JOSEPH E. TAYLOR III ON CLIMBER, GRANITE, SKY

Environmental History, Jan 2006 by Taylor, Joseph E III

Once approved, Ascent's editors gave it a novel look. In addition to feature articles and climbing notes, Steck, Roper, and Joe Fitschen published fiction, poetry, humor, and cartoons. They pushed the genre with works on spirituality, ethics, and technique, and reprinted farcical essays by MAD Magazine and Mark Twain.12 The first volume, issued once a year from 1967 to 1972, was a stylistic watershed. Despite its groundbreaking essays, however, Ascent's most important innovation was imagery. Photo editor Glen Denny crafted an aesthetic that blended reportage and interpretation. Some photos were grainy, others astonishingly clear. All revealed a rapidly shifting sensibility about mountain art among a clique of photographers that included Denny, Roper, Tom Frost, Henry Kendall, and Galen Rowell.'3 Ascent looked like nothing else. The Bulletin had featured photos by Ansel Adams and Leland Curtis, and the American A/pine Journal printed many fine images, but all journals, even the commercial Summit which began in 1955, used images to illustrate text. In Ascent photos often stood alone as works of art, and those which did accompany text tended to emphasize immensity, beauty, and action. The 1968 cover captured this aesthetic evolution, and color set it apart. Climbers even played to the camera, as when T. M. Herbert feigned panic or Warren Harding posed as a tourist, and the satirical cartoons of Sheridan Anderson, coupled with the lampooning pen of Joe Kelsey, were without parallel.14

Yet what seems most striking are Ascent's contradictions. Most contributors idealized pure experience, a vestige of nineteenth-century Victorian amateurism, yet in practice many were professionals. Their philosophy echoed adventurers who celebrated mountains as liberation from effeminizing modernity, but their behavior revealed that climbing was no longer purely play. In an illustrative moment Yvon Chouinard complained that new technologies allowed "the average Joe" to try routes "normally over his head and... experts to do incredibly hard climbs without having to stick their necks out."'5 He seemed to mourn the demise of risk, yet more was at stake. Chouinard was producing the very tools he decried. Ideals and practices were out of sync, and by the late-igSos such contradictions were widespread. Roper and Steck loved untrodden space, yet Roper had perfected the climbing guidebook that lured average Joes to wilderness, and Steck invented the trekking industry that led them there. Ascent was produced by a generation learning to sell itself, and its oeuvre marked this shift. From the 1968 Ascent cover we can recognize the dawn of a form of recreation in which marketing and play go hand in hand, and extreme sports, slicksheet magazines, and outdoor competitions are normative. It is also easier to see why recreation and environmentalism no longer meshed, why separate journals seemed so necessary, and why climber, granite, sky signified an emerging tension within environmental culture.