After the Golden Age

Sunset lights Horsetail Falls in
Yosemite each mid-February;
discovered by Galen Rowell, 1973

Last year, I was reading up on all the artisanal food companies in Brooklyn these days, and I commented in passing:

In a couple of decades, a few of the people who were in on the Brooklyn artisanal food scene in, say, 2007, will be billionaires, and will, no doubt, be greatly resented as sell outs by all the people who were there with them and didn't make it big. But, such is the way of the world.

I find this an interesting phenomenon of who among the people who got there early manages to cash in on a golden age. 

For example, the two dominant personalities among Yosemite Big Wall climbers in the late 1950s-1960s golden age were Warren Harding (not the President, but a Northern California surveyor who took up climbing at age 30) and Royal Robbins (a wunderkind from Tahquitz Rock in Southern California). Robbins climbed the 2000' face of Half Dome in the summer of 1957, so Harding climbed the 3000' El Capitan that fall. They traded off firsts for years, teaming up with dozens of other climbers, although, as far as I know, never with each other.

Half Dome

Harding finally became a celebrity in 1970 when he and a partner took 27 days to climb the Wall of the Early Morning Light on El Capitan. After about three weeks, the National Park Service attempted to rescue them, but they finally managed to convince the rangers they were in no need of rescue. (I followed the story in the newspaper every day for the last tend days or so of the climb.) Harding went off to do the talk shows in New York, where his wit made him a hit, and got an agent who set up a lecture tour. But he managed to spend more money on it than he took in, so he went back to being a surveyor.

(One of Harding's many climbing partners, an auto mechanic named Galen Rowell, went on to become the top mountain photographer of his era, the closest thing to a color photography successor to Ansel Adams.)

Robbins, the more talented climber and the more intellectual writer, was more influential within the climbing community: he put down Harding for drilling bolts into the rock, helping develop the dominant aesthetic of only wedging metal to anchor the safety rope into naturally occurring cracks. Robbins eventually founded a clothing brand that is still around.

But the big winner out of Golden Age climbers was one in the second tier right below Harding and Robbins: Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, the big clothing and gear company. Chouinard was more part of Team Robbins than Team Harding. Chouinard was a San Fernando Valley boy who started rock-climbing at Stoney Point (where I spent much of the summer of 1977 until I realized I was scared of heights).

I think you'll find fairly similar patterns in most golden ages. They always make a good story. (Now that I think of it, that's the basic idea behind the musical Dreamgirls: In the Supremes, why did Diana Ross become a legend and Florence Ballard, the better singer, die on welfare?)