studied the fiberglass tower, rising beyond the trees at the front entrance to the campground. Only a few campers waited their turn to climb it this early in the morning. But the line was sure to grow as the day wore on and more climbers arrived in the valley for the start of the Slam tomorrow.
Janelle ducked out of the tent. “Are you okay with it?” Chuck asked her, warming to Carmelita’s interest in the sport that had consumed him as a young man.
Janelle stood at Carmelita’s back and combed her fingers through her daughter’s long, sleep-tangled hair. “You want to be like Chuck, do you?” she asked Carmelita.
“Like me a long time ago,” Chuck clarified.
Now, as Carmelita reached the campsite with the others in the wake of Jimmy’s fall, she spoke while looking at her feet, her voice soft but firm. “I still want to do it,” she said. “I still want to be in the Slam.”
Chuck took Janelle’s hand in his and gave it a squeeze. Carmelita’s first year of middle school hadn’t been all they’d hoped. Shy and reserved, Carmelita had made few friends and refused entreaties from Janelle and Chuck to try after-school clubs and sports. The good news, at least, was that she’d done well in her classes. Very well, in fact. But she’d spent a lot of her free time alone.
“You’re crazy, Carm,” Rosie declared. She swung her hiking boot at a stone, kicking it from the path. She teetered at the end of her kick, her foot nearly as high as her head. Only Clarence’s quick grab kept her from tumbling backward to the ground.
“I was good at it,” Carmelita said. “I was really good. Wasn’t I?”
“That’s stating the obvious,” Clarence told her. “You were estupenda up there.”
Janelle slipped her hand out of Chuck’s grip and turned to him as they walked. “They’ll cancel the competition because of Jimmy’s accident, won’t they?”
“I doubt it. People come from all over to compete in the Slam. It’s turned into a big money-maker for the Camp 4 Fund. Jimmy told me last year’s entry fees paid for a whole new set of gear-hauling wheelbarrows. They’re already planning to use this year’s proceeds to remodel the bathroom. They might even raise enough money to add showers, which they’ve needed forever.”
Janelle slid her hand into the crook of Chuck’s arm. “What happened to him back there?”
“The auto-belay device failed. They’ll fix it, of course—not that Carm would use it. If she competes, I’ll belay her again myself, just to be completely safe.”
“Completely safe?”
“People think everything having to do with rock climbing is dangerous. But big-wall climbing and sport climbing are entirely different animals.” He pointed up through a break in the trees to the top of El Capitan, rising half a mile above the valley floor. “Big-wall climbing comes with unavoidable risk. The potential for accidents on massive cliffs, here in Yosemite or anywhere else, is part of the game. There’s simply too much that can go wrong on multi-day, multi-pitch climbs—sudden weather changes, equipment problems, fatigue, personality issues between team members. It’s impossible to control for all of them.” He aimed a thumb behind him at the tower. “But climbing on a bolted wall is one of the safest sports there is.”
Clarence pooched his lips. “Despite what just happened to Jimmy?”
“Despite that,” Chuck confirmed.
Janelle asked Carmelita, “You’re not scared?”
Carmelita shook her head. Then she nodded. “Sorta. But that’s why I want to do it.”
Clarence wrapped one of his beefy arms around Carmelita’s narrow shoulders, drawing her to his side. “Esa es mi sobrina valiente,” he said. “That’s my brave niece.”
Janelle’s fingers tightened around Chuck’s arm. “Bastante bien,” she said, acceding to Carmelita with a sigh. “As long as Chuck says it’s okay.”
Carmelita leaned around Clarence and grinned at Chuck, but Rosie said to her sister, “I’m telling you, Carm, you’re craaaaazy.” She swung her boot at another stone, sending it flying into a neighboring campsite.
“Careful,” Chuck warned her. “It wasn’t easy for me to reserve one of the researcher sites here. We don’t want to get thrown out our very first day.”
They continued along the path. In campsites on either side of them, campers prepared breakfast and arranged gear. Some organized overnight camping supplies. They packed duffle bags, tied guy lines to tent poles, and tossed sleeping bags over their tents to air the bags in the sun. Others, obviously climbers, sorted through their climbing kits. They counted out carabiners, coiled ropes on tarps, and arranged cams and bolts and quickdraws on picnic tables, grouping the pieces of milled-alloy climbing hardware by size and type. Still other Camp 4 campers were Latino families, middle-aged men and women with children who occupied sites ringed with inexpensive hoop tents. The adults’ worn jeans, denim shirts, long skirts, and cafeteria-worker blouses and slacks marked them not as park visitors but park concession employees.
Block-shaped Columbia Boulder, the size of a two-story house, sat just beyond the north boundary of the campground, where it had come to rest on the valley floor after tumbling eons ago from the cliffs above. For decades, the short, demanding climbing routes up the boulder’s vertical sides had provided a rope-free proving ground for Camp 4 climbers. These days, in an attempt to improve the often frayed relations between Camp 4’s free-spirited climbing community and Yosemite’s staid ranger staff, the park service provided free coffee and donuts to all comers every Sunday morning at the base of the boulder, where the two groups mingled and hashed out any outstanding grievances.
After so many years away, Chuck gazed around him with a sense of nostalgia. No campground in the national park system was more famous than Camp 4. From its position on the north side of Yosemite Valley, the campground had served since the 1960s as the base of climbing operations for hypercompetitive climbers bent on putting up ever more difficult routes on the valley’s surrounding faces. In those early years, the original occupants of the campground included pioneering rock climbers like Yvon Chouinard, Doug Tompkins, Royal Robbins, Ron Kauk, and—among only a handful of accomplished female climbers at the time—Lynn Hill. The early Camp 4 denizens assumed mythic status as climbing grew to become a global sport. During Chuck’s summers at Camp 4 decades later, the campground had remained home to an ever-changing cast of big-wall climbers, still predominantly male, all competing for the unofficial title of Best Rock Climber on Earth.
Chuck looked from side to side as he walked along the central corridor through the campground with his family. Camp 4 was a different place now than when he’d spent so much time here twenty years ago. The campground’s sites were occupied by a roughly equal number of males and females, and by a far more diverse crowd as well. Rather than almost exclusively white, Camp 4’s current climber occupants embodied a healthy mix of the multiethnic stewpot representative of modern-day America and the world, with Anglo as well as Asian, African American, and Latino climbers sorting piles of gear. Signaling the biggest change of all, in addition to the walk-in campsites occupied by climbers preparing for ascents and the numerous sites taken by tourists organizing camping supplies, a third of the campground’s sites were occupied by park workers and their families.
As Chuck, Janelle, Clarence, and the girls passed one of the worker-occupied sites, a middle-aged Latina woman looked up from a camp stove positioned at the end of a picnic table in front of her. The smell of frying bacon wafted from a skillet on the stove. The woman looked through the steam rising from the pan, taking in Janelle, Clarence, and the girls.
“Hola, amigos,” she greeted them. Her deep, gravelly voice reminded Chuck of the rough, sandpapery tone shared by Rosie and Rosie’s grandfather, Janelle’s Mexican-immigrant father.
“Hola,” Janelle responded.
The Latina woman went back to flipping strips of bacon in the pan with her spatula.