Enjoyed this, relevant quotes.

• Page 11: "Robbins’s early years were the trainwreck that often breeds felons and drunks. Luckily for "RR," he found climbing, a way out of his hardscrabble youth, and he threw himself at the rock with abandon. As his climbs got harder, so increased the commitment, risk, and fear. Perhaps during his second ascent of the North Face of the Sentinel (he and his partners were still teenagers) in 1953, or four years later, on the first ascent of the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome, Robbins realized the great truth that Viktor Frankl had discovered during his captivity in Nazi concentration camps. As Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, which details his ordeal, when a person has a reason to live, they can face almost any travail. Such an approach, commonly born from trials by fire, goes directly against our instinctual response to avoid pain and seek pleasure and security. Problem is, we all have an expiration date, which leaves us wondering what anything means. Since our aversion to suffering runs so deep, few come to know, as an existential fact, that purpose and meaning accrue from facing difficulties, all while exploring what we can bring to the adventure. Not easy. Life happens. Dreams unravel. Friends and family drop away as we hurtle toward the vanishing point. And that’s where Royal’s legacy has paid the richest dividends. Learning that we are strangely saved by meeting life on its own terms, embracing the whole catastrophe, and discovering what grit and passion we can muster for the task. Remembering that, in any set of circumstances, no matter how grave, we can follow Robbins’s example and choose our own way. Anything less leaves us underutilized."
• Page 222: "Royal had reflected often upon death, even as a young man. As Liz observed, he neither surrendered to nor resisted its inevitability, but acted like death was a kind of summit that could be reached by digging deeper, trying to make it just a few more feet, to live through another day. When he could no longer speak, Royal continued to read. Max Gammon, who knew nothing of Royal’s loss of faith, sent him regular letters. "I said to him that he needed to look at what was happening as a difficult climb," said Gammon, "and that the last move was utterly impossible, unless he trusted in Christ’s rope." What Royal thought of this advice will never be known. Royal wrote one of his last missives on a postcard of the Salathé Wall that he sent to Max Gammon’s young son, Matthew. "Live, so that when you die," wrote Royal, "you are a great loss." "It had always been so important to Royal to die well," said Liz, "[and] in the act of dying, to not be cowardly but honorable. We all know you’re going to have to do it, and very deeply within himself, Royal knew he wanted to do it well." And so, on March 14, 2017, at 10:10 in the morning, in his bedroom on Magnolia Avenue, with the California sun shining on his face through the branches of the giant redwood, the light slipped from Royal Shannon Robbins. He went off to some place none of us have ever seen, and it was a great loss. "His greatest climb," wrote Liz, "was to die in the manner that he did… so stoic.""
• Page 225: ""Royal was a very complex person," wrote Joe Fitschen in a presentation he later gave at the Oakland Climber’s Festival. "Not a chameleon, not one who changed his personality to suit the occasion like one might change clothes, but one who couldn’t be put in a box, one whose behavior was not a function of habit but was an attempt to deal honestly with the situation at hand." Max Gammon compared Royal to a massive, multifaceted rock wall: all routes were difficult; all routes were mysterious. "Our road trips, his love of adventure," wrote Tamara, "Tintin and Asterix, the way he would laugh, his sportsmanship. These are what we who knew him miss. I think his story is less about the forces which shaped it and more about how consciously and deliberately he shaped it. That is an unusual thing." "One is never hard at the center," Royal wrote in his notebooks, bringing us closest to the source of his being. "At the center is that little boy, open and flower-like, who screams to be listened to, who cries to escape, to be let out, to not be so deeply imprisoned, who would prefer to submit before God, yet is forced by the repeated blows of life to retire deeper, safer from the wounds, to retire so deep and so safe that he appears to be not there at all." The notion that American climbing’s greatest moments can be traced to the aftermath of unresolved childhood trauma inflicted by toxic father figures and poverty bears consideration. Abuse not only failed to extinguish Royal’s hunger for joy, transcendence, and ecstasy but heightened it to a perhaps unusual level. But recent historians have shown that in America, the line between being outdoors recreationally and out of necessity (i.e., homeless because of poverty or mental health issues) is much thinner than many might suppose. Squalor revealed that Royal, more than most people, was built for wonder. "

(tags: inspiration explorers mountaineering biographies california rock-climbing el-capitan big-wall-climbing )

Recommended by Greg… need to read before Italy this summer. Done! Read before the Italy trip, gave me confidence that hanging with my oldest on a hike for 1.5 weeks wouldn’t be a big deal… and it wasn’t.

(tags: travel family adventure hiking fatherhood spain perseverance endurance camino-de-santiago )