Frank Tarver died on March 30 in Edmonds, Washington. He was born in Oakland, California, on July 1, 1935, and grew up in the Bay Area. In the 1950s, he was active in the Sierra Club’s Rock Climbing Section. In July of 1954, Frank, Warren Harding, and Bob Swift made the second ascent of the Lost Arrow Chimney in Yosemite Valley. Perhaps Frank's greatest claim to fame in Yosemite was conceiving and making the first stove-leg angle pitons—the sawn-off legs of a stove used to protect the wider cracks (still called “The Stovelegs”) on the first forays up the Nose of El Capitan, before the first ascent of that route.
 
Frank moved to Seattle in the 1960s and climbed with Joe and Joan Firey, Sandy (Harthon) Bill, Mike Borghoff, and many others, young and old. Among his new routes were the Barber Pole Route on Liberty Bell, the northeast face of Johannesburg Mountain (with Hans Baer, Alex Bertulis, and Jack Bryan, July 1965), and the northeast ridge of Mt. Triumph (with Natalie Cole and Joe and Joan Firey, August 1965). His first ascents included Mt. Prestley in the Valhallas, British Columbia (with Ian Martin and myself, August 1969).
 
When he came to the Northwest, Frank brought his Golden Age of Yosemite spirit with him, and adapted it to the wetter, snowier, icier, looser rock conditions of the Northwest. Before Highway 20 cut through Washington Pass below Liberty Bell, he encouraged us to bounce up dirt tracks and have at the appealing peaks there.
 
Iain Martin enlisted Frank and a few others in the Kootenay Mountaineering Club’s project of building a hut in Mulvey Meadows in the Valhallas. This led to the Mt. Prestley climb. Around that time Frank was working as a machinist, and he was quick to begin fashioning climbing nuts, though commercial products soon took over.
 
Frank’s daughter Anne and son John followed in the mountain tradition, while he eventually moved on to sailing with his wife, Julidta. He remained a tough and solid character until his death, after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease.
 
— Peter Renz