Q: If you could be in on any FA, anywhere, in history, which team would you join and on which route? Why?
A: Royal said I was to be the fourth man for the first ascent of the North America Wall of El Cap, if Chouinard didn’t show. I was sad when Yvon did show. I went down to Fresno and caught a freight train back to Colorado. There were no mantels on El Cap as fierce as onto a moving flatcar with a heavy pack, legs swinging near the wheels… I’ve always wondered, though, how much fun that El Cap climb would have been. 

I would have liked to climb with Joe Brown and Don Whillans in Wales in their heyday. I believe I would have fit in with them. Whillans liked me, though I never got to meet Joe. 

Q: How hairy is hairy?
A: When I was young, I had no hair on my body except on my head. Some envied that. As I get older, I find my eyebrows grow wildly. I must trim them weekly. As for climbing, anything that gets me to that exhilaration point might be called hairy. I don’t let myself do anything too dangerous anymore. 

Q: How heinous is heinous?
A: I guess heinous is only heinous if it truly is heinous. But our use of the language tends to be a bit heinous. 

Q: Is the beer bottle half empty or half full?
A: I don’t drink anymore and haven’t for years, but I would say, from a philosophical point of view, that we all are blessed in some relative way, and thus always the bottle is half full, or so one should see it. 

Q: Is climbing your spirituality, or is it part of your spirituality?
A: Climbing, like karate, is a tool. And it is a gift. It is a way of perfecting ourselves. Karate, by definition, is the perfection of the self through the perfection of an art. Climbing serves that same purpose for those of us who give to it many years. Thus climbing is vital to any spirituality one might pursue. I once heard a man professing religion say it was a sin to climb, because it was to risk the sacred gift of life God gave us. Another person, in my eyes far more spiritual, told me it would be a sin not to climb, for climbing was, in his eyes, God-given.