40 Years of American Rock

1970, picture it: a cherry-red Mustang guns it up the back roads out of a podunk Hudson Valley college town, burning rubber past farmhouses and orchards and around tree-lined hairpins toward a notch in ridge-top cliffs. The driver is sporting James Dean sunglasses, passenger's blonde ponytail flying free, and the radio's cranking out Diana Ross's current number-one hit, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." Yeah, baby. Over the crest and down toward Minnewaska, past a lost city of stone hidden somewhere out there in the trees, where the serious, bespectacled John Stannard clings to an overhanging finger crack until his grip gives out, a few feet higher than last time.

Change scene: Halfway across the country and close to the sky, Bill Forrest inches his way up the last pitch on the first solo ascent of the Diamond in Rocky Mountain National Park, poised in his hand-tied webbing slings, fingering a cabled Foxhead from his rack and nestling it in a burnished granite crack next to a bloom of alpine phlox. All he can hear is that damned Jackson Five song stuck in his head.

And farther west, high on an even bigger wall, the South Face of Half Dome, Warren Harding and Galen Rowell bed down in their Bat Tents, a bit giddy from too much Sierra summer sun, but certain now that they won’t face a repeat of their hypothermic rescue epic two years earlier. After succeeding on Half Dome, Harding descends and immediately recruits Dean Caldwell for another big climb; this pair will spend the rest of the climbing season, in a single push, on the Wall of Early Morning Light, making national headlines.

In 1970, the year the first issue of Climbing hit the counters of a handful of mountain shops, American rock was on a roll. It was a volatile time. Nixon had just signed a ban on TV cigarette ads and another measure giving 18-year-olds the right to vote. Four anti-war protesters were shot at Kent State, Janis Joplin OD’ed on heroin, and the comic strip Doonesbury debuted, as did Earth Day and All My Children. The Beatles broke up, the Dead released American Beauty, and the Blue Flame set a new land speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats that would stand for 13 years.

More to the point, while the big walls were just as fashionable as they had been in the 1960s, Stannard was still persisting on the Gunks climb that would become Persistent (5.11c), pioneering the “epic project” concept for half-pitch free climbs that has helped turn molehills into mountains ever since. At the same time, the teenaged “Hot Henry” Barber was new on the scene, soon to raise free-climbing standards in areas as far flung as Yosemite, New Hampshire, the Adirondacks, North Carolina, Australia, and Africa. And the next year, things really got rolling when a dramatic five-pitch line called The Naked Edge went free at 5.11, almost immediately transmogrifying into a mythical creature that ascended out of Eldorado Canyon and into climbers’ dreams.