I began hiking and scrambling in the Colorado Rockies while I was a teenager, growing up west of Denver. A Stoney Point trip with the Mountaineering Club from UC Santa Barbara, where I started college in 1966, taught me how to belay and rappel. Inspired by stories from Chouinard, Tom Frost and Dennis Hennek about the big walls of Yosemite, we began learning how to climb things on our own.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
More than three decades later, the game is still fun. A few climbs stand out as milestones, looking back. Arrowhead Spire , Yosemite Valley, California, Spring 1968. Bob took a 20-foot headfirst leader fall, impressing us all. This proved that we were badly off route, but we carried on anyway.