most of his time in his van, which is equipped with a double bed, most of the nonperishable stock from Trader Joe’s and a heavy-duty alarm system.

“This is not what I want to be known for--getting kidnapped,” he tells Bullwinkle. Nevertheless, Singer accepts Bullwinkle’s contention that his newfound status within the climbing world won’t come around again. “I guess,” he says. “I mean, I could have been killed.” Instead, if all goes well, he stands to make six figures from book and movie rights. “Milk it,” Bullwinkle says.

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I wonder if Bullwinkle or Singer or anyone will watch the “Dateline” segment. Do they know when it’s on? Does anyone? I’ve now been here a week, long enough for time to lose all practical meaning and to learn a few lessons about Yosemite Valley: Nothing much matters here, other than rock and nature and a climber’s desire to conquer it.

Outside of the Mountain Room Bar, where the walls are hung with hiking boots and poles that seem to date back to John Muir, Alex Huber and his coterie of Euros smoke unfiltered Camels and pore over their maps. An English tour group sits near them, taking in a free lecture on the mating habits of bears. Sorry ‘Bout That Pat, down from El Cap with Houlding to gather supplies, walks by with a distinct limp. I find that deeply pleasing.

In seven days, I’ve hiked several punishing trails, had my sleeping bag stolen and fallen on a boulder in the middle of the night. Hiking without a flashlight, I fell and slammed my chest against a boulder. My watch broke, and it feels as if I broke a rib as well.

At the end of my stay, I’m still bruised and in full-hobble mode. Bullwinkle offers me a cigarette. (Another thing about a soul climber: he’ll give you a Camel when you really need one.) The valley, he says, will tell you when it doesn’t like you. “You’ll twist your ankle, you’ll get hassled by rangers, a bear will break into your car.” He shrugs. “Things just happen that way.” He winks. Then Bullwinkle wanders off to go climbing.

In the late afternoon, Singer and I drive to the meadow and lie in the grass, picking out the climbing routes on El Capitan. I can just make out a few figures on the wall and, of course, Chongo’s giant haul bag, which looks a bit like a mummy near the base of Sea of Dreams. To the right of the Nose, a few climbers hang off a sheer face as if they were mollusks.

By Monday, some of these people will be gone: to another wall, back to Los Angeles, into Mariposa for dinner and a bath at a friend’s house. But they’ll be back. It’s still only the first week in October. Another month, or more, to go. The sun casts a shadow on El Cap’s 3,000-foot North American Wall. I look up, and then back down again at the snaking line of cars, vans, SUVs all parked here, ticket-free, for days, while their owners, caught in the Valley’s embrace, inch slowly up the rock.

A giant whoop erupts from the top of the rock and echoes across the meadow. Singer smiles. “Someone made it,” he says.

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Janet Reitman is a New York-based writer.