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Cite As
Description of the Collection
Biographical / Historical
Language of Material:
English
Contributing Institution:
Department of Special Collections and University Archives
Title: Stanford Alpine Club oral history interviews
creator:
Rawlings, John
Identifier/Call Number: SC1018
Physical Description:
0.5 Linear Feet
(28 audiocassettes and 14 transcripts)
Date (inclusive): 1997-2001
Abstract: The collection contains transcripts of
interviews done by John Rawlings with David Boore and Judy (Lovelace) Boore, Herbert C.
DeStaebler, Nicholas B. Clinch, Henry Kendall, Alfred W. Baxter, Bea Vogel, Betsy (Swann)
Crowder, Gilbert Roberts, Irene Beardsley, Mary (Sherril) Baxter, Rowland Tabor, Russell Van
Dyke, Theodore (Jack) Weicker III, and Ulf Ramm-Ericson. Also included are source tapes from
the interviews. The following taped interviews have been transcribed: R. W. Tabor, Gilbert
J. Roberts, Betsy Crowder, Alfred Baxter, Herbert C. DeStaebler, David Boore, Mary Sherrill
Baxter, Russell Van Dyke, Irene Beardsley Ortenburger, and Nicholas Clinch. The following
taped interviews have not been transcribed: Gloria McConnel, Scott Davis, Mike Roberts,
Nancy Bickford Miller, Steven D'Hondt, Ned MacKay, Roger Gocking, Jim Moore, and Meredith
Ellis Little.
Information about Access
This collection is open for research.
Ownership & Copyright
All requests to reproduce, publish, quote from, or otherwise use collection materials must
be submitted in writing to the Head of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford
University Libraries, Stanford, California 94304-6064. Consent is given on behalf of Special
Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply
permission from the copyright owner. Such permission must be obtained from the copyright
owner, heir(s) or assigns. See:
http://library.stanford.edu/depts/spc/pubserv/permissions.html.
Restrictions also apply to digital representations of the original materials. Use of
digital files is restricted to research and educational purposes.
Cite As
Stanford Alpine Club Oral History Interviews (SC1018). Department of Special Collections
and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif.
Description of the Collection
The collection contains transcripts of interviews done by John Rawlings with David Boore
and Judy (Lovelace) Boore, Herbert C. DeStaebler, Nicholas B. Clinch, Henry Kendall, Alfred
W. Baxter, Bea Vogel, Betsy (Swann) Crowder, Gilbert Roberts, Irene Beardsley, Mary
(Sherril) Baxter, Rowland Tabor, Russell Van Dyke, Theodore (Jack) Weicker III, and Ulf
Ramm-Ericson. Also included are source tapes from the interviews.
The following taped interviews have been transcribed: R. W. Tabor, Gilbert J. Roberts,
Betsy Crowder, Alfred Baxter, Herbert C. DeStaebler, David Boore, Mary Sherrill Baxter,
Russell Van Dyke, Irene Beardsley Ortenburger, and Nicholas Clinch. The following taped
interviews have not been transcribed: Gloria McConnel, Scott Davis, Mike Roberts, Nancy
Bickford Miller, Steven D'Hondt, Ned MacKay, Roger Gocking, Jim Moore, and Meredith Ellis
Little.
Biographical / Historical
The Stanford Alpine Club was one of America's prominent college climbing clubs. Its
identity was forged in the crucible of Yosemite Valley's smooth, steep granite. Members made
important contributions to the development of modern Yosemite rockclimbing technique and
helped carry the lessons learned to the world's great ranges. Coeducational membership was
another factor distinguishing the SAC from the longer-established and better-known eastern
clubs, and a tradition of "manless climbing" dated from the club's 1946 inaugural year.
Through the summer of 1946, Larry Taylor worked on plans to form a climbing club at
Stanford when he returned for graduate work in civil engineering. Then in August he chanced
upon Al Baxter buying hobnails in the campus shoe shop, giving himself away as a mountain
climber. "Though he had never done any roped climbing," wrote Taylor, "Al was at once
enthusiastic about my plan; indeed it was his enthusiasm which had a great deal to do with
the actual carrying out of the idea." The third founding member, Fritz Lippmann, the only
experienced climber of the group, Taylor had met during Sierra Club Rock Climbing Section
outings.
The personal connections and corporate traditions that bound one class to another became
the SAC's strength. One such connection was between founder Fritz Lippmann and Dave Harrah,
and then between Harrah and members who would become club leaders into the 1950s, including
Jon Lindbergh and Nick Clinch. Lindbergh, Clinch, Dwight Crowder, Sherman Lehman, and
Rowland Tabor were examples of the club's ability to attract, train, and retain a nucleus of
leaders that would guide it through the fifties in the form established by the founders,
strengthened by Harrah, and carried on by a cadre of new club presidents with a shared
vision and commitment to the club.
Women climbers had distinguished themselves beginning in the club's first year when Mary
Sherrill and Freddy Hubbard became the third and fourth women to climb to the top of Higher
Cathedral Spire in Yosemite Valley. Later Hubbard made the first ascent by a woman of the
Washington Column Direct Route. The club's tradition of "manless" climbing dated from 1947.
In 1952 Jane Noble, Mary Kay Pottinger, Gail Fleming, and Bea Vogel made ascents of Mt.
Moran, the North Ridge of Middle Teton, and the Southwest Ridge of Symmetry Spire. In 1965
Irene Beardsley and Sue Swedlund made the first all-woman climb of the awesome North Face of
the Grand Teton, the most famous north face in the United States. Climbing historian Chris
Jones called that adventure "probably the most arduous all-woman ascent then made in North
America," and Beardsley "one of America's best women climbers."
Freddy Hubbard and her Roble Hall companions were not merely beneficiaries of the new
club's coed-friendly attitude. Experienced mountaineers all, they were important
contributors to the SAC's success.
Throughout the 1957/58 school year Mike Roberts, Lennie Lamb, Henry Kendall, Dave Sowles,
and Gil Roberts were working on their contributions to a new edition of the Stanford Alpine
Club Journal. Gil Roberts, back from his summer first ascent of Mt. Logan's East Ridge, was
also planning to join Nick Clinch's 1958 American Karakoram Expedition to Gasherbrum I.
In addition to the challenge of the great Himalayan peaks, a second test of American
mountaineering beckoned. The most severe routes of the Alps, including the Walker Spur of
the Grandes Jorasses and the Eigerwand, awaited American ascents, as did major lines and
faces yet unclimbed. Club members were learning skills and forging relationships that would
help them accomplish these mountaineering goals. John Harlin and Gary Hemming would lead the
way in a breakthrough for Americans climbing in the European Alps. Kendall joined Hemming on
the Walker Spur of the Grandes Jorasses, the first American ascent of that classic climb, "a
route to dream of, perhaps the finest in existence." Frost joined them on some of their
greatest first ascents: the South Face of the Fou and the Hidden Pillar of Fréney. These
adventures on great mountains had their beginnings in small places, on Sunday outings to
Miraloma Rock and Hunter's Hill, with the Stanford Alpine Club.
The SAC continued throughout the sixties in a form that would have been recognizable and
familiar to all earlier members, albeit the overall membership was smaller than in many
earlier periods, no more than 15-20 members. The change in Yosemite sign-out rules in the
mid-sixties, along with the growing number of climbers, development of commercial climbing
schools, production of guidebooks, and availability and relative affordability of climbing
equipment contributed to a situation where many Stanford climbers were pursuing their goals
independently.
Leigh Ortenburger's connection with the Stanford Alpine Club extended over some thirty
years. Bob Brooke described him as the holder of a long-time record for non-dues-paying
participation in Stanford activities. He had not been a Stanford undergraduate, nor had he
learned to climb in the club. He was already a Teton guide when he first climbed with
Clinch, John Mowat, and Dick Irvin in the Tetons in 1951. Ortenburger's SAC connection
developed when he came out to Berkeley for graduate school in the fall of that year,
climbing with the same trio in Yosemite Valley. He shared apartments with Al Baxter and
later Dick Irvin, attending practice climbs, parties, and dating Stanford coed climbers. He
married Irene Beardsley in 1956. Gil Roberts told of his influence in the early fifties:
He was a couple of years older and he was very experienced. He'd been to Peru and he'd done
new routes in the Tetons. So he certainly was one of the guys that was setting the pace on
club trips. . . . Leigh was an excellent climber and everybody respected him.
In the sixties Ortenburger earned a master's degree from Stanford and did course work for a
Ph.D. Throughout the sixties and seventies he sometimes attended club meetings and climbed
with Stanford climbers. Probably no other person had such a long-term connection with the
club. Leigh Ortenburger Photographer.
In the summer of 1952, while still in high school, Irene Beardsley traveled with her
parents by car west to Stanford from her Washington, D.C. home. Viewing the eastern
escarpment of Wyoming's Teton mountains, jutting six thousand feet above Jackson Hole, she
knew that people climbed those imposing rock and snow summits. She was intrigued. She was
also occupied just then by other dreams. She wanted to study physics:
My mother wanted me to go to Mills, but I wanted to go to Stanford. It was just something I
decided to do because of their reputation in physics. And I got interested in the SAC
because when I was in my freshman year I looked around for various social activities and
didn't find any that fit. I remember an embarrassing interview when I tried out for some
kind of political sort of thing; I wasn't the right type, and they told me so. I next saw an
advertisement in the Daily for the Alpine Club, and I went to a practice climb at Miraloma
Park in San Francisco. I wasn't very good.
While becoming the fourth woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford in 1965, she made
hundreds of ascents beginning in the 1950s, including notable firsts as the 1965 first
all-woman climb of the North Face of the Grand Teton, the most famous north face in the
United States, and the 1978 first American ascent of Annapurna (26,545 ft).
The SAC continued throughout the sixties in a form that would have been recognizable and
familiar to all earlier members, albeit the overall membership was smaller than in many
earlier periods, no more than 15-20 members. The change in Yosemite sign-out rules in the
mid-sixties, along with the growing number of climbers, development of commercial climbing
schools, production of guidebooks, and availability and relative affordability of climbing
equipment contributed to a situation where many Stanford climbers were pursuing their goals
independently.
Sixties outings sounded pretty much like old times: Belay practice was held in the San
Francisquito creek bed near the shopping center and Children's Hospital--as it had been
since 1950--at the beginning of fall quarter and sometimes spring quarter as well. It was
still required of members who aspired to climb in Yosemite. The raising through a pulley and
dropping of a hundred-pound block of concrete, testing the technique of well-anchored and
padded belayers, presented an entertaining spectacle. "Belay practice was always a jolly
event which attracted a fairly large crowd of both participants and spectators," Russ Van
Dyke, president in 1969/70 and 1970/71, recalled. The principal social events were beach
trips and club parties, still called Bergsteiger balls through the mid-sixties. Folk dancing
and sing-alongs were regular activities at the latter. One-third of the active members were
women. Meetings, held several times a quarter, sometimes included slide shows by members or
guests and were the forum at which club outings were planned, including Yosemite trips,
which were made at least four times during the fall and spring quarters.
In 1969 Chuck Kroger, SAC president 1968/69, became the first person to climb four routes
on El Capitan in a single season, including the third ascent of the menacing North America
Wall, widely considered the most difficult rock climb in the world. Scott Davis, '70, joined
Kroger on three of those climbs: the NA, West Buttress, and Dihedral Wall. Kroger and Davis,
two of the finest big-wall climbers in the country, capped their El Cap tour de force with
the first ascent of the Heart Route in April 1970.
Davis was a foreshadowing of the club's future. "I sort of thought I was a member," he
concluded some thirty years later, though on another occasion he conceded that he may not
have been an official member. "The 1960s were pretty informal," he added. Davis participated
in club activities and regularly climbed with club members, especially with Kroger, who
counted Davis among the SAC ranks. Another example of the amorphousness of the situation in
the late sixties and the seventies was Walt Vennum, a geology graduate student from 1966 to
1971. During his Stanford years he made first ascents in Alaska and the Sierra Nevada, and
listed himself in published climbing notes as "unaffiliated." "I don't think I was
officially a member of the SAC," Vennum said. "I climbed with a lot of people who were in
the club. It was a pretty fluid situation."
Jim Collins, sporting his distinctive leather cap, shorts, tube socks, and EB rock shoes,
was a familiar campus sight in the late 1970s, cruising the back wall of Building 260 or the
Art Gallery. Collins, an applied math major, never had so much to do that he wouldn't take
time out of his regimen to encourage and advise another wall climber. "The University is the
ideal place for practicing rockclimbing by way of buildering--the art of climbing walls,"
Collins told a Stanford Daily interviewer in 1979. "The sandstone blocks are ideal for
climbing, though extremely difficult. In fact, the most difficult rockclimbing challenge in
the world is in the Quad."
Buildering flourished on campus from the club's beginning in 1946: roofs were scaled and
rappelled from, walls were traversed, and Freddy Hubbard rappelled out of her Roble Hall
second-floor dorm window in order to make a pre-morning-curfew start for the crags. What
distinguished the Stanford's post-War buildering history from earlier times was the
application of climbing technique and technical rope work to the local problems.
All the causes and effects of forces shaping club history and society at large in the
sixties intensified in the seventies. Roger Gocking, Darien Hopkins, Jim Collins, Rob
Bracken, Greg Larson and other club officers each attempted to make the club relevant, and
different solutions were tried. Despite their efforts club activities lapsed during 1975/76
and a few years later in 1980/81. Resurrected once again, it disappeared after the 1982/83
school year. Gocking described the Stanford climbing scene in the early seventies:
The club had played several roles. One was it provided a basic introduction to
rockclimbing, and it helped to provide the logistics for climbing. People would pool their
cars, equipment, and all those sorts of things. And then too, it was something of a social
club. People met one another. I remember talking to Leigh Ortenburger about this, and his
observation was that a lot of people got married as a result. When I was president that role
was beginning to change. The better climbers didn't feel the need to belong. They were off
doing their own things. Climbing levels continued to rise. There was a big gap between
club-type activities and what many people were themselves climbing. I think that people who
were serious didn't want to be involved in something like a climbing club, which didn't
really cater to what they were doing.
The End: Greg Larson, Tresidder Union recreation manager, championed student voluntary
outdoor groups in general and the SAC in particular, which he and Steve D'Hondt
reestablished in 1981. Having been inspired to try out rockclimbing by a Jim Collins
presentation, and having learned to climb with the SAC, Larson fondly remembered the
trip-taking and camaraderie. Larson and D'Hondt rejuvenated the SAC to fill the need for
rockclimbing instruction. Larson took the title of coordinator. They organized ten
instructional climbs at local outcrops that year, along with the showing of climbing films
and a presentation by Jim Collins. After Larson's departure, D'Hondt took over as club
coordinator for 1982/83, repeating the previous year's pattern of activities. The club,
however, disappeared during the next school year.
Source: John Rawlings, "No Guts, No Glory: A History of the Stanford Alpine Club"
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Mountaineering
Rawlings, John
Stanford Alpine Club