INDEX CLUB

1966 — Town Crier, 5.10 A2/3; Fred Beckey and Dave Beckstead
The seven-pitch Town Crier marked the beginning of serious aid climbing on the Upper Town Wall. The venerable Seattle local Fred Beckey, 43 at the time, recruited a stable of (mostly) young bucks: Beckstead, Leif Patterson, Eric Bjornstad, Mark Fielding and Bob Phelps. The hardware tally for the 550-foot route came in at 103 pitons and 19 bolts. Becky had long been active in the Cascades, among other things completing the FA of the neighboring Mount Index middle peak, 16 years prior. 

Numerous aid climbs went up in the decade following, and many Index climbers took the techniques they’d learned there to Yosemite. The most significant phenomenon from this era was the climbing prodigy Jim Madsen, a UW engineering student and football player. In 1967, Madsen together with Ron Burgner put up Golden Arch (5.11b, A3), a large prominent arching left-facing dihedral in a section of golden-colored rock on the right side on Upper Town Wall. His skills honed at Index, Madsen joined forces with Kim Schmitz from Portland, Oregon. The pair established The Thin Red Line at Washington Pass (V, 5.9, A4), then dropped out of college. With $70 between them, Madsen and Schmitz drove south in a Rambler station wagon and tore up Yosemite in 1967-8, shocking the locals with their speed and boldness. 

“Jim Madsen and Kim Schmitz were all the rage those two years in Yosemite,” recalls Jim Erickson. “They showed up out of nowhere, climbing big walls faster than anyone else at the time.” In an era before nuts were invented let alone cams, their two-night bivouac ascents of The Nose and the Dihedral Wall and Salathé Wall (three nights) were accomplished with sky hooks, pitons, swami belts and hip belays. When asked how they accomplished these feats, Schmitz recalls, “Jim and I would just announce that we’d do the route in half the time than it had ever been done, and somehow it worked out.” 

In October 1968 Madsen rapped off the end of his braided Gold Line rope while attempting to rescue his friends Chuck Pratt and Chris Fredericks, pinned down by a storm on Dihedral Wall, perishing in the 2,500-foot fall. Madsen’s ledge, which extends across the right side of the Upper Town Wall and accesses the lower pitches of many multipitch climbs, is now named for this local climber. “Jim Madsen was killed the year I started climbing,” recalls Bruce Albert, the current mayor of Index who aid climbed at Index during the late 1960s. “[Madsen] really put Washington rock climbing on the map. He was an animal.” 

1972 — Ten Percent Meteorological Venticulation (TPMV), A4, 5.13a C1/2; Bruce Carson, Dave Anderson
The TPMV is a five-pitch aid route on the Lower Town Wall, originally A4 before flakes peeled off, put up by Seattle natives Bruce Carson and Dave Anderson in 1972. In 2007, Ben Gilkison extended the first-pitch variation (5.13a R) for 140 feet of climbing. A single No. 5 Micronut protects the crux. All but 40 feet of the original direct start now go free. 

TPMV gets a notch on the Index historical timeline because of the techniques Carson and Anderson pioneered during its ascent — a combination of copperheading, hooking large unstable flakes, and nailing. The following year Carson and Anderson plied their Index techniques on Yosemite big walls to complete difficult aid routes sans hammers. The duo completed the Rostrum in 1973 without a hammer or using fixed pitons. (Nuts were new on the scene and a rack of aluminum wedges did not exactly inspire confidence in big wall climbers at the time.) 

Carson was considered a visionary for adopting this clean, bold style. Wrote Royal Robbins in a 1976 American Alpine Journal, “[Carson] was a true mountaineer… and brilliant rock climber. …Leaving behind the hammer [on the first VI clean-aid ascent, the West Face of Sentinel Rock], was one of those flashes of genius [that] combine courage and insight which are extraordinary, even transcendent.” 

Later that year, Carson and Yvon Chouinard climbed the Nose, the first party to leave the ground without a hammer. Although the piton-ruined rock disturbed Chouinard, he had not yet entirely committed to the ethics espoused by “nut fanatics” like Royal Robbins. As they started up the Nose, Chouinard confessed to Carson, “I’ve never really stood on one of these [nuts] before.” But by the time they topped out, he’d become a clean-aid convert. That same year, Index locals Don Brooks and Karl Kaiyala, accompanied by Roger Fuggle, completed the second hammerless ascent of the Nose. “[Carson and Chouinard] lent us some of those nut goodies, and off we went,” says Kaiyala. 

Carson died September 4, 1975, only 24, after falling through a cornice in the Indian Himalaya. In 1998, an avalanche broke Anderson’s femur while he backcountry-skied near Salt Lake City. His rescue helicopter crashed, killing all aboard.