I met John Long or “Largo,” when I edited the first selection in this book, “A Short History of the Stonemasters,” for Rock and Ice Magazine in 2006. I’d known Long’s work since 1977, when I was 13 years old, hunkered over a climbing magazine like a mage over a book of spells, completely entranced by the beauty and strangeness of climbing. There were no mountains or hills in Parker, Texas, and “sports” consisted of slamming men and animals onto the ground and dominating them—in other words, hunting, football and rodeo. The stories in the magazines, on the other hand, were full of people climbing in the most beautiful places on earth—massive and sublime slabs of granite and sandstone and snow, and the object of the game was not to dominate, but to meld with your adversary. The articles—and especially Long’s essays—suggested that climbing wasn’t about victory. It was about style.

The style went well beyond the climbing. Dean Fidelman’s excellent photos are snapshots of an era defined by non-conformity. But the ache to transcend the norm is most palpable in the writing. As Long puts it in his Short History, “We considered ourselves nothing if we couldn't affect a sea change in the ways climbers felt and thought and behaved. It was all part of proving that we mattered, that we were worth a damn as human beings. In our minds a revolution was not a luxury but a condition for being alive.” 

The revolution that this crew of California kids kicked off was written across the rock in the boldest strokes imaginable. The Stonemasters were clearly the best Yosemite climbers of their era, but it was their lifestyle that rippled across the little pond that was U. S. climbing in the 1970s and soon climbers in Colorado, New England, Washington and Texas began to dress, talk and act like the Stonemasters. Boulders in Midwestern cornfields were marked with chalk lightning bolts. Climbers in Oklahoma tied back their hair with red bandanas and climbed in white painter’s pants.

Much of the credit (or approbation!) for this sweeping Stonemaster influence must go to John Long. His humanistic style, rife with hyperbole and buoyed by humor and heart, represents the very best American climbing writing yet produced. When casting about for a comparison, Mark Twain comes to mind, but the style more closely resembles the classic extremes of Rabelais, the sixteenth century genius who wrote about two randy giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel, as a way to subvert the conventions of his time. John Long’s stories challenged the notion that the sport was something deadly serious, sacrosanct and elitist. Long made being a climber, and more specifically a Stonemaster, into something that was all-inclusive, meaningful and a whole bunch of fun.

That’s the spirit of this book and it remains the zeitgeist of American rock climbing. These pages are both a swansong to a style and a lodestone to follow. In a few decades the Stonemasters will be gone, but they’ve cairned the approach and ticked the route for us, and perhaps as the Indians tell it, those stars in the sky are the campfires of our ancestors way up on the mountain. 

Jeff Jackson

December 2, 2008