Jim Logan: The Emperor of Mount Robson

Matt: I guess, a contributing member of society. So, you got here in 1965? And where did you grow up before that?

Jim: I grew up in west Texas and actually started climbing in 1959 in the Davis Mountains. Then I went to school in Colorado Springs and climbed quite a bit there when I was a junior and senior in high school. So, then came to Boulder I really was already well into climbing.

Matt: So, is that probably why you came here?

Jim: Skiing too. Climbing and skiing, I wanted to do both.

Matt: And how long have you had your architecture firm?

Jim: I am 60 now, and I got my architecture degree I think when I was 38, so that makes it 20-some years.

Matt: Okay, so that has always been in Boulder?

Jim: Yeah, I’ve always been here, ever since.

Matt: I know it’s hard for me to say, “Tell me about your climbing career,” because you have done so much, but around Colorado what do you think you are sort of most known for?

Jim: Well my three best climbs are first, The Crack of Fear, which was 1966 or 67, and it was kind of the next hard climb to do in the country. Kor had climbed it but ate it at the hard part. Then Robbins tried to free climb it and couldn’t. And Pat Ament was desperately trying to do it; he wanted to do it very badly. So, Chris Fredericks came out from California specifically to do The Crack of Fear. Because I was good at climbing the Grand Giraffe, the logic was that I would be his partner.

Matt: You were the man on the spot.

Jim: I was taught in somebody’s living room how to chicken wing that night, and then next day we went out and Chris basically lead the climb and did it. And actually I was thinking as we were coming down from the Crack of Fear, and I was 19 years old and pretty excited, and said I can’t want to get back to Boulder and tell everybody. And Chris, who later spent the last part of his life in a Zen monastery, said, “I don’t think that’s why we’re supposed to be doing this.”

Matt: How old were you?

Jim: 19

Matt: So, you were just a kid.

Jim: Yeah, and I was going out to the Valley a number of times and doing big walls and hard nailing. Roger Briggs and I climbed the Diamond when he was 15, and I was 19.

Matt: Did you guys do D1?

Jim: The second ascent of D7, and we didn’t take any bvvy gear. We didn’t have a plan. It never came up that you should have a plan and know if you are going to spend the night or not spend the night. It just didn’t register. We spent a very cold night hugging each other waiting for the dawn on that ledge a long time ago. So Roger and I have been climbing together since then.

Matt: And what year was that?

Jim: 1967 or 68.

Matt: And you still climb a lot with Roger?

Jim: Yeah, Roger and I are still good friends. I designed his house. Yeah, however many years that is, 40 years, we’re still climbing together.

Matt: And you’re also known for the first free ascent of the Diamond?

Jim: Yeah, Wayne Goss and I, what was then thought of as late in our climbing career, because we hadn’t really been doing much and people thought we were old has-beens because we were 30-somethings.

Matt: That’s tragic.

Jim: Yeah, we were in our 30s, and somehow we didn’t count anymore, so we decided to do the first free ascent of the Diamond. And, we did that in 1976. And what was cool was it was the first time the Diamond was ever climbed with no hammers, no bivvy gear, just the way it is climbed now. We bivvied on Broadway. We left our gear on Broadway. And just went for it, so we had a rope and a rack and a rain jacket, and that was it.

Matt: All clean gear?

Jim: All clean gear, all nuts. It was before cams were invented. It was all hexes and stoppers.

Matt: What year was that?

Jim: 76, I think. Probably 76, maybe 74 or 75.

Matt: And you guys did D7 into the Forrest Finish?

Jim: D7 into the Forrest Finish. I looked up what became the Casual Route later and declared it not free-climbable from the ledge. So, Wayne led a really hard pitch going left back into the top of Black Dagger. There was a crack there that is now completely cleaned out. At the time it was completely full of grass, mud, flowers, and stuff. So, Wayne face climbed in the rain on the right side in between the Black Dagger and the Casual Route.

Matt: So, much harder than the Casual Route?

Jim: Much harder than the Casual Route, and he managed to not fall off, and I followed and managed to not fall off. We were pretty excited.

Matt: Has anyone repeated that specific variation?

Jim: It’s hard to tell. It actually a pretty good route if you did that set of pitches into the Casual Route. It would be a really nice free climb actually. The Forrest Finish pitch, I looked it up, and I think it is like 11a or something maybe but, I just remember it was a very consistent, really good, pumpy crack climb. In that kind of complicated Diamond way where you jam, then you layback, then you reach up on the ledge and stem for a move.

Matt: You said you said you were known for three Colorado sends, did we miss one?

Jim: And the other was the Emperor Face. So at the end of that sort of free-climbing time, I got interested in mixed climbing. And I went to Europe and climbed the Eiger and started doing ice climbing. I climbed Bridalveil. I think Mugs and I did the second or third ascent of Bridalveil, maybe the third. We were doing new ice routes in Utah, basically doing a lot of waterfall climbing. The way Mugs and I met was, he was just a kid and I was going on the Hummingbird Ridge, and he found out about it and got himself invited. He told me later he wanted to climb the Emperor Face because he wanted to get known as a climber, and he thought that would be the way to do it.

Matt: That would be the stepping stone…

Jim: I was the step on his stepping stone to be known as a good climber, so he and I ended up on the Hummingbird Ridge, and it ended up being much harder than we expected it. So, I would lead all day one day, and he would lead all day the next. And the other people were just moving gear basically. So, when we came down from that, that was when he told me that was his plan. He knew I had been trying the Emperor Face for a number of years with good climbers – Duncan Ferguson, Mike Weiss.

Matt: Were you just making a pilgrimage up there every summer to do the thing?

Jim: Yeah, well I had gone in there with a group of people after I had done the Eiger. So it had been probably ‘75 or ‘76 and was amazing that there was a face that big that had not been climbed in the world. And then I started going back. I went in the wintertime with Jim Donini, and some other people, Mike Munger, Dicker… made a winter attempt. When I was there with Mike Weiss, my knee swelled up and I was still basically really afraid of it and didn’t want to go on it. I went in with Duncan, and it snowed. I went in the winter time with Wayne Goss, and it was really cold. Then I went back on a winter attempt with four guys, so basically I’d sort of probably put more energy into it than anyone else.

Matt: Over how many years do you think?

Jim: Three years maybe.

Matt: Three years and how many trips?

Jim: Four, I think. And in the four trips, two of them we never even got on the face. It’s the kind of thing where I think a lot of people go in and think about it and look and it and go, “Huh, I think I’ll walk back out.”

Matt: What’s turning them around, do you think, per se?

Jim: It’s really committing. It’s harder at the top than at the bottom. You can get way up on it pretty easily. Nobody is going to come get you; nobody knows you’re there. You know, it’s 8,000 feet tall if you start at the bottom.

Matt: That’s huge.

Jim: So, just going up and down on it is a pretty big deal. I had been up and down on it a few times, so I was getting pretty comfortable. I think going in the wintertime helped even though it was snowing all the time and avalanching all around us, and we barely lived through it. So, anyway Mugs and I went on Hummingbird, failed and had a good time, and came back out. And this is when Mugs told me his plan to become a famous climber, or well-known climber was to do the Emperor Face with me, and would I go with him? And I said OK, he seemed like a really good climber. And so that winter then, we were ice climbing all around and rock climbing, and just doing different things. And we went up there that summer with the intent of doing it, and then we had to camp up under the face across the river, and then we got a spell of good weather and went ahead and were able to climb it.

Matt: How long did you guys camp for before the weather opened up for you?

Jim: About two weeks. We went up under the face once and it rained on us. Everything got all wet; we didn’t have Goretex or anything like that, and you know leather boots, bamboo axe and all that kind of stuff. So, we went back to Jasper and got more supplies and went back. We were up there just a few days and it stormed. It snowed. We woke up, and it was clear weather and we had a little radio. We could listen to radio reports and for good weather. The base had a lot of ice on it, a lot of rind, so we thought we could climb on that.

Matt: The blocks were kind of frozen together.

Jim: Yeah, kind of frozen together and stuff. It turned out to work, but it was really scary climbing. The face was characterized by 60-degree snow slopes intersected by vertical steps of limestone that are 20 to 60 to whatever feet tall. So, when we were on the rock steps, they were covered by a thin layer of ice. And you had to climb on the ice and not knock it off, so there was no protection, so you were climbing 20, 30, 40 feet above these steep snow slopes with your only protection being a couple of screws at the bottom.

Matt: At the top of the snow? 

Jim: Yeah at the top of the snow, so you would put in two screws at the top of the snow and then start up these things and hope something might develop, protection-wise, but and nothing did.

Matt: So, it was pretty crackless rock?

Jim: Yeah I just talked to Steve House, and cams work. And we didn’t have any cams.

Matt: Did you just have pins and nuts?

Jim: No, nuts. We didn’t take any nuts.

Matt: Strictly pins?

Jim: We just had pins; we had 16 pins.

Matt: And you were up there three days?

Jim: Yeah.

Matt: And which day did you do that crux lead?

Jim: That was the end of the third day.

Matt: So that was at the very top, basically.

Jim: Yeah it was the very top. The route that Steve and Colin did… So they didn’t know where we had been because the guidebook description was completely wrong, because no one had ever asked us where we went, so they just made something up. And it was interesting, over the years as I would see pictures, the line kept moving to the right in the middle. So, we got better. Every time someone would draw a picture, we got a little better. The line in the guidebook had become the drop of water from the top to the bottom. So, we did pretty good. And I’ve looked out there — someday when someone does climb that, it will be pretty impressive. But nonetheless, we were following lines of weakness on the left side, which is where those guys also were. And we merged through the only realistic exit from the face up high and probably climbed three, four, five, six pitches of the same climbing. When I talked to them, it sounded very similar. But, we had a really miserable bivouac way up high, two pitches high, where it avalanched on us all night. So, you’d fall asleep and lean forward, and the snow would come down and push you out of your little seat. It was all heavy, wet snow. You’d have to clean it off and get it out of your bag and kind of get your seat hollowed out so you’d try to go back to sleep, or not go back to sleep or something. So, after that, then the next day Mugs lead a pitch up to the base of this hard dihedral up high. And then I got that pitch.

Matt: And this is the M8?

Jim: Yeah, and I just talked to Steve. And he had called it M8. We had a discussion on grading, and how do you actually grade stuff, you know? But, anyway, I think everyone who would really go up there, and it is as hard as you can climb. And you just have to do as good as you can.

Matt: Cause you’re way up there, and that’s your way off the face?

Jim: Your only way off the face is up. For us, I don’t know if he got more protection in it, but for me, it was about 45 feet of very hard free climbing using tools, trying not to fall off.

Matt: And how long were you on the pitch?

Jim: Yeah we didn’t have a watch, so we have no idea. I was on it for what seemed like all day. And then I got up to this stance and put the two pins in that Colin found and shut the pitch off and hauled the pack. It overhung the pitch by 10-15 feet. And then Mugs jumared up to me and started leading easier pitches, multiple pitches. And I was done. He would go up, and I would just try to stagger up.

Matt: You were exhausted?

Jim: I put everything I had into that.

Matt: And what were your tools for the pitch?

Jim: I only had a Chouinard ice axe that Paul Sibley had heated up in his shop and bent it down, and it had a bamboo shaft that had been broken. We put fiberglass all over the outside. I still have it.

Matt: Was the shaft broken deliberately to make it a shorter ax?

Jim: No, it was broken cause I hit it against something while I was doing something, and it cracked. And we didn’t have any money, so you didn’t get a new ax. So, essentially a lot of our tools were customized at that point. It seems like we intended to make things. There was an ethic to it, like when we made the Logan Hook.

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.

Matt: Oh, OK.

Jim: But, they didn’t break. Every other tool we had broke. Like when I did Takaka Falls with one of the two Burgess twins. What’s Adrian’s brother?

Matt: Al

Jim: Al, yeah. I still can’t remember which one is which. I think I climbed with Adrian. Anyway, the Calgary one, which you always felt like you were just about to go to jail. He and I did Takaka Falls.

Matt: It’s good to know people like that.

Jim: Yeah, we were skiing past the hut with all the big locks on it. And he goes over tapping on the door with his ice ax, you know seeing if we could break in. I said, I think we should just keep going. Anyway, he and I did Takaka Falls, second or third ascent or something. It was 40 below. I broke three tools on the climb. We had borrowed every ice tool we could find in Calgary and we had them all with us, and we just broke them. But, after you’d finally broken everything else, the one tool you always had that left was the pterodactyl, the Joe Brown tool — the Brits, you know from Scotland. And it just beat the shit out of your hands, but it didn’t break. 

Matt: It didn’t break, it was trusty?

Jim: It was trusty, and it had a real steep pick on it. It was actually a good mix tool. And Forrest made a hammer, which I still have — a fiberglass hammer that had a steep pick. So I had a steep pick, hammer, short, and then an ice axe. Not a 70, you know, we shortened them.

Matt: What was your technique using these two kind of tools? Were you switching hands with them?

Jim: No, ice axe is always in your left hand, and the hammer is always in your right. That’s what we did. 

Matt: I guess it was so steep too to switch around in any way.

Jim: No, and we had wrist loops that were half-inch webbing. So, basically you would tie at least a half-inch webbing into the head of the tool and then tie it to the right size to be a wrist loop. So, you had half-inch webbing, wrist loop, and, you know, gloves or not gloves. And then the hammer was in your right hand cause we had pins. So you got to put in pins. And we had holsters, so you could holster both tools and free climb. Now, we ice climbed a lot — in those days, we climbed ice a lot with no tools.

Matt: You guys would freeze your gloves?

Jim: Yeah, you’d use wool gloves. 

Matt: Yeah Jeff Lowe was telling me about that. You’d get them wet?

Jim: And it was a cool thing. Jeff and Duncan were always into the, could you climb this with no tools? 

Matt: So, did you do some of that style climbing on this pitch, or were you strictly on tools?

Jim: No, I was doing both. I was actually climbing barehanded in places. There were places where I was cleaning off holds, and cleaning them the best I could and using them as a hand hold. 

Matt: OK, so just pulling every trick out of the bag?

Jim: Anything yeah. I was just trying to stay alive. Just trying to get up it.

Matt: How big was the run out off the belay?

Jim: Well, for me, it was 30 years, 29 years ago. But, these guys said it was 40-50 feet. 10-15 meters.

Matt: Straight off the belay?

Jim: Oh no, that was above the knife blade.

Matt: So, that was where all the hard climbing was?

Jim: Yeah, for me it was on top of a 150-foot pitch. I did a whole rope length. Steve and Colin belayed at different places on the pitch.

Matt: Oh, OK.

Jim: So, they didn’t belay as low as Mugs did. They belayed higher up. There is a place, I can remember now where it is, where they got some pins in. So they belayed there and ran past my belay. So, we were lower in the corner. But, the hardest section is still the same. So, for me, it was a full 150-foot pitch that started off as a direct aid pitch, complicated, but not too hard. But, we were tying off icicles and stuff, tied-off pins, and things like that. But, then it ran out. I didn’t remember the knifeblade until they said about it, but it makes sense. So, I evidentially got the knifeblade in that is still there. But then there was nothing to do but just climb anyway you could. Finally, there was a shelf up above me and I got my axe sunk in the shelf and I didn’t know what it was hooking in — it was just like a rock in a little shelf covered in snow. But I got to where I could get my axe to hook in the same place repeatedly. So, I cut loose, mantled onto the axe and stood up and put the pins in. Then I was done.

Matt: That’s quite a fight. What did you think when you saw the report and heard that these guys had done the route?

Jim: Well, I was a bit curious what I was going to feel like cause this was very important to me that we did this and stuff. I was sort of getting to the point where I was wanting somebody to do it. And actually what happened when I heard was my son Michael called me and said, “Dad, Steve House repeated your route.” Then I looked on the Internet and it made me really happy. I really liked it. I liked the idea that somebody else had been there. I called Steve House today, and we talked about it. And so, it’s like Mugs and I knew what it was, and they know what it is. It’s kind of cool. No body else knows what it is.

Matt: It seems like another good thing to come out of this was that now people know exactly where the lines are too, versus what was in the book. History has been straightened out.

Jim: History has been straightened out. And actually for other people who want to climb onto it, I think what it really boils down to is in the lower section of the face, you can kind of go whatever direction you want given conditions and the day, and all that stuff, but when you get up into the steep, harder stuff, there is a line, which is the line that Mugs and I figured out. And, independently, it is the line that they figured out. And there’s obviously more lines out — well there is a huge amount of face out to the right that is going to be steep and hard, and that’s going to be really cool when somebody does that.

Matt: Similar genre — bold, runout, steep.

Jim: Oh, it’s going to be hard. I don’t think it is going to happen for a long time. And also Steve House and I were talking about White Horn — when you’re on Emperor Face you’re looking straight across it, this really beautiful, really big face on White Horn. I have never heard of anyone trying it either. I didn’t ask him. But as far as we know, and the bottom line is that there is a lot of rock left to climb.

Matt: Yeah.

Jim: There is stuff for young guns that want to go make their mark. There is stuff to do. White Horn is waiting.

Matt: White Horn is waiting. Why do you think it took so long for this route to be repeated?

Jim: I think you had to be a good climber to repeat it, and there was still enough stuff in the Rockies to climb. So, I think it was like if you are a good climber, and you are going to risk your life to try to do some thing, would you rather do a new route? Or would you rather do a second ascent? It had to go long enough that somebody said OK, I am willing to put that energy into the second ascent, or they thought they were doing a first ascent.

Matt: No one remembers the second-ascent guy.

Jim: Yeah exactly.

Matt: The third-ascent guy, forget it.

Jim: So, that is why I think it took so long. It doesn’t make a difference how many ascents. It is always going to be serious.

Matt: And where do you climbing mostly these days?

Jim: Mostly I sport climb around Boulder. Eldorado, Boulder Rock Club.

Matt: Eldo is known for its sport climbing…

Jim: It’s almost like sport climbs because…

Matt: You’ve got them so dialed by now.

Jim: Yeah when Roger and I go out, Roger racks the rack in the order he is going to put the gear in on the pitch.

Matt: He knows exactly.

Jim: He knows exactly — the Stopper, then the Alien, then the red Camalot.

Matt: 40 years on those routes.

Jim: You start getting them. Oh I better put a sling here because if I don’t, there is going to be rope drag.

Matt: It seems like you guys climb as hard as ever.

Jim: Pretty much, yeah. And Outer Space will always be great, you know, no matter what.

Matt: This is true. I totally agree.

Jim: I think actually it is interesting. I don’t think our climbing ability has really changed in 40 years. The equipment is better, there’s a lot better technique. We are kind of doing the same climbs.

Matt: That’s good. I mean there’s such good climbs… if it’s not broke, I guess why fix it.

Jim: I don’t know how long I’ll be able to climb the Naked Edge. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe longer.