Tom Frost Was the Photographer and Engineer Behind Climbing’s Golden Age

Tom Frost performed a behind-the scenes function within the Golden Age of American climbing, documenting most of the period’s most vital climbs and offering the engineering know-how that dropped at life the collective imaginative and prescient of better-known cohorts comparable to his pal and enterprise accomplice Yvon Chouinard, and his mentor Royal Robbins.

The function suited Frost’s modest persona, which generally masked his extraordinary presents for images, engineering and, most of all, big-wall climbing. Frost was launched to the game in 1957 throughout his senior 12 months at Stanford, the place he rowed and studied mechanical engineering. The long-limbed athlete confirmed preternatural prowess on the rock, and after commencement fell in with a gifted group of California climbers together with Chouinard and Invoice “Dolt” Feuerer.

After Robbins watched him simply repeat an advanced boulder drawback throughout a Sierra Membership outing to Mount Pacifico within the Angeles Nationwide Forest, he invited the younger Frost to hitch the second ascent of the Nostril, a route on El Capitan’s south buttress, with two different main climbers, Chuck Pratt and Joe Fitschen, in the summertime of 1960.

The quartet climbed with out repair ropes, a revolutionary method requiring extraordinary talent and dedication. In Camp four the day earlier than they began, Feuerer handed Frost his digicam, a Leica rangefinder with a collapsible 50mm lens, and confirmed him learn how to use it. The ascent took seven days, and Frost shot seven rolls of black and white movie. After a lifetime of climbing images, Frost advised journalist Chuck Graham in 2018 that “these had been the most effective seven rolls of movie I’ve.”

Left: Frost on the second ascent of Dihedral Wall, El Capitan, June 1964. Picture: Robbins; Proper: Royal Robbins on the third pitch of the Salathé Wall, El Capitan, throughout the first ascent by Robbins, Pratt and Frost, in 9½ days of September 1961. Picture: Frost.

Photographers name the 50mm focal size a standard lens, as a result of it reproduces the angle of the human eye. There’s no wide-angle trickery to make the heights appear higher than they’re; no telephoto magic to compress the scene. What you see is what you get, and Frost’s pictures are so hanging due to their full lack of pretense. Frost by no means arrange a shot, mentioned Glen Denny. “The spectacular factor about Frost is that his basic pictures had been seen, and photographed, throughout main first ascents. In these superior conditions he led, cleaned, hauled, day after day and–one way or the other–used his digicam with the acuity of a Cartier-Bresson strolling a few piazza.”

Frost merely climbed, and photographed his mates as they climbed. And so in Frost’s images we see the Golden Age of American mountaineering as Frost, Robbins, Chouinard and different luminaries lived it. That alone can be sufficient to cement his legacy, however Frost additionally took his activates the sharp finish of many groundbreaking climbs, and championed a form of clear climbing that has come to outline the game’s highest beliefs.

In 1961, Frost, Robbins and Pratt made the primary ascent of El Cap’s Salathé Wall utilizing solely 13 bolts, with Frost main the vital 15-foot overhang referred to as the Roof. Later, Frost and Robbins repeated the route with out fastened strains, changing into the primary two-person staff to climb El Cap.

In October 1964, Frost took half in maybe essentially the most notable first ascent of the period, scaling El Capitan’s North America Wall with Robbins, Pratt, and Chouinard. “The wall was steeper, tougher, looser, and the road much less apparent than what anybody had ever tried,” Duane Raleigh wrote of the climb in Rock & Ice.

The route traversed sections of diorite, which due to its darkish form on the southeast face provides the North America Wall its title and in Robbins’ description of the climb “tended to interrupt off in blocks.” The nine-day first ascent, with out fastened ropes and thru blistering warmth, rain, and snow, marked the primary time El Capitan had been climbed in a single push. This, on essentially the most tough massive wall climb ever tried on the time. “For the primary time within the historical past of the game,” wrote climbing historian Chris Jones, “Individuals led the world.”

(L-R) Frost, Robbins, Pratt, and Chouinard on the summit of El Capitan after the First Ascent of the North America Wall in October, 1964. Picture: Frost.

Frost made different notable climbs across the globe. He travelled to Nepal in 1963 to make the primary ascent of Kangtega (22,251 ft) and construct colleges with Edmund Hillary. In 1968 he and two others accomplished the primary ascent of Lotus Flower Tower, a 2,200-foot granite pillar within the Northwest Territories’ Cirque of the Unclimbables. In 1979 he climbed Ama Dablam (22,349 ft) on a filming expedition led by Jeff Lowe for ABC tv. In 1986 he returned to Kangtega with Lowe, forging a brand new path to the summit.

In all his time within the mountains, Frost mentioned he by no means skilled a very scary second. “I come unglued just a little on the Cyclops overhang on the North America Wall,” he advised Climbing journal in 2009, “and when Royal and I went again to do the second ascent of the Salathé, the concept was for every of us to steer the pitches we adopted the primary time. He made me lead the Ear. The considered it was terrifying, however it turned out to be straightforward — only a psychological drawback.”

The roof initially of the Salathé headwall was just a little scary too. “However as I look again on the photographs, I understand I actually beloved it up there,” he mentioned. “It was like going residence each time we climbed El Cap. It was residence.”

Yosemite in these days appeared a magical place, and a magical time. Years later Frost would liken his companions and the clear climbing motion they led to the legendary rebels of Star Wars, “led by younger Royal Rockwalker, and the shaggy, five-foot wookie Chewi-nard.

Left: Tom Frost leads pitch 29, the Salathé Wall, El Capitan. First ascent by Royal Robbins, Chuck Pratt, and Tom Frost, 9½ days, September 1961; Proper: Black Cave bivouac, Tom Frost, Royal Robbins, and Yvon Chouinard on the North America Wall, El Capitan. First ascent by Robbins, Pratt, Chouinard, and Frost, 10 days, October 1964

“We beloved the motion in climbing, the great thing about the creation, the depth of our companionship, and the invention of the unknown,” he continued. “These El Cap climbs we did collectively modified my life. They modified who I used to be.”

In addition they modified climbing, as Frost and others championed the clear climbing aesthetic and designed the tools that made it attainable. Chouinard had been promoting pitons and different climbing gear from the trunk of his automotive since 1957, and Frost later utilized his engineering experience to the enterprise. Collectively they designed the RURP—the Realized Final Actuality Piton—to complete the crux of Yosemite’s Kat Pinnacle in 1959, essentially the most tough support climb in North America on the time. Frost later stop his job at North American Aviation to work with Chouinard, and within the mid-1960s they perfected the Misplaced Arrow piton, which was designed to be eliminated and reused—in contrast to earlier pitons that had been usually left within the rock.

“We went from hand-forging to utilizing die-forged blanks and the die saved carrying out, so every time I’d re-think the piton design and enhance it,” Frost mentioned within the Climbing interview. The duo additionally was liable for such ice-climbing improvements together with inflexible crampons and re-imagined ice axes.

Frost referred to as himself a “piton engineer,” however maybe his biggest contribution to the game was serving to Chouinard make pitons out of date. The pair developed a brand new class of aluminum chockstones within the early 1970s referred to as Hexentrics and Stoppers, and marketed them aggressively as replacements for pitons, which accounted for 70 % of the corporate’s gross sales on the time. Making your personal best-selling product out of date is an unconventional strategy to do enterprise, however by Chouinard’s reckoning it was completely the suitable factor to do. (Frost offered his share of the corporate to Chouinard in 1975. Chouinard Tools went bankrupt in 1989 and was reborn as Black Diamond Tools.)

Frost was a longtime advocate of environmental ethics in climbing, utilizing pure safety at any time when attainable and guided by the crucial to go away no hint. He additionally fought doggedly to protect the locations and traditions that had been so influential in his life. When he realized of the Nationwide Park Service’s plans to construct 4 massive dormitories and resort annexes with room for 192 friends close to Yosemite’s Camp four, the naked bones campground that had develop into the middle of climbing’s cultural universe, Frost organized the resistance.

Chouinard Tools Firm portrait, Ventura , California , 1969. Left to proper: Tom and Dorene Frost, Tony Jessen, Dennis Henneck, Terry King, Yvon Chouinard, Merle, and Davey Agnew.

When he began the struggle in 1997, he hadn’t climbed on Yosemite’s massive partitions in additional than 30 years. After parting methods with Chouinard in 1975 he’d married and moved to Colorado, the place he raised a daughter, Marna, and a son, Ryan, who grew to become an achieved climber in his personal proper. Then, in his early 60s, newly divorced and following a coronary heart assault, Frost fell right into a basic midlife disaster. He purchased a Porsche and a rack of drugs, and drove with Ryan to Zion after which Yosemite, the place father and son climbed the Nostril 37 years after his 1960 ascent.

They stayed at Camp four, which to Frost’s annoyance the Park Service had renamed Sunnyside Campground. When he realized of the Park Service’s plans, he spent $400 on the camp pay telephone, looking for a lawyer to assist him sue the Park Service. Lastly, he reached legal professional Richard Duane and made his pitch:

“Ever accomplished one thing you didn’t know learn how to do earlier than you began?” Frost requested.

When Duane conceded he had, Frost replied, “Then you definitely’re my lawyer.”

Joined by the American Alpine Membership and different teams, Frost and Duane sued the Nationwide Park Service, forcing the company to desert the dormitory plan. Later they succeeded in including Camp four to the Nationwide Register of Historic Locations, making certain it should stay comparatively unchanged to nurture future generations of climbers.

Frost, too, discovered a second life on the partitions of Yosemite. Together with his son Ryan he spent three months in Yosemite, climbing the Nostril, Lurking Concern, the West Face, and the North America Wall.

“It appeared unlikely to me that such adventures would ever be attainable once more,” Frost wrote of his halcyon days with Robbins, Pratt, Chouinard and others. “However in recent times I’ve been in a position to return to El Capitan, and to those self same routes of way back. To my pleasure, it was simply the identical—nice companionship and basic climbing. The one thriller is why they’ve develop into a lot tougher.”

Tom Frost died in 2018 after a brief bout with most cancers.

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