This book was largely Dean Fidelman’s private dream. When he suggested that I drop some of the old stories into the book, I wondered. Many of these tales have been told and retold so many times in anthologies and translations and so forth that I doubted I could face them once again. What’s more, they were written for a particular crowd in a particular point in time and space – like articles from some outrageous newspaper - so I doubted they could have outgrown their original purpose by thirty some years and retained much relevance. But this book is at least superficially about the people and the time from which the stories were drawn, so they fit here or nowhere at all.

Curious thing about these stories. Over the decades I’ve had numerous computers, and generally I would save only those works drafted during the life of a particular machine. If and when it came time to trot out one of the older yarns, for a collection, say, I often had to type it up from a book, another anthology or a magazine – if I couldn’t find someone to type it for me. As I got older I naturally got more complicated and seasoned as a writer and every time I would retype one of these stories I would add a flourish here or buff up a passage there, recasting them into what Borges called “fine writing.” After various rewrites the stories became more polished and less vital till finally they were glass smooth and gutless. For this book I have largely returned to the earliest versions I could find. Many stories are full of silly excesses and form breaks but they seem to work because they were drawn from intense experiences. In the context of these stories, the material really does determine the form.

In a more spontaneous vein are the rash blurbs cut and pasted from a gigantic thread on Supertopo.com that kicked off just before or just after (can’t remember which) I wrote “A Short History of The Stonemasters,” for Rock & Ice Magazine. The interest generated in that article and that thread, and the 1,000+ posts written by many of the active players during the Stonemaster’s halcyon days, convinced Dean and I to push forward with this book. Many of the web posts were literally dashed off and in that candid delivery lives their power and guileless charm.

A third form of story herein are the book and magazine articles written by others than myself, or posts on the Stonemaster thread that were composed into actual narratives or essays. There’s some distilled stuff offered here and a few good yarns as well, focusing on personalities and shenanigans. My only disappointment in this whole project is the lack of material from other writers - and it’s not like we didn’t try and dig that stuff out of the earth. There was surprisingly little written (by others) about the Stonemaster experience, whereas in a sense that was all I ever wrote about. Apparently, most of the others were too busy being Stonemasters to bother writing much down. 

In several key ways, this book is a kind of last hurrah for the traditional age of American rock climbing, which peaked in mid-70s, and was in spirit, if not in fact most enthusiastically embraced, in Yosemite Valley, the natural home for the Stonemasters. The Valley’s magnetic allure was owing to the towering scale of its rock faces. In the mid 70s there was plenty of hard climbing going on outside the Valley by plenty of others besides the Stonemasters, but little of this climbing was set on such a great stage, so even the most outstanding free climb in Boulder or the Gunks or at Tahquitz seemed fundamentally different than clawing up Middle Cathedral or El Cap, Half Dome, the Column and so forth. In Yosemite, most everything felt like a grand slam.

There were always outsized characters at the core of the Stonemasters, such as John Yablonski, Tobin Sorenson, John Bachar, and many others, as well as people who were less demonstrative but who had a huge kind of presence and equally large influence, guys like Richard Harrison who so perfectly embodied the cowboy code adopted by most all Stonemasters: No complaining and no explaining. You just got out there and did it because nothing else mattered and no one cared about anything else. And then there was the group personality or the group conscience, as it were, and this had a remarkable effect on all involved, even those at the fringes of the Yosemite, and American climbing, scene. This orientation thrived on the unknown and going after the most difficult challenges out there. It respected the past because the first challenges tackled were always those that were most highly esteemed within the extant climbing community. That is, when a Stonemaster went to a new crag the first thing to do was repeat the classics and the test pieces. But a Stonemaster never stopped there and was always sniffing around for new worlds. So this shared, communal psych was a real thing that got people up some of the greatest routes out there, and in fact drew people into new experiences of most every kind.

Lastly, there was a great irony at the core of the Stonemasters. Most were out to have as much fun as humanly possible. Fact is, since the main decree was to go after the hardest things, much struggle and suffering followed, so it wasn’t so much an issue of fun as satisfaction. The unstated goal was to maintain serenity in tough situations, and to never abandon your sense of humor. Whoever let things get heavy had opted out of the movement by becoming bound by self, and Stonemasters were never bound by self- they were bound by curiosity, the curiosity that killed the cat.

Perhaps the entire movement is summed up by what Richard Harrison recently did with the bulk of his climbing photos (and Harrison has climbed about everything over a 35 year career), which was to throw them all away. The Stonemasters were all about what you were doing right now, and what lay on the horizon, pulling at you. Photos? Who needs them when there are 10,000 new worlds out there to embrace. In this sense, I hope that with this book I can finally give these stories away forever, chalk up and edge out past the past.

The Pictures

Dean spent several years (yes, years) traveling the country and rifling through folk’s private stock of largely neglected slides to amass the pictures in this book. This was a massive effort, Dean becoming a kind of Stonemaster anthropologist, tirelessly digging through mountains of disorganized slides. Through the art of selecting, cleaning up and arranging, he concocted a comprehensive visual record that otherwise would exist only in disparate fragments, rarely if ever seen. There are some skilled shooters featured in these pages, such as Brian Rennie, and the late Shawn Curtis, who had a great and quirky eye. And, of course, Dean’s own work, which is all verite, unposed, and so unique that photo editors have always struggled to smuggle his work into traditional magazine or catalogue formats. Much of Dean’s best material has no place but in a book like this one, which is full of misfits, rascals and rogues.

Climbing books are usually decked out with the same kind of slick action shots, whereas many of the pictures in this book are personality and lifestyle studies that evoke a mood and an atmosphere rather than just sweaty palms. Many of these pictures are not even good shots, technically speaking. But the Stonemaster seems to jump to life after you settle for a while with this book, and it’s surely the pictures that deliver on that count.