Forward
by John Long -from Lynn's book, "Climbing Free-My Life in the Vertical World"

The first time I saw Lynn Hill was at Trash Can Rock, in Joshua Tree National Monument. She wore a sassy little Grand Prix drivers hat, gym shorts, a bikini top and looked about twelve- years-old. Her older brother, Bob, and her brother-in-law, Chuck, were slip-sliding all over a little slab climb, and eventually gave up. They reluctantly let Lynn tie into the rope and she danced up the slab in about fifteen seconds. On top, she looked like she'd just been coronated Queen of some exotic land. The boys seemed to disapprove of her flagrant delight.

"Girl's got a future," I remember thinking.

Maybe four years later, also out at Joshua Tree, John Bachar (at the time one of the world's greatest free climbers) and I were trying to scratch up the overhanging side of a ten foot boulder. Rumor had it that some Frenchman had climbed it the previous week, but we didn't believe any such thing since neither of us could even get started. Then who should walk around the corner but Lynn Hill. She wasn't a girl anymore. She smiled, then proceeded to climb straight up that boulder, on her first try. We couldn't have been more amazed had a giraffe pranced by on its front legs. Lynn down climbed the back side of the boulder and joined us on the front. "That hurt my fingers," she said, not a trace of cunning in her voice. I clasped the first razor-blade holds and still couldn't pull my feet off the ground. Neither could John. I never did climb the damn thing, though not for lack of trying.

Perhaps a year after that, Lynn, Richard Harrison and I were attempting a new climb at the Red Rocks, an adventurous sandstone area twenty miles outside Las Vegas, Nevada. Lynn was working up the first pitch, ratcheting up a bottomless chimney that pinched off after about sixty feet, forcing her out onto the steep face to the right. After barely a body length on the face, a hold broke and she was plummeting though the air­and kept plummeting for about fifty feet before a nut finally arrested her fall, leaving her dangling upside down, in mid-air, about ten feet off the deck.

"Jesus!" Richard yelled. "You okay?" I was too stunned to even talk. Bar none, that was the most spectacular, airball "whipper" we'd ever seen. And a mighty close-shave at that. Another ten feet and she'd have left the cliffside in a black bag. "I'm fine," she said, slightly annoyed. Then straightaway she squeezed back up the chimney, climbed out onto the face and without the slightest hesitation, flawlessly cranked up to a ledge about thirty feet above.

Later that same year I was working nights at a sports club with an elaborate weigh-training facility on the second floor. Several nights a week Lynn would visit me at the club and we'd work out together. I don't remember how it all happened, but the floor supervisor­an accomplished power lifter who looked like a sawed off Hercules­noticed the prodigious weight Lynn was tossing around and, out of curiosity, had her experiment with the bench press.

She'd never "benched" before and didn't know how to hold the bar. After about fifteen seconds instruction, Hercules was astonished when Lynn lifted a weight that, back then, was within twenty-five pounds of the female world's record for her weight class. They devised a regimented training schedule, which Lynn followed to the letter, and inside of three months she could routinely break the existing record. It really was something to see, this eighteen-year old, 100-pound female popping one-hundred and seventy pounds off her chest. Everyone used to stop and watch when Lynn went to work. It wouldn't be the last time.

I mention these anecdotes because, in the following years, when Lynn became one of the biggest names in all adventure sports, they illustrate four traits that remained hallmarks of her character: enjoyment, excellence without guile, tenacity in fearful situations, and a work ethic second to none. These certainly factored into the success of the five-foot- one and three-quarters, 100-pound dynamo (and don't believe her if she claims to be bigger) who would soon come to dominate "the greatest sport in the world." Insiders well know how good she was­and still is. But even to genuine experts in more traditional, media-driven sports, Lynn Hill remains a curiosity who, to my knowledge, has never been contrasted with other great female athletes of her era.

By and large, Lynn Hill was as good as the very best male climbers which, considering her size, is miraculous. Many climbs favor masculine dimensions, such as wide fist cracks and steep faces obliging a long reach. Lynn came up to about the middle of my chest, and I swear she could slot her fist inside a walnut shell. Yet even on those wide cracks and reachy face climbs she could hold her own. God knows how. On climbs which favored Lynn's stature, especially small hold routes or tricky balance problems, Lynn was basically untouchable.

With virtually all other sports, few would argue that the gulf between male and female performance is significant. This fact makes Lynn unique in that she could equal and often outperform us fellas in a sport which, at the toplevels, also requires large rations of what traditionally are regarded asmale virtues: raw courage, brute strength, endurance and tenacity, a daring, go-for-it style, plus a bulletproof mind to negotiate the minefields risky situations. To these traits she added a female gymnasts grace and flexibility, along with her own native panache. Anyone who saw her climb understood these last endowments tipped the scales in her favor.

Almost from the first days when "Little Lynne" tied into a rope, the common refrain was, "Who the hell is that girl?!" The macho ones amongst us, and I marched point for that group, were left to watch and weep as Lynn breezed over what often had cost us several layers of skin and a few of our nine lives.

We normally would have growled like wolves at having our male luster dimmed by a woman. I would have, anyway. But Lynn hadn't a drop of guile, and took no measure to mock our struggles with male gender issues, with all their silly power grabs and illusions of control. You couldn't argue with Lynn on those counts, or any count because she was too good and too sweet.

So after the initial trauma of it all, the bone-deep chauvinism most of us had unconsciously embraced eventually melted away like fat off a holiday ham. There was a moment of nakedness in all of that, but I count myself lucky to have stumbled through this process at a young age, sheparded through it by an angel like Lynn. Not that she left us with any choice. But we got over it­fast, and sometimes for sketchy reasons. Guys no longer begged her onto their rope because she was pleasing to the eye, which is reason enough when you're twenty or fifty­rather because when you tied in with Lynn, you could get up any damn climb. What the hell? Why not cash in while the going's good, meaning so long as you could inveigle Lynn onto the same cord. We all did. Repeatedly.

Unlike other sports, a climber's deeds are literally fixed in stone. Barring features (such as hand and footholds) that occasionally break off, a climbing route forever remains the same climbing route, with a difficulty rating arrived at through consensus. Comparing past and present routes, and performances on these routes, is fairly straightforward. The routes Lynn did, many for the first time, remain at the top of anyone's "A" list.

Her greatest triumphs are ghastly hard "free" climbs, a term and deed the Lay public often mistakes for "free soloing," which is climbing without a rope.

Basically, free climbing is anything using your own body­hands, feet, gams, et al--for upward progress. Free "routes" are specific paths up given cliffs, and usually follow prominent features such as cracks, aretes, lines of holds or pockets, and so forth. Because severe routes are hit and miss even for world-class climbers, falls are frequent and expected. A rope and attending gear are used to safeguard the fall. When the tackle is used for upward progress, or to hang on to rest after a fall (standard practice), the climber is no longer free climbing, rather "aid" climbing­that is, using the gear as an "aid" to fight gravity. On titanic rock walls, like the blank, overhanging palisades of El Capitan, in Yosemite Valley, cracks and features tend to run out, and aid climbing is often the only way up. Here, experienced teams might take a week to scale the 3,000 foot cliffside, slowly, precariously building a ladder of pitons and other gear up the sheer granite ramparts.

These two forms­free and aid climbing­are distinctive arts; to Lynn's credit, she excelled at both. But it was her free climbing, often performed on the grandest possible scale, where Lynn Hill made history.

Her first free ascent of the Nose route on El Capitan, the most sought after pure rock climb in the world, remains a highwater mark in a sport where the technical tide rises by the week. It is difficult for a non-climber to grasp the significance of this effort. Picture a female sprinter running the 100 meters in 9.6 seconds. If you can imagine that, perhaps you can appreciate what I'm saying here much as we came to appreciate Lynn's prowess when we saw at work. I am not alone in thinking that throughout the 80s and 90s, Lynn Hill was quite possibly the best female athlete in the world. During the same years, Jackie Joyner Kersey was the most famous and celebrated female athlete on earth. Yet if she'd tried to qualify for the men's Olympic decathlon team she wouldn't have made the team. If climbing was the decathlon, Lynn would not only have made the team, she probably would have medaled.

Despite Lynn's victories on classic, high profile climbs like El Capitan, her overall ability was equally impressive. Because she came out of the Yosemite climber's mold, which put emphasis on all-around mastery, Lynn came to shine on all mediums. In this age of the super-specialist, all-around, do-anything, anywhere climbing is a long-forgotten skill born of the orientation that a genuine Yosemite climber was the best the planet had to offer. The task was to prove it as often as possible. One did not duck a certain kind of climb because it involved your weakest technique. Instead, you worked diligently till virtuosity finally came, sometimes after years of toil; then all frontiers were open. Face climbs, thin cracks, chimneys, big walls, alpine routes, bouldering­you name it, Lynn did it and most likely did it like magic. And there's no question she had magic. Nothing else can explain her faculty.

Another factor is that twenty years ago, when Lynn busted out in a big way, rock climbing was an obscure sport relative to today's scene, where many big cities feature indoor climbing gyms and the advertising world has latched onto ascent as a vehicle to pander everything from soda pop to trucks to kitchen sinks. Consequently, even the great Lynn Hill could not always find another ace to partner up with. No problem there. Anyone available was usually good enough. A friend was always her preferred ropemate, even over someone with ten times the talent.

I remember a time in the late 70s, when Lynn and I were an item. I was heading off for some new climb on Middle Cathedral and Lynn was heading off for the Salathé Wall on El Capitan, then widely publicized as "the world's greatest rock climb." We had a mutual friend­a solid recreational climber but by no means a monster talent­who worked graveyard at the Yosemite garage. When his shift was over around 6:00 AM, he striped off his overalls, drove to camp, hooked up with Lynn and the two jumped straight onto the Salathé.

And it was no more his pleasure than it was Lynns to climb the "Captain" together.

We all know that "great" men or women are often lousy people, that the Napoleons of the world often advance over the backs of others. We also know how high achievements are often traceable to the love of acclaim. Lynn was the exception to both rules. She would climb anything with most anyone, putting so little emphasis on her stature that it seemed as unreal as watching her walk on water, figuratively speaking. The end result is that many climbers of our era came to call Lynn a close friend, and have memories of epics together that their grand kids will someday sicken to hear about if gramps mentions it one more time. And having written all this, I realize I haven't said a word about Lynn's competitive career. She was world champion for many years. What else?

Can I take the measure of Lynn's humility and humanity? I won't even try. I trust both will shine through in this engaging book. But in closing, I want to touch on the reasons why I believe Lynn's conquests reach beyond a person scratching up harrowing rock walls from Montana to Madagascar. Mastery is admirable in any field. But when this mastery plays out by slaying gender stereotypes, embracing primal terrors (always a factor in climbing), having the vision and chops to do long-established things in amazing new ways, fighting through injuries, slim wages, and one's own doubts and insecurities, and to grow more modest in the process, a mere rock climb becomes a victory for the human spirit. Through choice or temperament, most of us are followers. Greatness, on the other hand, is almost always a path leading into the unknown and unproven. Lynn walked that path like a giant, which puts our daily fears into a context that inspires us to take the one extra step that might make a difference to ourselves and others. Ultimately, Lynn Hill not only broke the trail in ways too numerous to mention, she did so in a manner that hallows a whole people. She makes us proud, even relieved, that there are a precious few like her walking this earth.

I have been all over the world and have had the fortune of doing things with many special people, some famous, some anonymous. But the biggest little hero I've every know is Lynn Hill. The rest of us are just holding her rope.

John Long 7-13-01

Venice, California