Rock Climbing

Jeffersonville, Vt. — Just at the edge of sight, a man dangled from a rope, high in the air. For days, storms had dimmed the sky, but the angle of the cliff overhung so much that the drops of water fell to the ground without touching him. It was as if, he later wrote, he climbed under the protection of a “stupendous umbrella.”

It was May 1963. Past a ledge, Royal Robbins clipped slings to lopsided bolts that the previous climbers had drilled only partway into the hard granite. He placed his weight on them and hoped they would hold. If they didn’t, he might fall a long distance until the rope caught him, and he feared that he might break a limb — or worse. The idea of a rescue attempt, even if possible, seemed humiliating. Desperate to avoid publicity, he had started in secret up the West Face of Leaning Tower, a 700-foot wall in Yosemite Valley. Only his future wife, Liz Burkner, was aware of his intent.

Far below, rain-beaten tourists marveled at torrents of spring meltwater that poured 620 feet down Bridalveil Fall. As far as Robbins knew, none of them noticed the speck of his figure suspended from the nearby spire, flickering in and out of the mist. If he reached the top, he would become the first person to climb a big wall in Yosemite alone. Soon, anyway, he had no choice: The rock beneath him was too steep for retreat. All he could do was focus on the steady labor of ascent while the sheets of rain turned into thick flakes of snow.

It can be hard to imagine this depth of inner solitude in today’s extreme-sports world, when athletes post regular updates from once-remote peaks and media companies offer up life-or-death struggles as spectacles for mass consumption. As with many of his ascents, Robbins planned his solo of Leaning Tower to be a bold statement about his belief in forming intimate connections with high, wild places. He needed isolation to refine and accomplish this vision. When he stood on the summit, after three and a half days of climbing, he proved the route could be accomplished with fewer technological aids than its original ascensionists had used — including his famous rival, Warren Harding.

Robbins, who died this month at 82, spent a lifetime developing an austere, demanding “concept of climbing as art,” as he termed it in his 1973 manual, “Advanced Rockcraft.” In “Royal Robbins: Spirit of the Age,” his close friend and biographer Pat Ament portrayed Robbins’s ethos as a “transaction between place and spirit” that encompassed the entirety of his surroundings: the passage of sun and shadow, the fragrance of evergreens and thunder of waterfalls, and all that remained untrammeled. Within this holistic view, the hammering of an extra piton — a peg of metal driven into cracks to aid in ascent or to help safeguard the climber in case of a fall — could scar more than the rock itself. “Like a single word in a poem,” Robbins explained, “it can affect the entire composition.”

Some of Robbins’s peers chafed at such perfectionism, which appeared, at times, too intense for anyone (Robbins included) to match. Today the underlying spirit seems more prescient than it did back then. In his 1971 book “Basic Rockcraft,” Robbins had defended the importance of minimizing climbers’ impacts, promoting the use of equipment that doesn’t alter the rock, like nuts and hexes that can be inserted into cracks and then removed. “There are so many of us,” he worried, “and there will be more.” Indeed, outdoor recreation has grown enormously, resulting in an even greater need for thoughtfulness about its ecological footprint. But this expansion also opens up possibilities of more and varied voices for conservation.

The stories of adventurers, Robbins believed, should be about more than just entertainment or escapism; the forms of their narratives become natural metaphors for how humans interact with the wild. Much of modern Western society remains enthralled by tales of human dominion over nature and dreams of endless technological expansion. In contrast, Robbins embraced a philosophy of limits and absences: the holes that climbers didn’t drill into the stone; the traces they didn’t leave behind; the quiet spaces of the mind they explored in airy solitude. If an excess piton could symbolize a misplaced word in a poem, the silences between the lines represent his proudest work, gaps that reflect an inexpressible mystery he and Ament sensed within the world.

It is in this way that Robbins’s ideas seem particularly meaningful now. To see the worth of nature beyond its potential for exploitation and consumption, we might recall the transformative values of wonder and awe — qualities that seem, more than ever, in need of defense at a time when both the national funding of the arts and the protection of wild lands appear endangered. In a 2011 essay in the literary magazine Tin House, the novelist Marilynne Robinson lamented, “It has seemed to me for some time that beauty, as a conscious element of experience, as a thing to be valued and explored, has gone into abeyance among us.” She continued, “We are part of a mystery, a splendid mystery within which we must attempt to orient ourselves if we are to have a sense of our own nature.”

In reading Ament’s and Robbins’s books today, we are reminded of how much we stand to lose with each acre of hill, desert and forest developed, with each realm of the imagination closed off: fragments of that delicate interweaving of inward and outward worlds that make us deeply, spiritually alive. For Robbins, cliffs and mountains provided a “magic window” through which he glimpsed some more vital, utopian form of being — at once as elusive as flashes of light on distant panes of granite, and as tangible as grains of stone beneath his hands. It is a vision that still appears luminous, ideal and just barely, possibly, attainable.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. 

Katie Ives is the editor in chief of Alpinist.