Climbing With Layton Kor

I’m down in Kingman, on the far western edge of Arizona, visiting for a few days with the legendary Layton Kor, an iconic American rock climber. Kor, of course, was prolific in the 1960s, putting up many new routes across his home state of Colorado, on the desert spires in Utah and Arizona, on the walls of Yosemite Valley, and in Europe in the Italian Dolomites and on the big peaks like the Eigerwand in Switzerland. Now Layton, a tall 70-year-old man with a shock of white hair, still has the fire to do first ascents and get out on vertical terrain.

Tomorrow, Layton Kor, my friends Ed Webster and Dennis Jump, who drove down with me from Colorado, and I are heading out to do the first ascent of a basalt tower perched on a high ridge in the desert mountains north of Kingman. We racked up this afternoon. I pulled out cams and nuts while Layton put together a dozen pitons on a sling. “I still love to use pitons,” he says with a smile. “That’s just how I’ve always climbed.”

I’ll write up a post later about how it goes along with a couple photographs of the master in action. In the meantime, enjoy this historic photo of Layton Kor on the 1962 first ascent of Monster Tower, a 450-foot-high sandstone spire in Canyonlands National Park south of Moab, Utah.

Photo top: Layton Kor getting ready to lead a pitch during the first ascent of Monster Tower, Canyonlands National Park, Utah. 1962. Photograph courtesy Layton Kor