Legends: George Lowe

Current age: 67

Started climbing: during first year of college in Southern California, 1962, but soon based out of his home area of Salt Lake City

Disciplines: rock, ice, big-wall, alpine, Himalaya

Résumé highlights: The Fin, Little Cottonwood Canyon; first winter ascent of Grand Teton’s north face; north faces of Alberta, North Twin, Geikie, Canadian Rockies; Infinite Spur, Mt. Foraker; Kangshung Face of Everest

When and where was your first road trip?

My first road trip to a foreign area was probably my trip to the Grand Teton after I’d been climbing six months or so, with my cousin Mike and my brothers John and Steve, in the sense of getting away, but I’ve never done a road trip in the sense that I think of road trips, where you drive across the country climbing at different areas. I’ve always done trips with a focused objective in one area, and try as hard as we can for as long as we’re there and then return.

Who were your first heroes?

I was so unaware of the scope of climbing when I started. I just took it up without knowing much about these crazy people in California who were going out—but at least it got me out of the city. So, I didn’t really have these models directly early on. I mean it’s been 50 years, and my memory isn’t as good as it should be, but I don’t remember anyone explicitly. There was so little communication about climbing—very little within the States. There were some books, like Rebuffat’s book, that sort of inspired me. So Rebuffat. Lionel Terray was another one. I went to Europe in summer 1965, and then it became the Christian Boningtons and the Tom Pateys. Dougald Haston and John Harlin.

What was the state of the art when you started climbing?

Soft-iron pitons. I guess Salathé was making hardened-steel pitons before that, but we were certainly unaware of it. We had the soft-iron stuff from Europe. The ropes we were using were a big step up—they were Goldline. I think we were tying swami belts at that time, but I certainly climbed a fair amount just tying in with the rope directly to my waist. And of course carrying hammers. We did have the army surplus aluminum carabiners instead of steel. Ancient times.

We were pretty isolated. I think the hardest grade was 5.9 or maybe 5.10 when I started to push things for myself in Little Cottonwood. We didn’t have climbers going from place to place, or at least I didn’t know them, so when I climbed The Fin in 1965 in Little Cottonwood, I rated it 5.9, just because we figured that was as hard as we could climb. We had absolutely no knowledge of what the standards really were. We probably had a lot of that around the country, where people didn’t know how far up they’d pushed the standard. We just knew it felt hard for us.

I remember the first time I climbed The Fin was in a tight pair of hiking shoes. There were some climbing shoes, some Kronhoffers out there, but I just bought some hiking shoes and bought them tight. They worked just fine. Little Cottonwood was a place with some very small edges, and if you could keep your foot very, very still, you could actually edge with them. And a year of two later I climbed it in mountain boots. If you could keep really still, and place them precisely, the old mountain boots would hold pretty well.

I can’t complain—I had stretchy ropes. WAY stretchy ropes.

What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in climbing?

I think the biggest thing is that we’re not damaging cracks. I mean we’re damaging the rock because there are just too many climbers, and you run into places where the rock is polished, but the biggest change is the environmental change. When we were driving pitons we were really damaging the rock, and that’s been a huge change, the advent of clean protection. And the fact that you can place it really rapidly is an enormous change.

And the changes in the shoes: a tremendous difference. And I’ve always earned my living totally outside of climbing, and maybe made a little bit of money off of climbing, but now the people who are leading devote their lives to it. And in some ways I feel that is a little bit of a loss, because it means you don’t get to experience as much of the other things in life.

On the other hand, just watching the standards of today, it’s really phenomenal. I just can’t believe the things that people can get up. I would have laughed at the thought, back in the ’60s, of some of these things.

The other interesting thing for me is recognizing that a lot of those limitations were in my head, and it’s really neat to be able to observe the sport and actually get a bit better myself. Not up to modern standards, but just recognizing that a lot of limitations are in your head and you can climb some big routes if you go about it the right way and do them really fast. Even if you’re old. The old-age treachery helps a little bit. With modern gear, I’m climbing just about as hard on rock, not quite, as I ever did. And I think if I wanted to devote a little more time to it, I’d probably get pretty close to how I climbed 40 years ago. Part of it is when I started I didn’t want to fall.

Longs Peak now is just a crag—and that’s a huge change. How much further can it go? I’m looking forward to that.