So I hadn’t climbed El Cap for 37 years, and then climbed it with my son, imbuing Ryan with lofty Golden Age wall philosophies of traveling light, not much water or clothing (because it’s always hot). After four days on the Nose, with rain beginning in the Stovelegs, the storm totally freezing us, my son informed me, ‘I’m no longer taking advice from pioneers.’

We spent three months in Yosemite and ticked the Nose, Lurking Fear, the West Face, and the North America Wall. Oh, what joy!

You can’t tell someone else to climb in a certain style. We were all already climbing in the best style we can. But role models are inspiring - like John Salathé was for us. We didn’t want to disappoint him. Some ascents are a disaster, others brilliant. Its all a day’s climbing.

Climbing is an internal game. Commitment is the reality. There is no avoiding this. Going up means we have to face ourselves. That is why there is so much respect in the Camp 4 community – in ways the average person cannot understand.

Development of the Lost Arrow piton was quite meaningful for me. They required craftsmanship in the user to get the best placement, and craftsmanship from us to make them. The first ones were hand forged by Chouinard, myself, and others. Those early ones were beautiful but are not made that way anymore.

The Lost Arrow evolved, and the design got better over the years. We went from hand-forging to using die-forged blanks and the die kept wearing out, so each time I would re-think the piton design and improve it. When we moved to clean climbing, I really liked designing the Stoppers and Hexentrics … my current Sentinel Nuts are an improved iteration over the original Stoppers.

It was a process to move to clean climbing. Robbins figured it out ahead of the rest of us. He had gone to England and climbed on nuts in the 60s, earlier than anyone else, and came back praising clean climbing. Most of the rest of us weren’t getting it. In 1970, I went to Annapurna and then England and climbed with nuts, and understood. I came back and told Chouinard I could design them. Royal and Doug Robinson were the earliest supporters.

With Chouinard, we liked climbing and making gear equally. It was the whole thing — being involved in a small business with a partner going the same direction, believing in the same values. In business, that is a rare experience. We did a fair bit of climbing together, too. We repeated all of Salathé’s routes together, looking for one of his pitons. Chouinard had one — we were looking for one for me. Designing was as much fun as the climbing. Yvon was the idea man, and I was the engineer. Yvon would show up at a climbing area, open his trunk, and sell his pitons and carabiners a couple of years before we met. I worked on the tooling for production, and the business grew slowly but steadily.