May John rest in Peace. Photo of the Tuolumne Meadows Store bulletin board.
In the early 1980s, John Bachar, found himself near the top of a rock climb in the Yosemite
valley in California called the Moratorium. Four hundred feet off the
ground and hanging from his fingertips, he faced an imminent death. He
had deliberately chosen to climb with no rope, a technique called
"soloing", on a route he had never experienced before. His decision was
backfiring.
Bachar survived that time. Drawing on his high level
of fitness, he pushed through his moment of crisis and reached safety,
adding to his reputation as one of the boldest rock climbers in
history. But he took little pride in it.
Recalling the incident
recently, he said: "I felt hollow. I'd gotten away with something. I
hadn't conquered anything. The mountain had just let me off."
For
Bachar, soloing a climb in this way was the ultimate expression of his
craft. Oscillating between overbearing egotism and humility, he made
soloing seem both gloriously reckless and shrewdly calculating. His was
not an easy trick to imitate and he never recommended anyone should try.
Born
and raised in Los Angeles, the son of a maths professor, Bachar
excelled in his youth as a pole-vaulter at the Santa Monica Track Club,
coached by Joe Douglas, who later trained the Olympic medallist Carl
Lewis. He discovered rock climbing at Stoney Point, an LA hangout for
renowned 1950s climbers such as Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor
clothing company Patagonia. By the early 1970s, Bachar and his friends
were calling themselves the Stonemasters.
His athletics
background had switched him on to methodical, properly researched
training methods. He wondered what might happen if a rock climber
trained like that, and decided to find out. Together with a fellow
Californian, John Long, Bachar started exploring further afield,
particularly on the granite crags of Joshua Tree. It was here that Long
introduced him to soloing, which Bachar quickly saw as the purist form
of his new craft.
Determined, as he put it, to be the best rock
climber in the world, Bachar dropped out of University College Los
Angeles, where he was a maths major, and headed for Camp IV in the
Yosemite valley, a kind of dirtbag Camelot for the knights of rock
climbing.
Here, he set up a climbing gym which he named
Gunsmoke, arranged among the campsite trees, including a hanging rope
ladder which he would climb using only his arms. The apparatus is still
known as a Bachar ladder. He took up the saxophone, buying his first
instrument after a previous owner threatened to turn it into a bong,
and would serenade climbers high on the big granite walls above Camp IV.
Devouring
books such as Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery, Bachar worked
on his flexibility until he could do the splits, and studied martial
arts and Chinese philosophy to find the perfect state of mind in which
to push the boundaries of what was possible. Despite the Californian
froth, top climbers from around the world eagerly absorbed his approach
and ideas.
In 1981, he was the first to ascend the bold
Bachar-Yerian route on nearby Tuolumne Meadows, which was subsequently
named after him and his colleague Dave Yerian. In 1986, Bachar and
Peter Croft climbed the famous El Capitan and Half Dome cliffs in 14
hours, some 5,000ft of climbing.
Bachar was also famous for his
ability at bouldering, a kind of haiku version of climbing where moves
of intense difficulty, called problems, are done on short stretches of
rock. The presiding American genius of this sub-genre was John Gill,
and Bachar made a pilgrimage with Long to Pueblo, Colorado, to visit
the master and repeat the hardest problems Gill had completed.
But
it was for making solos of hard routes hundreds of feet long that
Bachar secured his reputation as one of the best in the world. Apart
from Moratorium, he made solo ascents of other Yosemite routes such as
Butterballs and Nabisco Wall. These routes were at the limit of what
the very best climbers were doing - but with a rope to catch them if
they failed. Bachar's unroped ascents were almost shocking.
In
the mid-1980s, rock climbing went through one of its periodic
revolutions. Bachar found he was suddenly out of step with the new
French tactics of drilling bolts into the rockface. He disapproved, his
previous intensity turning to rage at what he saw as the dilution of
the sport's ethos, sometimes defending his position with his fists.
After some spectacular solo climbs in the early 1990s, he drifted away
from the sport he loved, taking up snowboarding and even golf.
Latterly,
however, he rediscovered his passion, and slowly recovered his physical
shape too. He had spent years designing climbing shoes for a Spanish
manufacturer and, in 2003, set up in partnership with Steve Karafa. On
the way back from a trade fair in 2006, their car crashed and Karafa
was killed. Bachar broke four vertebrae. Lacking medical insurance, he
was touched when the climbing community raised money for his treatment.
Despite
his fused back, he was eventually able to climb well again and
continued to solo. Several of his friends who were equally devoted to
solo climbing had been killed doing it, and he was acutely aware of the
risks.
No one witnessed the fall that killed him at Dike Wall,
near his home in Mammoth Lakes, but help arrived very quickly. He is
survived by his son Tyrus by a previous relationship.
• John Bachar, rock climber, born 1957; died 5 July 2009
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