Up and Down amid Brobdingnagian Stones 

Two fools rediscover the Aiguille du Fou, Smoke Blanchard’s lost route in the High Sierra

I had just climbed to one of those belays where living feels beautiful and life is sweet. Tying off a horn I call down “off-belay” to Greg with a certain amount of relief. Time, then, to fondle the view from 200 feet of the arête and wait for him to pull through the cruxes made apparent by the slow progress of the rope.

“Blimey,” Greg declares, fighting up the lichen splattered slab that had given me much pause. “Blimey” again, as Greg nearly pulls a teetering block into his lap, the same block I’d whispered by with all the delicacy of encountering a psychotic hooligan in a dark alley.

Far below, the town of Bishop squats in the Owens Valley, and across the canyon the red Piaute Crags meld into the white granite of Mt. Emerson. Hmmm, I think: Ralph Waldo Emerson, the New England transcendentalist, communing with the California Indians in geologic metaphor — no doubt under the rhapsodic whim of endorphins from the last hair-raising pitch.

Greg comes around the corner into view.

“Nice lead,” he says. “My heart was in my throat on that one.”

We are attempting the Aiguille du Fou, a long-forgotten route in the High Sierra authored by Smoke Blanchard, the pioneer of the Buttermilks and Buddhist truck driver, who when he wasn’t climbing and guiding, drove up and down Highway 395 with a load of explosive propane hitched to his tractor. Smoke had also written a book, long out of print, called Walking Up and Down in the World: Memories of a Mountain Rambler. It contained our only clue where the route went, or for that matter, where the Fou was.

Smoke climbed the Fou countless times, writing: “Another strange turn to this climber’s brain is my preference for repeating the same peak or route or experience over and over. I told my wife that this trait keeps me monogamous. Told all of them — mostly it works.”

He’d named the “Fools Needle” after the one that shares its namesake in France, rising high above Chamonix and made famous by the photograph of John Harlin on its summit edging out over the void like a scared surfer. “If Chamonix can have one I don’t see why we can’t too,” Smoke once remarked.

The Sierra version, though, had long slipped into obscurity, and despite Smoke’s legendary status as one of Bishop’s most prolific climbers of the older generation — second only to Norman Clyde — nobody in town seemed to know where the Fou was. They’d heard of it, yes. But they didn’t know if it had been climbed since Smoke passed away in 1976, thrown into the Mojave Desert from the back of a pick-up truck.