Grand Sentinel

Royal Robbins

She’s got everything she needs;

She’s an artist, she don’t look back.

—Bob Dylan

CHOUINARD don’t look back. He’s an artist of life. He delights even in the stray bits of wickedness which flit through his soul. He doesn’t care much for intellectuals, or chess, or Mozart. For he’s a humanist. And although apparently agreeable and even pliant, he has an adamantine core which, when he senses something going against his central being, makes him as obdurate to outside influences as the granite on which he climbs. It happened to me once in the Dolomites. We were attempting a new route on the Cima Ovest di Lavaredo. I wanted to go on, but Chouinard demurred. There was something wrong with the climb and he felt it. Perhaps we were climbing for the wrong reason: going too gung-ho for glory in mountains new to us, when we should have been enjoying ourselves. In any case, there was no moving him, and so down we went. Yvon has the good sense never to climb when he does not feel right.

So I was apprehensive as we drove up the canyon to view Grand Sentinel. It was not without difficulty that I had persuaded Yvon to leave Yosemite and join me adventuring in a canyon 100 miles south. Would he sour on the wall when he saw it? He might, but he didn’t. "Hey, man, that looks great. I’m all for it. Let’s go!”

Del Rey. And Camino del Rey. Kings Canyon National Park and in it the Kings River, originally Río de los Santos Reyes, and a canyon cut by that river and carved by glaciers, much as was Yosemite. But the Kings is a rougher land than the Yosemite, and suffers in comparison with that almost painfully beautiful masterpiece of Nature. Yet it has some fine rocks and tumultuous rivers and retains the feeling of wildness Yosemite has lost: for Kings Canyon knows not the crushing mobs which are throttling the Valley. It is still a picture into the past.

That night, warmed by a cozy fire as we sprawled on the coarse sand of the canyon floor, we lit up cigarettes and fell to philosophizing and occasionally to looking up in perfect silence at the stars. "Yvon,” I said, "Do you know that some of those stars are so big that our entire solarsystem would fit inside them?” "Yeh man,” he replied. "And that’s only the ones we know about.” It suddenly struck me that it had been years since I had marveled at the ever astounding magnitudes of the stars and the incomprehensible distances between them. For awhile Yvon joined me in celestial speculation, then shrugged his mental shoulders, and turned to discussing drugs, hippies and the love generation. Chouinard likes to keep his feet on the ground.

In the grey morning we dutifully dragged ourselves from our bags, brewed a pot of tea, and loosened our joints strolling through the high grass of Zumalt Meadows: which the reader will hopefully take as a token of the real events that occurred to us in that uncertain period when night is changing to morning and sleep-clouded minds are moving from the domain of Morpheus to that of Aurora; and indeed Aurora was all too quickly ceding her place to Helios, whose radiant presence and warm personality were keenly felt as we scrambled sweating over enormous talus blocks, finally and thankfully reaching the cool grey world at the foot of the north wall of Grand Sentinel.

It was presumptuous of us to consider doing the route free, but we presumed. The first two pitches went well: face-climbing on the left wall of an open-book. Sure, a couple of tricky moves, but nothing severe: with pitons, nuts and runners for protection. Then the free climbing began getting a bit sticky. It looked impossible, but Yvon did it anyway by following a ramp up left, turning a corner, and climbing a magnificent classic crack, the sort of free climbing you can really get your teeth into. It was now unavoidably my lead, and so I traversed out above the void fearing I might be voided. The stroll ended in a hanging hand traverse and a gymnastic scrabble into a niche. Getting out of the niche looked easy—with pitons for aid. Doing it free was another matter. And we were playing the "free game”: artificially limiting our methods to make the route harder. That’s called "good style.” It was perhaps rather silly, but to the existentialist alpinist all games are rather silly, so he plays only those meaningful to him.

With a pin and a nut backing me up I was soon spread-eagled, then a toe-hold broke, or something, and the air was rushing by when the rope grabbed my waist just as my feet touched the ledge. I was OK, but a rough corner had cut through the sheath and two strands of my Jannu perlon rope, so I tied in on the other side of the damage and adjusted my belays to lessen the danger. Oddly, I wasn’t scared. I thought of my friend Mark McQuarrie and how he had died in a similar accident and felt uneasy but still not afraid. It was strange, for fear is no stranger. Itried again and after a desperate struggle got over the worst. It was hard above, but manageable.

Yvon came up and gave the next pitch a go free but it was no go. I don’t think he had his heart in it. I fretted whether someone might come and do the route free. But Chouinard wasn’t worried. He didn’t care about that. And there’s no worry anyway for the upper wall won’t go free.

We reached a large terrace and I led on toward the Green Corner when a good handhold turned not to slush but to a missile which I promptly dropped grabbing wildly and just successfully to catch my balance. "That’s how I’ll go,” I thought, heart pounding, "on easy ground, like Terray.” And I thought how that wouldn’t have happened to Chouinard. He’s so cool, man, in climbing as in life.

We entered the Green Corner and nailed two pitches, one in the bed of the corner and the second on the left wall which took nuts well. I then belayed in a tiny slot while Yvon led a fine pitch up a steep wall ending in an overhang. This unusual pitch involved climbing a crack filled with many rectangular blocks, mostly secure, and utterly unlike anything we had ever seen in Yosemite. Darkness was upon us; so Yvon set up a bivouac in a hole while I swung to a good ledge below. He declined to join me in comfort, preferring cramped quarters to the trouble of descending. Besides which he wears the blue cagoule of the Masochistic School which holds to the tenent that a big wall is scarcely worth doing unless suffering is involved. The night passed quickly for me, slowly for Yvon. And as the first hint of the sun turned the eastern sky from black to pastel blue, a grumpy voice from a hundred feet above suggested we continue with the climb. I sent up some salami and cheese to placate my groggy friend and received in return a down jacket and instructions to give him a belay. I therefore belayed in the warmth of two duvets as Chouinard finished the pitch by going right on tension and climbing a corner to a steep groove where he set up a hanging belay. The climbing above continued difficult and the route intricate and always interesting. It was good rock climbing—mostly free but with some artificial, and we moved upward carefully and steadily. It’s a fine wall, and were it in Yosemite this route would be a standard classic equivilent to, say, a combination of the regular route and the Chouinard-Herbert route on the north wall of Sentinel Rock.

The sun was low and yellow-golden in the western sky when our feet trod the summit, actually the false and lower summit of Grand Sentinel. We surveyed the scene—the still snowy peaks, the bald domes, the beckoning wilderness, and the western slopes dropping into the haze of

the San Joaquin Valley. We felt good. But there was something nagging in our consciousness about the way we did it, the Jiimars, I mean. We had seconded all the pitches with Jümars, and the method didn’t seem appropriate to the problem. There was too much free climbing. As we descended, fighting our way through manzanita and scrub oak, we discussed the ethics of Jümaring on Grade V’s. We both felt a little guilty. But as I continued to ponder the right or wrong, Chouinard’s thoughts had turned to the cold beer awaiting us in the valley. He was no longer concerned. He don’t look back.

Route Description

(Key: L = left; R = right; r = runner; p = piton; n = nut)

Climb up 30 feet to gully and follow it, using wall on L to avoid steep waterfall. Belay at large block on R. 5p lr 1n F8 (F9).

Follow gully 40 feet, traverse L across slabs, go up steep trough with overhanging chockstone at top, continue up to good ledge. 4p 5n lr F8 (F9) .

Follow ramp up L, turn corner, then go up crack to good ledge. 5p 2r 1n

F8 (F9).

Traverse R, turn corner and climb overhanging trough. Continue up cracks above to small ledge. 4p 4n lr F9 (F10).

Climb crack on L, then wander face to belay. 4n l0p 4r A2 F8.

Climb up L to large sloping ledge 30 feet above green terrace. F4

Go towards green corner, lr 4p F8 (F7).

Climb up into green dihedral. Belay at top of ramp. 14p 4n A2

Climb crack on green wall. Belay in tiny slot. l0p l0n A2, F7.

Continue straight up wall to overhangs, tension traverse R, climb up corner and belay in slings in steep groove. 9p 4r 6n A2, F7.

Nail crack on L, turn corner on R and return to bed of dihedral. Easy climbing leads to sloping terrace on L. 8p 8n A2, F7.

Move up R to re-enter dihedral. After 30 feet take crack on L. Sling belay in corner. 5n l0p A2, F7.

Traverse L, then go straight up to good ledge. (Short pitch.) 4p 3n F7.

Take ramp diagonally up L, then move straight up to belay by horn directly below furthest R tree. 2n 4p A2, F6.

Nail crack on L. Free climb L at small overhang. Go 20 feet L then come back R to good ledge. 8p 8n A2, F6.

Easily follow crack up left. 2n F4.

Continue up L to large low angle area. Crack summit wall on R. F4. Summary of Statistics.

Area: Grand Sentinel, near Zumalt Meadows in Kings River Canyon, Kings Canyon National Park, California.

First Ascent: Grand Sentinel, June, 1967, 2 days (Yvon Chouinard, Royal Robbins). NCCS V, F9 or F10, A2. 99 pitons, 15 runners, 63 nuts. Vertical rise: 1700 feet.