Free-climber Lynn Hill works out solutions for
the impossible.
Sunday, April 28, 2002 - Her forearm muscles look like
the fine grain at the heart of split oak - at once delicate
and strong, chiseled and supple. Those are the muscles that
pulled Lynn Hill, 41, up countless big walls, setting record
after record as she became the best-known rock climber in
the world.
Jaws dropped when Hill quit the World Cup competitive-climbing
circuit in 1993, the year after her friend Robyn Erbesfield
won the 1992 circuit. Hill retired from competitive climbing.
The North Face hired her as a salaried athlete, sending
her to tackle big walls and using photographs of those climbs
in its advertisements. One North Face print ad featured
Hill standing next to a yellow tent pitched on a patch of
snow atop The Bird in Kyrgyzstan, in the former Soviet Union.
Today, Hill divides her time between Europe and the U.S.,
including Colorado. (In mid-April, she moved from Boulder
to Moab to join her boyfriend.)
With fellow climber and writer Greg Child, Hill chronicles
her own story in "Climbing Free" (Norton, $24.95).
The title is a reference to two of Hill's most famous accomplishments:
free-climbing The Nose, a 3,000-plus-foot route on Yosemite's
El Capitan; and free-climbing the same route - normally
tackled as a multiday climb - in less than 24 hours.
"Free-climbing" is a phrase that describes the
style of climbing compulsory when Hill began in the 1970s,
at age 14. By definition, "free climbing" means
that the climber relies solely on her feet, hands, ability,
skill and physical strength to ascend a rock face. All the
equipment used - the rope, the metal gizmos placed at intervals
to arrest a fall - are meant only to stop the climber if
she falls. Hanging onto a bolt or a nut is cheating.
"Aid climbing" means using any equipment to ascend
the rock face. A purist free climber uses aid only if a
section of rock is so blank that it defies free-climbing.
For 35 years, climbers tried to free-climb The Nose on
El Capitan. They all were defeated by the Great Roof, an
overhang that starts, as Hill describes it in her book,
"with a corner shaped like an open book with a crack
at its center."
The crack rises straight for 100 feet, splitting a vast
wall. Then it leans right, becoming "a large roof shaped
like a breaking wave of granite." To ascend, Hill writes,
she had to "surf sideways on smooth, featureless rock,"
jamming her fingers into the crack above her head. Getting
over the roof meant hunching like Atlas, with the granite
ceiling pressing against her shoulders, insinuating her
fingers into a small slot.
Hill's first free climb of the Great Roof meant contorting
her small body - she is only 5-feet-2 and 100 pounds wringing
wet - awkwardly, extending her leading arm. Her head butted
against the ceiling, "unexpectedly steadying me."
To her surprise, she popped upon the overhanging ledge.
It was a huge accomplishment, the equivalent of runner
Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile.
The following year, when Hill free-climbed The Nose in
less than 24 hours, she set another record. Typically, The
Nose is a multiday climb, and was the first time she climbed
it in 1993. She spent four days on the route, sleeping in
bivouac camps on ledges or hanging from ropes. Most climbers
take between four and six days, valley floor to summit,
and that's with aid climbing.
Hill's tenacity won her a following among people, especially
women, who normally don't follow rock climbing. Like cyclist
Lance Armstrong's post-cancer Tour de France victory, Hill's
accomplishment was seen by many women as an example of what
can be possible when someone asks herself to do the impossible.
"I'm uncomfortable with the people who put me on a
pedestal," Hill said, sitting on the sofa in a friend's
Boulder home.
"Doing The Nose in a day was pie in the sky. It was
reaching, but it was meaningful because it made me reach
into myself. The grandness of that route, and what it meant
to me about the spirit of climbing, that was what was important.
And," she said, not quite as an afterthought, "as
a woman in a male-dominated world of climbing, it was meaningful,
too."
She speaks the way she climbs, deliberately and thoughtfully.
The fifth in a noisy family of seven children, she learned
early to size up situations and work out solutions on her
own.
That independent analysis helped her as a young climber
and still dictates her life. When Hill was living in Europe,
she developed the habit of observing herself as if she were
a character in a novel. Then she put down her observations
in French and Spanish, schooling herself to better learn
the languages she spoke daily.
"That taught me certain things about myself - the
way I was raised, the way I talk or being petty," she
said. Her observations extended the lessons she credits
to climbing.
"The thing that's interesting about climbing, and
I try not to point it out too hard in the book, is that
you learn to take responsibility for yourself. Part of the
evolution of my career was starting in one style and then
following another in competition, and then wanting to go
back to the rock."
She talks about rock the way lovers might describe each
other. To climb well, Hill says, "you have to caress
your holds." When she's on belay and climbing, "there's
a relationship, an appreciation for the rock - its warmth,
its aesthetics." Under her tough fingers, the texture
of a rock face is its skin. When Hill looks at a rock, or
nearly any vertical surface, she automatically scans its
potential holds - the fissures, knobs and lips willing to
allow a visitor.
She knows, having lost a brother-in-law, lovers and friends,
that climbing can be fatal. She knows, from personal experience,
that making a mistake demands a high price. Hill fell, famously,
when she forgot to tie her harness into the rope when she
was climbing with her then-husband in 1989. Nobody realized
that she wasn't tied in until she got to the top of the
route and leaned back to descend.
Hill fell 72 feet in two seconds. As she fell, she pictured
the floor below. She remembered an oak tree at the bottom,
and flailed her arms, trying to force her head up and steer
toward the tree. Its branches interrupted her fall. While
she didn't walk away - she'd broken an arm and suffered
other minor injuries - nearly everyone, including Hill,
couldn't believe she'd survived.
The fall, like the record-setting free climbing ascents
of The Nose, encouraged her to be more introspective. When
she thinks back on her early days in Yosemite National Park,
living on maybe $75 a month, she smiles at her current job
as a salaried professional athlete - someone who's paid
to climb.
And while climbing still largely defines her life, Hill
considers other goals experts claim may be beyond the reach
of a 41-year-old woman. She'd like to get married again.
She would like to have a child.
"Scientists say a woman's eggs get too old to be viable
after you're 40," she said, her face inscrutable. Maybe
she was thinking about the experts who said The Nose never
would be free-climbed.
"Seminal, and not only in the realm of women's sports,"
Brad Wetzler wrote of Lynn Hill in Outside Magazine. "(Hill
has) managed to transcend the whole tiresome discussion
of gender and the "undeniable" differences between
men and women ... outdone the guys, and the guys still haven't
caught up."
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