Many moons ago a friend of mine and I hiked to the stone shelter at the base of Long’s Peak in Colorado (14,256’) It’s east face is called The Diamond due to it’s shape and being 1,000 feet or so in height…mostly vertical to slightly overhanging, was considered a very serious climb only to be attempted by top notch climbers or idiots. Anyway Ben and I were in the shelter with three other guys cooking some awful dehydrated goop on a camp stove when two other guys came in announcing breathlessly that “Kor was coming!” Layton Kor, a 6’6” bricklayer, lanky and taut, and a climbing legend. Ben and I were excited to spend a night with him and his climbing buddy, imagining him to be some kind of majestic poetic type of alpinist like Gaston Rebuffat, Maurice Herzog and other European icons, dispensing meaningful wisdom and insight into life as an extraordinary alpinist.
Surprise! Lotsa beer, blue language, cigarette smoke, graphic accounts of female conquests, etc on and on into the night. No poetry at all. We were kinda stunned, crushed and deflated, huddled in the corner with no hope of getting any sleep.
Late the next day as we were descending the trail in the rain, still above timberline, we heard some early 60s rock and roll coming from under a stunted bushy conifer (krummholzt). There was Kor, sheltered, sitting on his rope with his transistor radio on full blast. He looked at us as if to ask “What are you knuckleheads doing out in the rain?” So we squeezed in with him then hiked down to the trailhead where we gave him a ride to his car parked maybe a mile away. He thanked us for the conversation and ride, then drive away. We just looked at each other and basically said “Huh!” He went on to pioneer a bunch of very difficult routes in the US and Europe. You can if you wish read about his exploits in a book titled Beyond the Vertical. Our takeaway from those 36 hours was he ain’t a hero or icon, but was damned good at what he did and was, other than that, just a regular testosterone driven dude not unlike what in some ways we were, too.
Many moons ago a friend of mine and I hiked to the stone shelter at the base of Long’s Peak in Colorado (14,256’) It’s east face is called The Diamond due to it’s shape and being 1,000 feet or so in height…mostly vertical to slightly overhanging, was considered a very serious climb only to be attempted by top notch climbers or idiots. Anyway Ben and I were in the shelter with three other guys cooking some awful dehydrated goop on a camp stove when two other guys came in announcing breathlessly that “Kor was coming!” Layton Kor, a 6’6” bricklayer, lanky and taut, and a climbing legend. Ben and I were excited to spend a night with him and his climbing buddy, imagining him to be some kind of majestic poetic type of alpinist like Gaston Rebuffat, Maurice Herzog and other European icons, dispensing meaningful wisdom and insight into life as an extraordinary alpinist.
Surprise! Lotsa beer, blue language, cigarette smoke, graphic accounts of female conquests, etc on and on into the night. No poetry at all. We were kinda stunned, crushed and deflated, huddled in the corner with no hope of getting any sleep.
Late the next day as we were descending the trail in the rain, still above timberline, we heard some early 60s rock and roll coming from under a stunted bushy conifer (krummholzt). There was Kor, sheltered, sitting on his rope with his transistor radio on full blast. He looked at us as if to ask “What are you knuckleheads doing out in the rain?” So we squeezed in with him then hiked down to the trailhead where we gave him a ride to his car parked maybe a mile away. He thanked us for the conversation and ride, then drive away. We just looked at each other and basically said “Huh!” He went on to pioneer a bunch of very difficult routes in the US and Europe. You can if you wish read about his exploits in a book titled Beyond the Vertical. Our takeaway from those 36 hours was he ain’t a hero or icon, but was damned good at what he did and was, other than that, just a regular testosterone driven dude not unlike what in some ways we were, too.