Legends: Lynn Hill

Current age: 50

Started climbing: in Southern California in 1975

Disciplines: comp climbing, bouldering, sport-climbing, big-wall free climbing

Résumé highlights: more than 30 international comp wins, first woman to climb 5.14, first female ascent of Midnight Lightning (V8), FFA of the Nose, first one-day free ascent of El Capitan

When and where was your first road trip?

Well, Joshua Tree was my local climbing area—that was three and a half hours from LA, where I grew up—so every weekend was kind of a road trip for me. I worked at Carl’s Jr. to earn the money for gas, and my first rope was used, from my sister’s boyfriend. So I really didn’t really go very far for a long time. Probably Vegas would have been one of first? Or, let’s see, I won some money on this television show called Survival of the Fittest and also on That’s Incredible, and with that money bought a VW van. So we would go up to Yosemite. And then John [Long] and I drove through the western states to Colorado. That was 1978. We hung out a bit at Independence Pass; I think we spent a couple of days in Eldo. We also went through Arizona. So I think that’s what I’d consider my first big road trip. John was kind of the mastermind behind any first free ascents or possible things along the way.

I remember John—he was really good drummer, and he turned me on to jazz music—and he’d be there pounding on the dashboard—you know, professionally, because he was a professional drummer. So we spent a lot of time in the car and a lot of time checking out different climbing areas, which was exciting for me because up to that time I’d only been to SoCal areas. And then we ended up moving to Vegas after that, in 1980.

Road tripping was not very popular, necessarily. Certain people could do it, but for most of us—I mean me being as young as I was and no one was paying my way—to go on a road trip takes time and money. If you’ve got time, you’re not working, and if you’re not working, you don’t have money.

Who were your first heroes?

I would say the very first people who taught me. My sister was afraid of leading, so she taught me the basics, but her heart really wasn’t into it; so her boyfriend Chuck, who later passed away on Aconcagua. I guess I was 19 when that happened. I very quickly met the whole group of people who loosely became known as the Stonemasters—certainly John was one of those people. But then, as a woman, I would say Mari Gingery and Maria Cranor were big influences on me. But we were just some of the few women who were out there.

And then, people who I didn’t really know, but later met, Bev Johnson. I’d heard about her through my circle of friends and actually through Survival of the Fittest. She called me up and asked me, because Hoover thought it would be nice to have Bev invite me, and I thought that was nice too, because I’d heard about her ascent, in 1978, her solo ascent of the Dihedral Wall on El Cap—that was pretty impressive to me. It was on a par with what men were doing. And when I met her, she seemed really cool. She was almost cavalier in the way she looked at risk-taking and things like that. But she was nice and a fun-loving type person, and I really loved Bev. So I guess she would be the first official role model that I actually knew and climbed with regularly, who did something that was notorious.

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

[Chuck] was the one who kind of passed on the climbing culture to me, because he read books and was a subscriber to Climbing magazine, and so he would pass me the magazines. So I’d read articles, and I remember Doug Robinson’s article in the Chouinard catalog, whatever it was called, The Art of something—and I just remember that being kind of a defining ethic, you know “leave no trace.” I don’t know why people don’t use this term now, but “climbing by fair means.” Summarized like that it makes sense really quickly to people. Otherwise, it’s a long explanation. Fair means to me meant that we were climbing as if we didn’t have a rope, and if you fell, that was a blemish in style. The whole idea was to do everything possible not to fall, so you could downclimb. Back in the day, we yo-yoed—we tolerated that technique, which I guess is not part of the ethic today. The idea is that you’d place your own protection on lead.

Putting a bolt in was a big effort, so when I did first ascents with that band of climbers, usually we would just pick a line that you could protect with natural gear. And since a lot of the major lines had been done, sometimes those routes didn’t have as much protection. So we were kind of crossing the line between the old traditional style on lower-angle stuff or straightforward cracks, to incipient cracks and face/crack type things that got steeper.

We didn’t toprope—well, we did toprope, as a separate thing. We considered toproping as a separate sport, where you couldn’t possibly put gear in—I guess that was the first step toward sport climbing. But we didn’t rap down and check out moves. It was all about the adventure style. We approached it like you were doing a first ascent on a mountain. If you fell, no hangdogging—you were lowered down to the ground, you’d hand the rope over to the next person, usually in the yo-yo style if the gear was tricky, and the next person would go up and give it their best. And we’d pass the rope around till the route got done.

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

First, some of the equipment we used—Friends, sticky rubber—and then, the ethical thing I just mentioned, people looking at steeper walls and pushing harder and harder things. Then the next level after that I would say the climbing gyms, that whole explosion.

And climbing is no longer this fringe sport. When I first started climbing I didn’t know what climbing was. There was no t-shirt, no ad for a bank—there was no physical image in my mind of what climbing would be, which I find interesting because now climbing is everywhere.

And I paid my own way through college—how did I do that? Things have gotten more complicated financially. Living in modern society, it’s just really hard to get by like that. You have to have a better plan.

What’s better, what’s worse?

What’s better…? We were pretty free to express ourselves the way we wanted to. The only real ethic was respecting the rock. We were running away from the constraints of modern society into nature. And it was beautiful back then. It was a more intimate community, which meant that there were fewer problems with trash or access. Joshua Tree didn’t seem to be limited at all. You didn’t have lines on routes, and cigarette butts, and trash.

That was what we lost. What we’ve gained? Well, now there are a lot more places to go climbing, and if you look at climbing in terms of general wellbeing and fitness, even if you’re someone who has a high-powered job and you’re traveling across the country, if you have a day or an afternoon, you can go to a local area or climbing gym and meet new people and network around the world.

And networking around the world is a lot easier now that you have Internet. I’d say Internet is what opened up a lot of more obscure places and broadened the community. Now anyone can be part of an international community by way of the Internet. I mean, it’s not the same kind of connection, but it’s at least a peek into another culture, and what the rock looks like, and, you know, it’s a much more global climbing scene.