Matt: What’s the Logan Hook?

Jim: The Logan Hook is a direct aider. It is the first hook that worked basically. So, per direct aid, the first hook was made by Chouinard. It was just a bent piece of metal and when you stood up on it, it would rotate. So, I was climbing, I think actually with Roger Briggs in Eldorado, and I did a hook move on this Chouinard hook, and I was up above an old soft iron pin that was half driven in, and as I stood up I watched the hook rotate and drop me 15-20 feet onto this old soft iron, which, fortunately, didn’t come out.

But then I designed this hook that had a base — a wide base and three points for support. It’s essentially all the hooks there are now. But, the first one, and I was working for Ed Leeper for making pitons, so I was the lone worker for the Leeper Piton Factory on Wall Street. A little shack up on Wall Street. So he came in, and I was making hooks, and he asked, “What are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I am making hooks for myself.” And he said that we should sell them. And so, then we made them and we sold them. At some point Chouinard called me and said that he wanted to make my design and make it a little bigger. And I said, well, we don’t have the ability to make it bigger, so if you want to, that’s fine. So, the little original Leeper hook is still called the Logan Hook.

Matt: It stays put really well?

Jim: It just stays put, and it has very little leverage for really extreme hooking. It sort of made hooking possible.

Matt: Right, well that’s cool.

Jim: Like I was climbing in Red Rocks, and I was talking to Uriostes, the guys that bolted all those things. And Jorge told me he was able to do it because I made that hook. Cause before that, they would climb up on the edges and couldn’t do anything. But, after I made the hook, they would climb up and put a hook on and hang on the hook and then drill. So, all those drilled routes happened because we made the hooks, so he could hang there and drill the holes.

Matt: Cool, so you guys had customized the ax, and you also had the Forrest hammer.

Jim: Yeah, Bill Forest made an ice hammer that you could put different picks on. So, it was an ice hammer that had a steep pick on it like a pterodactyl — I don’t know if you have ever used pterodactyls. They are just very very steep, and they were, for us, always the tool of last resort because they’d tear your knuckles up. You couldn’t swing em, you would have to kind of pull them down, so you hit your knuckles. You would always come home with bloody, swollen, horrible knuckles.