There's a reason its called the "Mountaineer's Route".
Its not a sport climbing route, or a rock climbing route, or a speed climbing route. It's not a big wall, or any kind of a wall at all. It's just a way up the mountain. But it is at once both a very general and ordinary way up the mountain, and very special and particular way.
It is, and was, John Muir's way up this mountain. In its history and its character, it may be the most aptly named route in the Sierra, or anywhere.
Call me old fashioned, so last century, or just old (I prefer "Old School" or better, "Classicist"). But I have been having this conversation in one form or another with climbers for 50 years or so, and it is still interesting, if not gratifying, to see it playing out yet again, this time in perhaps the most appropriate context of all. Scheiner has brought this conversation full circle. Thank her for that.
When I was getting hooked on mountains, and especially this mountain, in the 1960's, my heroes included Muir, Mallory, Hillary, Sayre, and later Rebuffat and Chouinard. I only realized it years later, but this progression in historic heroes represents a regression in my relationship with mountains, from Muir, the quintessential man living in, with and on mountains, to the conquerors of particular mountains, to the masters of the particular techniques of ascending ever specialized portions of any mountains (Rebuffat), or no mountains at all (Chouinard).
Rock climbing, and ice climbing, and any number of forms of each, emerged as separate endeavors from what up until 1960 or so, had been known simply as mountain climbing, or mountaineering.
In order to feed my jones in the off-season, I would hook up with buddies who would go climbing all kinds of formations, mountains and not so much with me all over Connecticut. I did it to keep in shape, to hone the skills that I would use the following summers in Colorado and California. Little did I know that "rock climbing" was becoming an activity in itself, divorced from mountaineering.
The wake-up call came when somebody called me one day to ask me to "go rappelling" the following weekend. Now. For those of you who may be thinking, yeah? and? let me point out that in 1965 being asked to "go rappelling" by climbing friends struck me like being asked to "go mooring" by sailors, or "go cleaning" by fishing buddies. To go "dropping me off at my parents'" by a date.
Rappelling was now an activity of itself? The emergence of cheerleading, or spirit, whatever its called, as a competitive sport, from, well, leading cheers for competitors in competitive sports, suggests itself. One wonders: do competitive cheerleading teams have cheering sections at their competitions who are led by , uh . . . but that way lies madness, and I digress.
The emergence of rappelling from rock climbing as an activity got me thinking about the artificiality of separating rock climbing from mountain climbing.
Which of course brings us to Scheiner's experience. Scheiner, at 16 years in, was deprived of the dismay I enjoyed of watching rock climbing evolve as an activity separate from the greater endeavor that spawned it. We have no frame of reference any more for how Schneiners ratings in "trad" and "sport" emerged from the far more general experience of just getting up the mountain.
How are we to make sense of the simple fact that a barely 4.XX scramble scared the shit out of, and nearly stopped, a 5.10a/5.11a rock climber?
There's the reason its called the "Mountaineer's Route".
