One Dark and Stormy September Night

Upland was our home, a nowhere little burg lush for its citrus groves and mountain panoramas. From the two-block commercial center in the middle of town, a sea of orange trees spread north, thinning as grey foothills rose into the splintered schist canyons and woody arroyos of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Through the busted windows of my homeroom in Upland High School I'd often peer out at the San Gabriels and daydream about all the mountains I would someday climb, secret mountains obscured by clouds and 10 times the size of 10,064-foot Mt. Baldy, gleaming in the distance. But I couldn't go it alone. I needed partners and a way to get to those mountains. So I organized a high-school rock climbing club for the sole purpose of enlisting a partner who had access to a car.

The club started off strong but was terminated after an overnight field trip to Joshua Tree, when the chaperon caught several students with a fifth of Pappy Van Winkle and a foreign exchange student from Hyderabad-who'd shown such promise on The Blob earlier that day-was found wandering the desert in her panties. No matter, since by then I'd hooked up with Eric "Ricky" Accomazzo and schooled him on the little I knew about ropework. And we'd be climbing plenty since Ricky had a car-a powder blue Ford Pinto we drove into the tundra over the following years, years in which Ricky would distinguish himself as king of the shit-your-pants runout.

With a demeanor smooth as Mezzaluna and the athleticism of an all-everything waterpolo player in high school and college, Ricky was to climbing what Sinatra was to song. From Yosemite granite to Chamonix ice, Ricky climbed the hardest new routes with a casual artistry that led Dale Bard to once ask, "What the hell's that guy made of?"

"He's Italian," I said.

"That hardly explains it," said Dale, as Ricky hiked a glassy, Royal Arches slab that Dale and I had just backed off and declared unleadable. But back in high school Ricky and I were just two kids thrilled to get our feet off the ground. Then we were three.

"You're not going to believe this one, Johnny," Ricky said one day after school. That morning, on a restless hunch, Ricky drove up into the foothills and started snooping around a mangy canyon for a misplaced Diamond or Shiprock. Instead, he stumbled across a long-haired maniac running laps on a 30-foot mud cliff.

"Huh?" I asked. "Another climber? In Upland?"
"Yeah," said Ricky. "Name's Richard. Richard Harrison. Says he dropped outta high school because it was cutting into his climbing time."

Next thing I knew, Richard, Ricky and I were scratching over the boulders at Mount Roubidoux, a trendy practice climbing area near Riverside, California. Slowly and collectively we bought a perlon rope and a skeleton rack, and over the 1970 school year and through the summer if we weren't climbing we were reading or thinking or talking about climbing. We'd memorized quotes and immortal passages and even the mawkish book jacket copy from The West Ridge, Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage, Starlight and Storm, even The Ascent of Rum Doodle. We'd recite the grave stuff in soto voce and then yell the gallant summit quips at the top of our lungs, with bogus French and German accents we learned from listening to Inspector Clueso and watching Hogan's Heroes. And much of this went down in Richard's cinder block basement bungalow, later know simply as The Basement.

Richard lived up in the foothills, above the citrus groves but not quite in the mountains. His nearest neighbor was a half-mile away. A dirt drive found his lodging, set back from a crummy two-lane road winding past a boulder-strewn streambed that occasionally overflowed during winter rains. You needed a compass to ever find the place, and on my first visit, Richard's cranky old German Shepard nearly bit my leg off. The area and the dog had a wild remoteness to them and following our afternoon bouldering sessions we'd return to The Basement to recite passages from Conquistadors of the Useless and a hundred other mountaineering books we'd devoured. Richard's mom, two siblings, grandparents and 20-odd critters ranging from turkeys to Great Danes lived in Old MacDonald's other farm, several hundred yards below The Basement. An artist friend of Richard's had painted an exposed joist with a stylized cordillera of mountains, starting with Annapurna by the left wall and ending with the Matterhorn by the door on the right. In the presence of these giants we dreamed away many evenings, recounting dazzling alpine epics, listening to music on Richard's squeaky eight-track tape deck and smoking rag weed he grew in the arid gulch behind The Basement. No one ever bothered us. When you're 18, that kind of privacy, and the cloistered vibe of The Basement, made us feel like sovereigns of a secret castle. Richard always held court with a corn cob (Missouri Meerschaum) pipe and the coolest aspect you've ever seen in your life.

The son of a renowned wood worker, Richard grew up in an artist's culture and developed a shine for alternative lifestyles that seemed to the rest of us so daring and unauthorized we wondered how anyone could actually pull it off and stay out of jail. Each Stonemaster (as we would later style ourselves) brought to the group ingredients that were blended into the social dynamic. Richard brought the main course: following your own prerogative. If that squared with others-fine. If not, "Tastes differ," he'd often say. Richard went on to climb more routes in more places than most of us combined, all with such a low profile he might have remained anonymous but for his full page photo in Meyer's Yosemite Climber, cranking an early ascent of Nabisco Wall, a young John Yablonski belaying. It's curious to consider how that picture and all that climbing flowed from one dark and stormy September night in 1972.

An Unexpected Guest

The night started out like so many others, Curtis Mayfield's Superfly mingling with clouds of rag weed and tangy incense so thick I could scarcely make out the profile of K2 on the joist, only six feet away. A fierce wind lashed The Basement and thunder rumbled down from the San Gabriels. I started in with Buhl's forced bivy on Nanga Parbat, but the thrill had gone. I shifted to Messner's solo of Les Droit, but the words had no substance. We'd cannibalized those epics of every last morsel of inspiration. So we just sat there, circled by bones, with no catalyst for our scattered energies. It was the first time in my life I asked myself, "Now what?"

No one remembers who coined it, or who was first to use it, but the term "Stonemaster" suddenly materialized in our conversation. Just mentioning the name was to conjure The Stonemaster himself and his lightening struck us right between the eyes.  Dazed, struck dumb, we waited breathlessly for some ghastly wraith to appear, and when it didn't we slowly cracked a few doors, peered under chairs and behind an old Honda 50 in corner. Richard even dumped out his rucksack, looking for physical evidence. But apparently The Stonemaster was like the wind or a wave, whose presence is visible only through the leafstorm and the heaving breaker. And just as the wave commands of the water, the Stonemaster abruptly took charge of our bodies, which torqued and twitched as though some dark force had leapt from hell directly into our loins.

We jumped up and started yelling over each other. Rash and alarming plans were voiced through us at breakneck speed and I half expected pentagrams to appear on the rafters and horse heads to start bobbing round The Basement. But I didn't give a damn. Bugger Herzog and Messner and never mind the Himalayas, we gushed. This was about us, and stupendous rocks, since we were rock climbers after all. There was El Capitan and Half Dome and a thousand plums at nearby Tahquitz and Suicide rocks and we'd climb them all in nothing flat. We'd been force-fed and were now spewing forth the greatest revelation of them all-that nothing held us back. It was like being birthed out the barrel of a cannon.

Only later would I realize the shift from reciting other people's stories to chasing after your own always involves breaking an illusory taboo, held in place by fear of the unknown. Month after month, book after book our dream had dashed itself against the unknown like a fly against a windowpane. Then The Stonemaster threw open the window.

Yet as we kept marching around The Basement and babbling grimoires to invoke our master (from first mention of The Stonemaster we were his loyal subjects), and the fantastic adventures sure to follow, I grew cold in the middle. The Stonemaster was ushering us onto the High Lonesome where the Buhls and Terrays once roamed-and where they had died. But we were already two pitches up, and had been for a while. There was no bailing now.

Around midnight I got on my bike for the six-mile pedal back to my five-by-15 foot dorm room at the University of La Verne, where I was slogging through my freshman year. From Richard's house, a lung-busting half-mile climb gained the steep and twisting, two-lane road rifling down from Mt. Baldy. I could coast for a couple of miles, at what felt like mach 1, rarely encountering cars while tracking the single white lane line that in the dead of night was my only hope of not flying off the road. But that night a stiff headwind held me nearly in place and I floated down the road in a trance, touched by the fragrance of orange blossoms. My life, the life that was actually mine, had just begun.

Who am I?

Over the following months The Stonemaster always asked the same momentous question: Who am I, really? That's a heady question for 18-year-olds with no maps and little experience. The question could only be answered through an odyssey, meaning we'd need a proper crew. God knows how, but the question found the ears of Mike Graham, Robs Muir, and a handful of other young climbers scattered over Southern California, and all of us were soon on board. For the next few years none of us could talk about the boredom of being alive with any confidence. From the moment we first cast off, The Stonemaster shot us into action with a velocity that broke one of our backs, busted another nearly in half, killed another one outright, and had the rest of us pawing at slopers.

Early Journeys

Suicide Rock, in Idyllwild, California, served as our training ground and cultural laboratory. East of Suicide, a mile across Strawberry Valley, rose massive Tahquitz Rock, crucible of American climbing mores and incubator of the Yosemite pioneers. Tahquitz always felt hallowed and elderly-like a famous old uncle you were proud of but never visited much because he was, well, old. Suicide felt brand spanking new because most of the routes had gone up in the previous half dozen years-courtesy of Pat Callis, Charlie Raymond, and Bud Couch-and there were plenty more new ones for the taking. The rock tended toward sweeping (up to about 300 feet), high-angled slabs, faces and aretes, with extravagant runouts on polished granite. In an era long before sticky rubber, casting off on a Suicide testpiece had the feel and consequences of big game hunting with your bare hands. And one of the best of the early hunters was Mike Graham, known in later years as Gramicci.

Mike had the long, lean frame of an Olympic swimmer and the insolent dash of a surfer, which he was, having grown up in Newport Beach. With the gift of the natural and the drive of a beatnik, not once, in all the years I knew and climbed with Mike, did he ever round into maximum shape. He never needed to. He did everything on mental steel, God-given skill and guts. If you were to ask Jim Bridwell to name the greatest, go-for-broke lead he's ever seen it would be Grammici cranking an 80-foot, unprotected, barndoor layback during the yet unrepeated first ascent of Gold Ribbon, on Ribbon Falls, Yosemite.

Mike worked at Ski Mart, a big outdoor recreation retailer, and kept us all dialed in with the finest gear (later, Robs Muir, Ricky Accomazzo and I would also work there). Mike also fashioned the first Stonemaster logo, with the sizzling lightning bolt (forever chalked beneath the famous boulder problem, Midnight Lightning), a signet later filched by Jerry Lopez for his Lightning Bolt surf line. It was through Mike that we met Gib Lewis and Bill Antel.

Gib had a bottle-brush blond Afro and a learning curve that never flattened out. An adventure sports generalist who later mastered wind surfing and laid down the grimmest ski descents on record, Gib started out slow and just kept getting better and better. Bill apparently stepped from the shadows straight onto 5.11 face climbs. I never knew where Bill came from and didn't care because the Stonemasters were like the French Foreign Legion in that regard-your past was forgotten the moment you signed on.

So we had a name and a lightning bolt and marching orders to peaks unknown, but as a group we'd done little more than repeat Suicide's standard hardman routes and shoot off our mouths. We desperately needed some dramatic victory to assert our arrival and establish the clout of The Stonemaster himself. But nobody was quite sure how.

Valhalla

Enter Robs Muir and Jim Hoagland, two UC Riverside students, both stand-outs at Mt. Roubidoux and Suicide. It took the pair several tries, but they managed the first continuous ascent of Valhalla, one of America's few 5.11s and a route that had a reputation nearly the size of its creator, Bud Couch, a 6-foot-4-inch college professor who lived in Idyllwild and lorded over Suicide with flinty
disdain.

Bud was the last, and possibly the best, of the traditional line of Idyllwild masters that ran back 40 years, to John Mendenhal, the father of California rock climbing. Bud had his circle of partners, whose names and photos were peppered throughout the guidebooks. We were awe-struck by these guys and secretly wanted their blessing. Instead they laughed out loud as we tumbled all over the rock. I was too proud and insecure to roll with such ridicule, but far worse was getting dressed down by the board certified leaders of various outing clubs that rounded out the Idyllwild climbing scene during those dog days. For ages these clubs had thrutched up the same 5.4 gullies in humorless cavalcades, the very gullies we'd downclimb (unroped, of course) to return to our packs. A couple of times when we ran into a battalion of these guys and the leader launched into another diatribe, barking and spitting in our faces, I just about served up the knuckle sandwich.

The whole shebang felt absurd. There you had a cult of illustrious has-beens mostly loafing in the shade, drinking malt liquor and tossing off snide comments, while a regular platoon, led by phobic drill-Sergeants, queued for their umpteenth slog up some dark and dreary ditch. One of Suicide's most beautiful formations was called the Weeping Wall, and it was crying for good reason. For millions of years this great rock had drawn rain and wind upon itself to fashion resources that were largely going unused. We had to up the ante.

It must have seemed arrogant for us punks to have made it our business how others used the crags, but we considered ourselves nothing if we couldn't effect a sea change in the ways climbers felt and thought and behaved. It was all part of the tacit charter we had with The Stonemaster, and a means of proving that we belonged, that we mattered, that were worth a damn as human beings. In our minds a revolution was not a luxury but a condition for being alive.  And any revolution, we felt, would only come through inspiration.

"Time to step it up," Richard concluded one night in The Basement, "or we ain't going nowhere."

So shortly after Robs' and Jim's victory, we all shot for Valhalla, and we all got there. (Valhalla immediately became the prerequisite for a Stonemaster, and Mike kept a journal that logged the first 20 or so ascents.) In another few months we'd repeated every old testpiece worth doing, yet the Stonemasters grew none the larger for our efforts, efforts that apparently inspired no one but pissed off everyone, leaving them anxious and guarded.

Club leaders imagined we were ordering them out of those gullies and onto something new, leading one to write: "These so-called Stonemasters are as unacquainted with prudence as a hog is with mathematics." The old guard acted like they were being elbowed out of the opera house by kids who could merely scream. But while they slowly faded to black, and the old dogs trudged up their gullies, anyone new to the game had a different order to follow-and eventually, many did. The Stonemasters had arrived, the game was on, and everyone was invited.

Safety in Numbers

1972 and 1973 saw the Stonemasters pull down dozens of new climbs and first free ascents at Suicide and out at Joshua Tree. New Generations, Iron Cross, Drain Pipe, Solid Gold, Ultimatum, Le Toit, The Flakes, Jumping Jack Crack, Ski Tracks, and countless others from today's tic list were all climbed in rapid succession. Most were dispatched mob style because no one could bear missing out on the glory, plus it was always more laughs with a conga line 5 or 10 ten strong. And far more dangerous because the Suicide climbs in particular were often protected by bolts and only bolts, and a leader was obliged to run the rope half way to Kingdom Come before breaking out the drill.

The details varied route to route, but the ritual remained the same. Like the time a stack of us gathered for a first ascent on the Smooth Soul Wall, at Suicide. There, Gib was clawing up crumbly, centavo-sized edges, 20 feet above the boulders when he finally spotted a divot sufficient to stop and place that first and critical bolt. Looking at sprained ankles at the least, his hand no sooner reached for the hammer than someone screamed, "You can't stop there you spineless sodomite!"

"I mean, come on!" someone else added. "At least push it to that big knob . . ."

Gib frantically scanned the rock overhead, wondering if the burnished marble 15 feet above was the "big knob" in question.

"Er . . . I don't know, man . . . "

"Why'd you grab the lead if you're gonna embarrass us like that?"

That always clenched it because nobody could stomach dishonoring The Stonemaster, even if the consequence was a pine box. So sure enough Gib started for that big knob, which naturally was round as a grape and smoother, too. For 20 ghastly minutes as his feet oozed off that grape he hammered and whimpered and sweated the big drop and finally sank that bolt. Then he lowered off to pats on the back and a bong hit or three, whence he slouched down and rocked back and forth like an imbecile as I tied in and cast off for the same merciless
treatment.

Of course the physical moves were usually nothing compared to onsight route finding holdless faces, and stopping to slug in those bolts, balanced on nothing at all, and looking at jumbo whippers. After a few hours and three or four bolts the next "leader" would float to the high point with the greatest of ease, wondering out loud what the commotion was about-till he cast off on the bald adventure overhead. That was the pay dirt, and we all lined up as much to scare the shit out of ourselves up on the virgin face as to haze the poor sap on the sharp end. This was before EBs, when the shoe of choice was either red PAs (Pierre Alan) or brown RDs (Rene Demaison), which edged OK but had the friction coefficient of a shovel. The slightest misstep and you were off for the big one. And nobody took the big one as often and as dramatically as Tobin Sorenson.

A Once in a Lifetime Experience

Most climbers know of Tobin Sorenson, if they've heard of him at all, as the madman who, in Levis and a "Jesus Saves" sweatshirt, soloed the North Face of the Matterhorn or who with the late, great, British alpinist, Alex McIntyre, made the first alpine-style ascent of the Harlin Direct on the Eigerwand, or who joined Ricky Accomazzo on the first ascent of the Dru Couloir Direct, in Chamonix, then the hardest ice climb in the Alps (and one of the first times a team bivouacked while totally suspended from ice screws). If you had to pick the world's best overall climber from the 1970s-from alpine peaks to Yosemite big walls-few would argue if you gave the nod to Tobin. More than a friend and a partner, Tobin was a once in a lifetime experience. He answered The Stonemaster's momentous question- Who am I, really?-in ways we could never fully grasp.

In his fierce nature there was a touch of the feminine, as there is in every prince and pirate. His impulses always toggled between a wildcat and a saint, but when Tobin tied into a rope he was all wildcat. During our early mob ascents, whenever Tobin took the lead we'd never goad him, rather we gnashed our teeth and held our breath because Tobin hadn't technically caught up to the rest of us but he charged as though his knickers (back then he always wore knickers) were literally on fire. God must indeed have adored him. It's the only explanation why Tobin survived the titanic, head-over-heels, rag-doll falls he logged each and every weekend. A great natural athlete, his skill quickly approached his ambition and, praise the Lord, Tobin's harrowing falls eventually declined. But so long as he lived his goals outpaced his capacity-or anyone's capacity. We were too young to appreciate where it all must lead, but from the day he first chalked up, Tobin Sorenson was a dead man climbing. I believe that the savage force that drove him and his magnificent sense of purpose derived from his respect of climbing history.

Worship and veneration came naturally to Tobin. Though he would have considered it blasphemous to place any climber alongside the Almighty, Tobin would nevertheless risk your life and his own to secure his place alongside the Buhls and Robbins and Messners-all supreme artists in Tobin's mind. Emily Dickinson said that art is a house that wants to be haunted. But Emily meant how a house, inclined by history, would naturally attract the ghosts of the great ones who lived and tangled with similar challenges. Tobin, on the other hand, seemed determined to inhabit the house with his own ghost. Why else would he follow hard cracks out at Joshua with a noose around his neck, or race his sports car on the wrong side of the road during rush hour traffic? And what did this have to do with becoming an imminent climber? All we knew for certain was that Tobin had some strange and dreadful need to square off with his maker every time out.

Though the rest of us could never match Tobin's nerve and commitment, his example shifted the group's paradigm from a rogue's adventure to a game of deadly seriousness, a shift accentuated by the newest Stonemaster, John Bachar, who through passion and heroic effort transformed himself into one of the greatest figures in 20th-century adventure sports. Though John always played his own tune-both on the rock and on the alto sax he used to torture us with-early on he did so within the context of the group, and we all had the edgy rapture of watching John go where no climber had gone before. If ever a Stonemaster carried the name on his sleeve (and he scribbled it on his boots as well), it was John Bachar, Grand Templar of the entire movement.

Double Trouble

Throughout 1973 the group energy arced up and found expression through several pivotal ascents. First came the Vampire, an old Robbins aid route that took the boldest line up the baldest section of Tahquitz. Eight-hundred feet long, with a flapjack thin, expanding flake soaring up the glazed, southwest face, the Vampire was to Southern Californians the closest thing we had to a big wall. When Ricky Accomazzo freed the A4 traverse on the third pitch, via an audacious, sideways leap to the expando flake (an improbable 5.11 foot traverse was later found a body length below), any notion we had about what a leader could and should do flew straight out the rain fly. Preceded by .10d and .11a pitches respectively, the Vampire was, along with Yosemite's Nabisco Wall, and Eldorado's Naked Edge, one of America's first multi-pitch, super free climbs.

The Vampire naturally led to Idyllwild's most improbable free climbing prospect: Paisano Overhang, a 20-something foot, down-turned roof crack that went free at 5.12c (the rating was not established for another decade, when Randy Leavitt and Tony Yaniro invented Levitation to bag the second free ascent). The combination of grisly wide crack moves and A3 protection gave us a futuristic yardstick to measure any other crack on the face of the earth. If we could climb something as hard and poorly protected (a fall would have likely been a back breaker) as Paisano, what could stop us? And so on the vortex of these climbs we made our summer pilgrimage to rock climbing's grandest stage: Yosemite Valley. To that point we'd made only quick sorties into the Valley, slowly developing our comfort level by picking off a couple of small walls and a celebrated crack or two. But in 1973, the moment the semester let out, we descended on Camp 4 en masse, determined to carve an existence out of Yosemite's soaring expanse.

The Big Valley

Within a few weeks of arriving in the Valley, The Stonemaster movement gained critical mass; out of necessity we broke ranks with our small cadre of So Cal partners and teamed up with other kindred rascals. Robs had already climbed the West Face of El Cap and we had some catching up to do. Richard and Kevin Worral kick started the fandango with an early ascent of the Direct Route on Half Dome. Ricky and Gib climbed the Nose and I quickly followed suit, tying in with British ace Ron Fawcett. Directly on our heels climbed Richard and soulful English mountaineer Nick Escourt (who a few years later perished in an avalanche, 6,500 meters up K2, during an early attempt on the West Ridge).

During those first months the Stonemasters lived on the walls. But more pivotal than our first Grade VIs was the relationship we forged with Jim Bridwell, the most practiced rock climber in the world and a carry over from the Yosemite pioneers, most of whom fled the Trench in the late 1960s.

If The Stonemaster himself had a right-hand man, it was Jim Bridwell, a.k.a., "The Bird." To recount another Bridwell story is to spin a broken record, but his influence cannot be overstated. To climb with Jim (which we all did) was to embrace the boldest, newest, most outrageous adventure you could, each and every time out. And come what may.

What came was a thousand exploits-some jackass, others sublime-that took Jim and I from El Cap in a day to Venezuela's Angel Falls to the jungles of Borneo. Through Jim we met Mark Chapman, Ron Kauk, Werner Braun, Billy Westbay, Ed Barry, Jim Orey, Rik Reider, Dale Bard, and many others. During our first few seasons we were all interchangeable partners. When the Stonemaster's gusto grew too much for us Southern Californians to contain, our original group burst at the seams and The Stonemaster mojo splashed over one and all. By 1974 there were easily 25 Stonemasters (an ascent of Valhalla was no longer a criteria), and by 1976, most everyone in Camp Four was a charter member of the most unofficial club on the planet. Years later a climber would write that the Stonemasters "set a cultural standard aped by monkeys around the world." But the way it played out, the monkeys around the world were themselves Stonemasters, since the original movement diffused into the masses after a few short seasons.

Of course the story of the Stonemasters in Yosemite was actually a sub-plot in which The Stonemaster himself played a leading role only in the beginning, when the bull's-eye was anything new, anything that could pull out of us some undiscovered property. Since this existential experiment matched the needs of an entire generation of outcasts, it quickly assumed a life of its own, and The Stonemaster's work was done. Knowing that the most valuable technique was the exit, none of us ever saw him go.

From the beginning The Stonemaster provided a springboard into the mysterious, an adventure made ridiculous by climbing El Capitan 20 or even 30 times, something many climbers had now accomplished. After a dozen or so big walls you could return to find challenge and no doubt danger, but you'd no longer encounter an unknown world. When we first jumped into terra incognito, we returned so transformed that our relationships, our clothes, even our language morphed to reflect the inner transmutation. But over the years the crazy clothes and lingo and attitudes became ends in themselves, no longer predicated by jumping beyond our experience. We'd crisscrossed this particular ocean a thousand times and in the process a Stonemaster had come to mean little more than a formidable granite mariner-a rarity when we'd first attacked Suicide and Joshua Tree, but not anymore. Then Tobin died while trying to solo the North Face of Mt. Alberta (a feat later attempted by another Stonemaster, Mark Wilford). So boldly and so often had Tobin marched point on our quest into the unknown, when every summit and every ending flowed into something new. But this time he'd lead us into no-man's land, where the future dead-ended and there was no exit. We just hung our heads and stared at our shoes.

Especially early on, The Stonemasters moved freely between dreams and destruction. Because we were all forced to work on the rescue team (the only way to escape Yosemite's 14 day camping limit), we'd handled our share of corpses. Our founding ranks had also been thinned when Bill Antel shattered his back on Rixon's Pinnacle, and when Gib Lewis fell 100 feet to the deck-right in front of Ricky and I-while soloing the mottled ice falls in Lee Vining, in the Eastern Sierras. Miraculously, Gib would return, but Tobin never would. When Tobin died, so died the last of our innocence, and innocence was the lifeblood of every Stonemaster. Our pain was nothing compared to the injustice we felt, which left us dismayed and outraged. We surely saw it coming, and Tobin essentially died by his own hand. But I hated God just then. You come into the world believing a brave heart will live forever. When you learn otherwise, you might love once more, but never again will you be the same person.

I couldn't bring myself to attend Tobin's funeral- something I later deeply regretted-and instead dug out an old Impressions tape and listened to a song that, years earlier, in the tent cabin of a girlfriend in Yosemite, Tobin and I used to play over and over.

People get ready, there's a train comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
You don't need no ticket you just thank the Lord

Tobin was the only apostle among us, but this lyric summed up the come-one, come-all philosophy that spread the Stonemasters so far and wide, and saw so many people from so many places just get on board. But this locomotive carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. In time, the train got too crowded and the nuclear, personal bond that held together our passion and desires slowly unraveled. That's when I understood that a Stonemaster, in his pure and original form, could only be a kid with a restless spirit and unrequited dreams. And I was no longer a kid with dreams but a man with memories. Yosemite and I were done with each other. Suddenly I stared out over an emptiness so vast it put all my previous encounters with the unknown into the shade.

A wise friend said that, once you know the nature of this emptiness, like an Atlantic squall, you can plot a course though it. Or you can play grab ass on deck as the winds tear the sails to shreds. The only course I knew was to return to Yosemite, and it only took a few days and a few climbs to know I was playing grab ass once more.

I went to New Guinea and Borneo and Irian Jaya and other places I can't remember and could never pronounce. Once again the great unknown provided salvation and spared me the bitterness, dread and ennui that, following one's first, shattering let down, drive many into the bottle and into the grave. At long last I found myself back in The Basement with Richard. It would be our last and shortest confab in our secret castle (Richard soon moved to Red Rock and never came back). Almost by reflex we started in with the stories, though this time the stories were our own. We had to go over the main beats for the thing to ever be over, and for us to move on.

With Nuptse as our witness, soaring off the dusty joist, we recounted how through sweat and fear but the whole while laughing, we drew near The Stonemaster. And how strange to finally discover he was never so much a being as an island in our hearts, with a fireball bursting in a wordless sky, and tall walls looming, and rascals quaking through lonesome bivouacs, and waterfalls gushing through shady clefts as a bottle of tincture of benzoin explodes in my pack and ruins my one good pair of pants. And all along The Stonemaster asks: Who am I, really?

Through many epics did we find him, having followed the plumb line mostly, though not owning to our route finding skills, but rather because The Stonemaster had sought us all along. By no other means could you find that island, where the young and strong alight for a month or a year, and jump just as far as they can. Every old Stonemaster knows the place. We still feel the wind on our faces. And in other haunts and in other ways we might still jump beyond ourselves. But only the young can live on those craggy shores, and we would land there no more.

This John Long story is featured and fully illustrated in the up and coming Book “The Stonemasters California Rock Climbers in the Seventies.” It can be found at www.stonemasterpress.com