BASKETCASE SECOND FREE ASCENT:  A DAY WITH ED WARD

By Peter Haan, copyrighted 2006

It wasn’t Ed’s first visit---I think he had come over from England in the late ‘60’s announcing beforehand in a letter to Royal and others that he was going to bag the second ascent of the North America Wall in a solo, cleverly leapfrogging any need to climb in the Valley at all beforehand. Clearly a very efficient plan. He was Ed Ward-Drummond then, later becoming just Ed Ward, why I don’t recall.  But soon after arriving,  he had met up with our various realities and had to actually train like the rest of us, just seeing what he could do as his schooling progressed in the Valley.  It’s true, it would have been really impressive had he  simply arrived full-blown from the head of Zeus as planned and flash-soloed the second ascent of the North America Wall, beating out Lauria and Hennek.  But this dream of omnipotence most of us had had already and hastily recovered from, so we smirked communally, as people do, implying we would never have made such a mistake ourselves.

A BRIEF WALK WITH BRIDWELL

Bridwell and I hadn’t climbed together for awhile, but we had been working on our outfits and we had plans. Mostly Jim’s rigs involved adapting stuff from the men’s AND ladies’ racks at Goodwill in Merced for the fierce conditions we met out on the rock. I think these Jimi Hendrix-inspired arrangements usually rang in at less than $5, not including the driving to Merced. We wore through stuff fast in that bold era of daily offwidthing and wall climbs that lasted weeks. And Jim was clearly a leader in this trend towards the outré and the recycled. Kind of a year-round Halloween or Mardi Gras with certain unique festive aspects we brought to it as well.

Well this particular time, we were thinking to do "Henley Quits", and scope out the left side (which was still just a project) while descending from the anchors of the regular one-pitch summitless route on the right. We both had done this new popular and fun Klemens route already.