Doug Robinson: Climbing Quote of the Week

Doug Robinson, one of the most literate American climber writers, has long incorporated the spiritual and esoteric elements of climbing in his articles and books. Doug was part of the Golden Age of Yosemite rock climbing in the 1960s and 1970s, climbing with Yvon Chouinard, Royal Robbins, Chuck Pratt, and others.

Robinson began writing for Ascent, an annual journal devoted to climbing that was published by The Sierra Club. In the early seventies he wrote a seminal piece on the art of clean climbing that, after appearing the Chouinard’s Great Pacific Iron Works catalog, aided in the clean climbing revolution as American climbers accepted an environmental leave-no-trace ethic by using nuts rather than pitons. He also wrote an article for National Geographic Magazine in 1974, photographed by Galen Rowell, about a pitonless all-clean ascent of Half Dome’s Northwest Face route by Dennis Hennek and Robinson. His instructional film Moving Over Stone remains one of the best of its genre and still inspires beginning climbers on the rock. Robinson was also the ghost writer for much of Yvon Chouinard's fabulous book Climbing Ice.

This quote comes from “The Climber as Visionary," one of my favorite Doug Robinson essays, which appeared in the 1969 issue of Ascent. It evokes that counter-cultural era of free-thinking and expanding consciousness, fueled in part by drugs, altered awareness, William Blake’s “Doors of Perception,” and the summer of 1968. Doug attempts in this article to look beyond the everyday mundane reality into the deeper reasons why we climb and how climbing affects both our brain chemistry and our soul.

”Climbing requires intense concentration. I know of no other activity in which I can so easily lose all the hours of an afternoon without a trace. Or a regret. I have had storms creep up on me as if I had been asleep, yet I knew the whole time I was in the grip of an intense concentration, focused first on a few square feet of rock, and then on a few feet more. I have gone off across camp to boulder and returned to find the stew burned. Sometimes in the lowlands when it is hard to work I am jealous of how easily concentration comes in climbing. This concentration may be intense, but it is not the same as the intensity of the visionary periods; it is a prerequisite intensity.”

Buy Doug Robinson’s book:
A Night on the Ground A Day in the Open A wonderful collection of essays and stories about the mountain and climbing experience.

Photo above: Climbers on Lizard Rock discover that climbing offers visions of beauty and grace.
Photo © Stewart M. Green