Your window into the stories, history, and ongoing work to preserve Yosemite’s climbing legacy.

A Note from the Editor

It’s raining in the Sierra foothills as I write this on the afternoon of Oct. 14. As Yosemite local Chris Falkenstein wrote on Facebook:

Winter storm forecast: be prepared for road closures and carry tire chains. Road closures (including Tioga Road and/or Glacier Point Road) and tire chain requirements are possible starting October 13.

Signs in Mariposa since yesterday stated: Tioga Pass Closed and Sonora Pass Closed.

There’s a flood watch expected until 5 p.m. today and rain forecast through today and into tomorrow. After that, sunny skies are expected for the foreseeable future, with highs rising from 49 to 73. The leaves are falling, and once the rock dries, conditions should be just right for climbing.

I spent this morning meeting with my old friend Ben Zartman, visiting from Rhode Island. Like Ben, I moved to Yosemite right after high school in the mid-’90s, and we quickly became climbing partners. I preferred sport and bouldering and he liked all things trad; we did our first big wall in ’95, the RNWF of Half Dome, and our second in ’97, the Pacific Ocean Wall on El Cap. I wrote about him in Gripped here and here.

This morning at the coffeeshop Pony Espresso—which was packed—we talked about our early days on the rock, his round-the-world seafaring expeditions, and his new business, Zartman Rigging. Ben is currently on a cross-country tour promoting his new company. “What I make isn’t secret engineering—I’m adapting proven marine tech for climbing,” he says.

After that, I rang Ken Yager and he shared his memories of climbing with Yosemite legend Warren Harding, whom he met 50 years ago.

Recently on Instagram, Taylor Martin posted about her latest first ascent. Martin wrote:

Finished up another project yesterday on Lower Cathedral Rock. 11 new pitches of climbing after starting on “Scruffy Corner” at the Mecca crag. The route is mostly hooking with intermittent nailing in the first 5/6 pitches, then mixed free and aid pitches. The last pitch goes out the large diving board feature in the middle of the north face putting you out from the wall a good 40 ft or so from where you started. Exhilarating!

Yosemite Valley is far from climbed out. There is much to do, and little time to do it. I am so psyched. This might be my last FA of the season, and that’s ok. I’ve caught the bug. There’ll be more of that at some point in the future. I just feel so stoked to have found something that just grows the more you do it. Better yet, it is whatever you want it to be. Around every corner there is something new.

“Requiem For A Dream” 5.11a A4 1300/1400ft

In the news this week: on Oct. 13, Owen Clark wrote in Outside: “Two hikers were rescued from an icy alpine pass north of Yosemite National Park.” Clark continues:

The incident occurred on the afternoon of October 7, atop Burro Lake Pass east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, the Mono County Sheriff Search and Rescue Team said on Facebook.

A member of the rescue team told Outside that the two men were prepared for a casual day hike they had planned but woefully unequipped for the trail they followed.

Mono County Sheriff Search and Rescue Team posted on Facebook:

Cliffed-Out Backpackers near Burro Lake Pass — Tuesday, October 7th, 2025

On Tuesday, October 7th, at 1319 hours, the Team was paged out by the Sheriff’s Office for a report of two individuals cliffed out “on an icy ridge” due west of Burro Lake Pass at an approximate elevation of 11,340 feet. Rescue Base was established at the Virginia Lakes Trailhead.

Initial photos showed one individual atop the ridge due west of Burro Lake Pass and another approximately 100 feet down a snow-filled couloir perched on a small stomped ledge, with another 800 feet of relief beneath them.

Due to the steep, complex, and consequential terrain, Operations planned for a technical rescue/pickoff approach.

A member from Team 1 took command as rigging lead just as Team 3 was delivered. The attendant was lowered to the subject, tying off a precarious and large rock on the way down. Subject 2 was placed into a sound victim harness, a Team jacket, and a helmet. Team 3 arrived on scene during the lower and began rigging the system for a raise once instructed. Subject 2 was hauled up the couloir, which was measured to have an average steepness of 50 degrees.

On Oct. 14, Kate Plummer at Newsweek wrote:

Yosemite National Park hit with wave of illegal activity during shutdown. People have entered sections of the park without a permit as lawmakers' standoff over policy and funding enters its third week.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “We’re barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history, unless Democrats drop their partisan demands and pass a clean, no-strings-attached budget to reopen the government and pay our federal workers.”

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle reported last week that some BASE jumpers were taking advantage of the shutdown to jump in the park.

The National Park Service told Newsweek: “BASE jumping is illegal in all national parks, including Yosemite, due to the significant safety risks it poses to participants, the public, and first responders.”

Enough about the news and weather. Read Ken’s Founder’s Note and the feature on Zartman below.

*Correction. The video promoting the first ascent of Half Dome, which we shared last week, has been updated with the latest information. Please view here.

Chris Van Leuven

Editor, Yosemite Climbing Association News Brief

YosemiteClimbing.org

YouTube Screenshot: Warren Harding's Outrageous First Ascents of The Nose and The Dawn Wall, Reel Rock

Founder’s Log Oct. 14, 2025 | Remembering Warren Harding

I met Warren “Batso” Harding by pulling over for a hitchhiker on Highway 50. It was Feb. 4, 1975. I was sixteen, fresh off a day at Lover’s Leap, driving my dad’s truck. This wiry guy with wild hair had his thumb out. He introduces himself—Warren Harding—and suddenly I’m giving a ride to the man whose name I’d been staring at since I first dreamed about climbing El Cap when I was 13.

I dropped him off at his mom’s house in West Sacramento. Inside, his mother fed us beneath a wall of clippings and photos. Around her, he looked almost boyish—“mama’s boy” energy—which took me by surprise. The El Cap first ascensionist, now (in a sweet way) just somebody’s kid. His mom was walking with a cane, chuckling about how her gout was acting up, but she didn’t complain. It was obvious where Warren got his toughness.

We started climbing shortly afterward. On one of our first days out, we headed to the Phantom Spires above Highway 50, near the Wrights Lake turnoff. I expected Batso to drag me up something desperate, but instead, he’d patched holes in his shoe toes with so much epoxy that he couldn’t stand on the edges. He shrugged, handed me the rack, and said, “You’d better go first.” I led two of those granite spires, and then it got dark. Warren built a small fire, opened his pack for the first time, and revealed its contents: hot dogs, Wonder Bread, a family-size mustard, and—of course—two legit wine glasses, a bottle of wine, and four brews. I was sixteen; the beers and wine hit me, but I sobered up during the steep stumble back to the highway. A few hours earlier, he’d been a myth. Now my clothes smelled like campfire smoke and wine, and the legend was passing me a mustard bottle.

As for what Harding meant to Yosemite. Short version: he went first—again and again—on the most prominent faces. He led the first ascent of The Nose in 1958 with Wayne Merry and George Whitmore, a 3,000-foot line that took 47 days and nearly 18 months and changed American climbing.

After The Nose, he kept picking proud lines: the East Face (Astroman) of Washington Column with Glen Denny, and Chuck Pratt (1959), the steep West Face of Leaning Tower (1961) with Glen Denny and Al MacDonald; the North Face of the Rostrum with Glen Denny (1962); the South Face of Mount Watkins (1964) with Chuck Pratt and Yvon Chouinard. And he didn’t confine himself to the Valley—he also climbed the Keeler Needle by Mt. Whitney and a new route on Mt. Conness. He picked the proudest lines up the steepest faces, and many of his routes are classic to this day. He had a good eye for a line, there’s no doubt.

The Wall of Early Morning Light on El Cap—what most folks now call the Dawn Wall—captures his style best. In 1970, he and Dean Caldwell spent 27 days aiding up that dead-vertical sweep, riding out a multiday storm in BAT hammocks, low on food and long on stubbornness. When a rescue effort began assembling below, Warren tossed down a can with a note that’s now part of Valley lore:

“A rescue is unwarranted, unwanted and will not be accepted,” says this article in Gripped Magazine.

They topped out on November 18 to cameras, family, and champagne—because only Harding could turn an epic into a punchline and a picnic.

By the time I first racked up on Leaning Tower (1977), some of the old hardware was still there—undersized bolts bent and migrating out from decades of weather and previous teams. In the Climbing Museum, we’ve got two of those tiny bolts on display.

On Forbidden Wall in ’75, we got snowed off, but he showed me enough about aiding and hauling to keep the El Cap dream alive.

The obituary lines tell the bookends: born 1924; died February 27, 2002. As Dennis McLellan wrote in the LA Times:

Harding died of liver failure Feb. 27 in his home in Happy Valley, near Anderson in Shasta County.

Nicknamed “Batso” by a fellow climber in the early 1970s--for his hanging off rock walls like a bat--the 5-foot-6 Harding was an iconoclastic California character known for his courage, flair and sense of humor.

He made his living as a land surveyor on roads, highways and subdivisions. But it was while hanging precariously, often for days, on sheer granite cliffs in Yosemite that he became a legend.

In a climbing career that spanned the 1950s through the ’70s, the sport’s golden age, Harding made 30 first ascents in Yosemite.

Fifty years after that hitchhiker ride, I’m grateful I stopped the truck. Harding went first on so many of the biggest walls in Yosemite. He did routes everywhere, and his name is listed on many first ascents. Porcelain Wall, Rhombus Wall, Forbidden Wall—he climbed it all. He thrived in chimneys.

He and Royal Robbins were the two most prolific first ascensionists of the 1960s, a period known as the golden years. In particular, Harding, more so than Robbins in a lot of ways—Harding pretty much, other than the Northwest Face of Half Dome, got the first ascent up every big face. That seemed to be what he liked to do. He even did the first ascent of a wild flake above Arch Rock, Julia’s Flake, where you can see the sky through. I climbed that once. The topo calls it fourth class, but I can tell you it isn’t.

Ken Yager

Founder and President, YCA

YosemiteClimbing.org

Former Yosemite Local Ben Zartman’s Cross-Country Tour

From the East Coast to Yosemite, innovator and sailor Zartman is teaching climbers the art of Dyneema splicing and sharing his ultralight ropework system born from decades at sea

For the past month, Ben Zartman has been traveling cross-country, offering hands-on Dyneema splicing workshops for climbers, gyms, and shops—teaching best practices. He’s also selling his UIAA-certified seamless runners and other ultralight soft goods, plus a 6 mm rappel/guide plate and a full ecosystem of rope-work tools.

And the shops are biting. IME (North Conway) placed the first order, followed by Rock and Snow (New Paltz, NY); then IME in Salt Lake City made a large purchase. Stops in Omaha (a “park-bench demo”) followed, then Laramie, Reno (Nevada Adventure Rentals), Tahoe/Truckee/Lover’s Leap, Bishop, and finally Yosemite.

After we talked for hours this morning, Ben drove into Yosemite, headed toward Curry Village to promote his gear at the Mountain Shop, and planned to meet up with El Capitan photographer Tom Evans.

At Pony Espresso—which was packed—he slowly sipped a tall cappuccino while I drank a no-frills small coffee. Then he unpacked a large bag of gear. He girth-hitched his custom micro-stitch plate to his climbing-style belt and explained how to use the device in various ways—ranging from guide mode to an adjustable daisy—for glacier rescue and beyond. He added his handmade slings and pulleys—essentially the entire kit—to demonstrate advanced ultralight methods for glacier travel and extraction. He detailed how his extendable quickdraws worked, how his triple-length slings and loop-style daisies operated, and shared his process and ratings of UIAA strength testing. People looked over and couldn’t help but stare, and meanwhile, I snapped pictures of his complex, featherweight systems

“I’m building an entire ecosystem of lightweight ropework that all plays together—tools, cords, plates, and spliced softgoods,” he told me.

Of his hands-on workshops, where he stresses safety and a keen eye for detail, he said: “A good splice keeps ~90 % of the rope’s strength; a knot can rob you of 40–60 %. The trick is doing the splice right. Most mistakes I see? Buried too short, no taper, and a twist hiding in the eye. I teach splicing so climbers can build confidence: make a few, pull-test them, understand the margins—then trust the system.”

As for his motivation to sell gear now, he says, “Climbers are starting to play with skinny lines; I’m just giving them best practices so they can trust what they build.” What’s unique to the industry is that “my seamless runners don’t have that bar-tack hard spot.”

Ben stresses that he uses all his designs while climbing with his family—and he wouldn’t if he didn’t trust its safety. On social media, he’s been posting photos from the road: a pink Tricam slotted in a horizontal crack in the Gunks, fastened with his custom sling; a hex threaded with his Dyneema cord at Vedauwoo; a custom-made Dyneema cord slung around a horn with a soft shackle at Lover’s Leap.

Since Ben has gifted me gear over the years, it’s mixed into my rack. I’ve used his slings on easier routes at Fresno Dome—tying off chickenheads—but I’m slow to adopt new gear. I’m used to today’s traditional equipment: bar-tacked slings, Totems instead of the hexes I bought in the early ’90s (and later gave away), and ropes from major manufacturers. I’m not endorsing Ben’s gear either way—just noting that it exists, has passed UIAA testing, and from what he’s shown me, could serve practical purposes. His micro-slings, designed to girth-hitch to hooks of any size, make sense. So do his seamless runners (though they’re pricey). I understand why he uses a micro-stitch plate—“The new 6 mm plate works as a rappel device and a progress-capture—guide-mode, crevasse rescue, the works,” he says—though I still prefer a GriGri.

Lightweight gear is in Ben’s blood, and, in contrast, the more I climb, the more gear I bring. I carry a stick clip even on multi-pitch sport routes, often bring more cams than the guidebook recommends, and load up on a heavy pile of snacks like iced electrolyte drinks, robust sandwiches, and even pie (especially when doing the Rostrum). You wouldn’t see Ben with any of that stuff at the crags; maybe a few cams, but likely rigid stem Friends instead of Totems.

When he speed-soloed the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome in 1998, years after we first did it, “I brought a micro-rack: one cam each to #3, five stoppers, a couple slings, and the shortest rope I could get away with,” he says. He also free-soloed the Steck-Salathé on Sentinel soon after we’d climbed it together with a rack of mostly hexes and stoppers.

Ben notes that since he doesn’t sport climb, he can count his leader falls on one hand. I, by contrast, might take that many falls in a single day while projecting a route.

“Efficiency is safety,” he says about traveling light on the rock. “Less bulk means less fumbling, fewer benightments, and more energy where it matters.”

And when it comes to his mariner skills: “All of the outings I did prepared me to think in very simple terms about the climbing gear I’m making—the least complicated, most practical stuff possible. The more gadgets you bolt on, the more time you spend fixing instead of sailing.”

He continues, “The best things in sailing are also the very simple ones. The less moving parts you have and the less complication you have, the less stuff there is to go awry and to break. It’s kind of an engineering feat to eliminate complications and boil things down to the most essential and uncomplicated method or process or object.”

Despite all the stories he shared or reshared this morning—including building his boat in Mariposa, then sailing from California to Newfoundland with his family, and through the Northwest Passage (from the East Coast to the West Coast through Canada)—I kept thinking about our second big wall together in the mid-’90s. Forget that our first wall, the RNWF of Half Dome in 1995, was terrifying; that was on me for being unprepared. But I was ready for the Pacific Ocean Wall two years later. I had the Gore-Tex bivy sack, synthetic sleeping bag, waterproof breathable jackets and pants, puffy layers, and a warm hat. As storms lashed our bivy again and again, Ben—with much simpler gear—didn’t seem the least bit uncomfortable. (Ben admitted later that he was a little uncomfortable, especially when wrestling with the portaledge fly in a storm while I was fast asleep.)

This morning, I pulled out my phone and smiled while showing him the photo I’d run in my Gripped story: Ben sans harness and shoes, clad in all cotton, standing on a wet ledge midway up El Cap, completely relaxed and munching a pudding cup.

“Some people practically bring a salad bar and a disco ball on a big wall,” he says, “but I always appreciated the strong, light, efficient approach.

“All of the sailing and adventuring I did prepared me to think in very simple terms about the climbing gear I’m making—the least complicated, most practical stuff possible.”