Oral History Program Preston Richey Interviewed by Colby Wayment 15 April 2009 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Preston Richey Interviewed by Colby Wayment 15 April 2009 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Richey, Preston, an oral history by Colby Wayment, 15 April 2009, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: This is an oral interview with Preston Richey. It is being conducted on April 15, 2009 at his house concerning the Steinfel Club. CW: What were the background experiences that got you into climbing? PR: I had a friend, Keith Myers; I called him Little Igor. He was just really bound and determined to climb and he dragged me along. We would hike up Waterfall Canyon in the wintertime. We started climbing in the fall and climbed all winter. We would go up there and climb. We had ordered stuff from REI. We had 120 feet of 7/16 inch Goldline. We made stirrups. We used to go up with a crowbar and a hammer and dig out some of the old soft-iron pitons that Ralph Lowe had brought back from the 10th Army Division. They used to be peppered all over here because they had done so much climbing. We would dig those out and we bought some. We had steel carabineers and we would go out to Smith & Edwards to get some webbing. I remember one February day - we just had a great day. It was about 60 degrees and we were climbing up there. I just went because he drug me along. That was the first day he let me lead and I had a really good lead up by where they have the via ferrata. It was fun. By spring we were trying all different kinds of stuff. We used to climb it once and rappel it three times. But we climbed all over Waterfall Canyon and some around the bouldering and some on the face above 26th street. It was in the spring and we were up in Waterfall. We wanted to do an aid pitch just because we had never done one. We had these homemade stirrups and wanted to use them. We had been rappelling and didn't want to uncoil our Goldline because it took so long to coil it. This is because we would rappel on it so much it got all twisted. We were climbing on a piece of 3/8 inch manila rope thinking, "It's aid climbing. 1 What could go wrong?" So Little Igor got up and put in a piton. He clipped into it and put his weight on it. We didn't have the right size. So, when he put his weight on it, it rotated and popped. When it popped out, I was prepared to belay him, but the rope flipped into a groove and snapped. He fell about twenty feet and landed right on top of me. It almost killed me, but it broke the fall. He rolled down into the creek and I staggered down and dragged him out. He was bleeding from the head. I half- carried him to the mouth of the canyon and then went and got the car because I had a learner's permit. I was 15 and a half. He didn't have a license yet. I went and got the car and took him into Dr. Hyde to get him stitched up. I tried to get Dr. Hyde to promise that he wouldn't tell our parents. We were afraid they would tell us we couldn't climb. Of course he ratted us out. I was a little surprised my dad's response was, "If you're going to climb, get the right equipment and get the training. What are you doing climbing on a 3/8 inch manila rope?" We went down and took climbing lessons from Hack. We would go up and he would show us a few things. As soon as we started taking climbing lessons from him, then we were part of the group and they invited us in the climbing club. Hack, after the climbing lessons, told us that we ought to climb the backside of Mount Ogden, which we did. It was really nice because it was an actual peak. It wasn't difficult. Hack rated it like 5.3. That summer, Little Igor wanted to climb the Grand. By then I was 16. So he said I needed to borrow my dad's car. He had a brand-new 1964 Volkswagen. I asked if I could borrow it, fully confident he would say no. Again, as I said, I didn't know him. He was delighted any time you were out doing something. He was all for it. So, we drove up. We were terrified of the equipment inspection. I remember my pack was one I made myself. It had a wooden frame and you laced rope through it. It weighed about 60 pounds and we 2 hiked up to the Petzoldt Caves in Cascade Canyon . We did the Lower Exum. We got rained off one day but ultimately made it. It was great. We were well on our way. I was the same age as Greg and Little Igor was in the same grade as Whitey, Jeff. We mostly climbed together, but we would go to City of Rocks and that was practically a religious experience. We would go to City of Rocks. We would have climbing meetings. Early on, we would have climbing meetings and we would talk about putting together a guide. In climbing meetings, you would go to Hacks and sit in his living room. Everybody would be smoking until you couldn't see across the room and they would quit smoking for a while because you really didn't need to. We had climbing parties. I remember we had a freeze-out party one time. We went up, in the middle of winter, and had a party on the dam. It was interesting. It was a very eclectic group. You had all kinds of different people with different backgrounds. The one common interest was climbing and nobody particularly cared whether you were a teetotaler or you did drugs, although you probably shouldn't bring them to a climbing party- whether you were strait-laced or promiscuous. It was all based on climbing. We got along pretty good. CW: Were the lessons you took from Hack formal? Did you have to pay him? PR: Yeah. We paid him. I forget what he wanted, like twenty bucks or something, which was a fair amount. He just went up and said, "Well, what do you know?" Things were changing then - not as much as they have changed. For example, Goldline was out and we went with Perlon. We started going with longer ropes and longer leads. The club did some interesting things. We would have an annual falling seminar. We would set up and someone would take a fall. It seems like the first time that we did it we went down by Lorin Farr Park. We got off in the trees and shimmied up a tree and put a pulley in there. 3 We had a 170- pound concrete weight and we would hoist that sucker up with the pulley- this was one of our climbing meetings- and turn it loose. We put a loop in there and put a hammer through it, then yank the hammer out of the loop. That thing would drop. We would start with a twelve or twenty foot drop. You would stand there belaying anchored to the bumper of a car. Well, my gosh, you let a 170 pound weight drop through a pulley for twenty feet, and when it hits the end of the rope, you're going to be launched. I never caught any fall that was like catching that concrete. I remember, they did that with Whitey and it yanked him completely off the ground. He was slipping. It was all about dynamic belay. So he tried to let it slip a little bit and that stopped it and controlled it before it hit the ground. But it about killed him. I saw what happened to him, so I just locked down and still it was a pretty good jerk. Then we went up. We would typically go up to Shovel Slab, and then have people jump off. It's way different to catch somebody. Even if you have somebody go off an overhang, you generally have enough drag in the rope that it is just way different. We would do the falling seminar. That's what we called it. We hired- I think Hack arranged this- but we pulled our money and got Royal Robbins to come. We went up in the boulder field. Royal Robbins was going to show us how... he was the great climber, but we would take him to all these boulder moves that we had wired. We would have to show him. Mostly he just told us stories, which we thought were great. When we started, we would read Summit magazine almost religiously. It was the Golden Age of Yosemite - the big walls. I remember reading about Chuck Pratt and those guys climbing North American wall. There was the big debate on bolting. Now I think, we had such stern ethics about bolting. Gary Rodgers had gone out and bolted this whole thing and we were all offended. Then he 4 got in the climbing club and said, "Well I just didn't know any better." Now days, you see guys they like limestone because they can drill the bolts better and they carry a rotary hammer drill on their belt. It's completely different. We were opposed to bolting, that was wrong. We were using chrome-aluminum pitons, but when they started coming out with nuts, we immediately saw that that was better. It was a cleaner way to climb. We were going away from chromoly, although every one of us had started out with Chouinard chromoly pitons. When you were getting a little bit shaky, then you like the sound of driving a pin. It was interesting, because climbing started taking a turn. All the sudden, you have these pre-bolted routes. It was just different. CW: Dick Grow told me the story about you guys going into the boulder field with Robbins. I guess you asked Robbins if it was true that when he met anyone better, he would take his cap off. And you said to Robbins, since he couldn't do the moves, he should take his cap off? PR: I probably said that. He wore a mugger hat like that. Hack wore a mugger hat and used to say you would have to give up your hat. That just shows how immature I was. When you get into bouldering, Greg Lowe was in a class by himself. When it came to pure climbing, I never saw anybody better than Jeff. He was incredible. But Greg was so strong. In the history of Ogden High School, they would give the Marine physical fitness test. All of us had to take the physical fitness test. You got a rope to the ceiling of the gym. You've got to climb it hand over hand and to get a passing score on it, you had to climb it in like 20 seconds. But to get a perfect score, you would have to climb it in like 5 seconds. If you're climbing a rope that fast- I watched Greg do this because he was in my gym class- there is times when neither hand is on the rope. He was pulling down on 5 the rope so hard that when he releases, he was still going up. He was the only one, in the history of Ogden High School, to that time and maybe later, to get a perfect 500 score, because of the way it was scaled. He was phenomenally strong. One time he climbed the side of the school and came in through the window, which the teacher kind of laughed off. One time, they opened a hotel that was looking for some publicity. So me, Mike Lowe, Little Igor, and maybe Jon Marsch, we went and rappelled of the hotel. It had got on the news. They were just looking for publicity. Jeff chastised us a little bit because it was commercializing the sport. Which is kind of funny because he ultimately ended up making a living somewhat commercializing it. But at the time he felt it was beyond our ethics to do something just for show. CW: You were talking about reading books. Did you read some of the stuff that had been coming out of the Alps? PR: Oh yeah. There was Lionel Turret and Gaston Rebufat. Those were the books that were in the library. They were talking about a group of climbers that started in World War II and went on and did the Eiger and some of the really great climbs. We read those multiple times. Then there was James Ramsey Ullman about the American Everest Expedition. James Ullman wrote Third Man on the Mountain. I'm not sure if that is what it is called, but it was made into a Walt Disney movie called Third Man on the Mountain, which was kind of a kids' book. Then he wrote the White Tower, which was a sequel to it but a much more adult book. I read all those in junior high school. After the Grand, every year we would go to the Wind Rivers for a week. It was really good climbing there. CW: Did you go as part of the club? 6 PR: There were different people. But it seems like there was a core group - Steve Johnson, me, Little Igor, and Mims Barker. Mims loved to fish. He would go to the Winds as much to fish. One time we went up there, we were coming out. Hack, Jeff Lowe, and a couple others were going in, but we all kind of met up there at the area around East Temple and Haystack. We did a lot of climbing and did some first ascents up there. Whitey did a bunch of solo stuff up there, which was really impressive. It was about that time we were starting to realize. I didn't understand how much better he was than I was because we were all climbing together. You see somebody doing it and think I ought to be able to do that. So, we attempted stuff. The Lowes, I climbed with George, Mike, Greg and Jeff, not a lot. But at one time or another, I climbed with all of them. They're like a climbing dynasty. They were really good and went on and did expeditions. But at the time, we were just all in the same club. We were all climbers and you would have a good day and feel pretty good about yourself. But we would do stuff without realizing how much better they were. It raised me to a level I never would have got to. I tried stuff that I never would have done. Greg, in particular, was always a huge cheerleader. He always had tremendous confidence. Greg and I would sluff school and go up into the boulder field. "Oh yeah, you can do this." He would try and show me something and some of them I eventually got after falling off and having him point things out. It was kind of one of the life lessons I took out of climbing. Whenever you can, hang around people who are better than you because it just automatically lifts you up. It was a tremendous privilege to climb with those guys. CW: Kent told me this, no one else has, but some of the club members were hired on to do a movie, the Devil's Brigade. Were you part of that? 7 PR: I did that. That was fun. I was in high school at the time. It came out at about the same time as the Dirty Dozen. The Devil's Brigade is factual and the Dirty Dozen is just fantasy. People obviously went and watched the Dirty Dozen. Devil's Brigade didn't do that well. It was a great deal. They sent a bus up and we drove down. They cut a road up. There is a rock up there above Riverton were they had set up for this climactic seen. They actually put together a joint regiment- one from U.S. and one from Canada. The U.S. military, fairly arrogant, didn't want to have anything to do with cooperation. They were going to win the war on their own. They sent the worst people they had and Canada sent the best. They went through a variety of training. They trained to be mountain troops and ended up in Italy. Then there was this assault they made where they suffered major casualties. This really happened. At any rate, they were going to film this thing. We were stuntmen. The stuntman pay rate per day was a huge sum of money - an outrageous amount. They outfitted us with military uniforms and packs. They wanted to color our shoelaces. In those days, we had really bright shoelaces on our climbing boots. They had a couple of E9 cats and put us in a trailer. One would tow the trailer and the other would come up and push. They had a trailer that they drug up there for Vince Edwards, who was kind of a jerk. They had Claude Akins and a bunch of other actors who were just great. We ate lunch with them and they were really great guys. It was all hurry up and wait. At the time, I thought this is the most disorganized thing I've ever seen in my life. I later came to realize what a phenomenally difficult artistic endeavor making a movie is. If I'm a painter and I have this picture in my mind, then I put it down. But if my art is making movies, I've got this picture in my mind, but I've got to control scenery, cameras, sound and actors to make my vision come to life. 8 It's not something that lends itself to delegation. What they do is, there is all these toadies. If the director says something, then people will repeat it all over. It took us forever. They wanted to film this scene where we're coming around the cliff lined up. There were already fixed ropes. So we're coming around the cliff and somebody up above knocked a whole bunch of rocks off. Everybody who didn't know what they were doing ran away from the cliff. All the climbers hugged the cliff. If the rocks are coming down and falling away, the safest place is right next to the cliff. You're not going to get hit there. I remember this well, somebody said, "Get away from the cliff!" and there were all these toadies echoing it. People are getting away. I bellowed out, "It's safer by the cliff!" and then everybody started echoing that. I thought, wow, you could take over this production with a loud voice. We eventually got that filmed then we were going to film this scene where we climbed ropes. So people were jostling for positions. The ropes were inch and a quarter or something. You didn't need much of a climber. I tried to mark my position so I could see myself in the movie. They had cameras everywhere: across the valley, down below, on a platform, and a camera in a helicopter. They were going to do this in one shot because it takes forever to get everybody dressed and ready to go. They've got all these cameras rolling and we start climbing. Of course, anybody with any sense, you would sling your M1 across your chest. There was a guy that had it slung over one shoulder. He was climbing and he got tired. He drops his firearm. The M1 just slides right off, nine and a half pounds, and it drops strait down and hits a guy right in the middle of his helmet. His arms flail and he drops about twelve feet and wedges in a crack. We're getting a little bit higher and the guy who was in the front leaned back to look at an overhang. He didn't have his chinstrap on. So the helmet 9 starts to come off and he let go with both hands to grab his helmet and did this backwards thing. He fell about 40 feet before he hit the outcropping. He hit kind of on his side, spun, and went down into the scree slope, which was fortunately quite steep. He slid down that and people were screaming, "Cut!" And ropes were being thrown off the top. They had the Utah National Guard up there. They're throwing ropes down and these guardsmen were going down and grabbing people. Whitey won't tell you this, but they tied a rope on to him and pulled him up over the top kicking and screaming just pissed as could be. These people on the overhang rope, they just froze. I got off my rope and Greg got off. We positioned ourselves in between so that we could guide them and hold their feet on the rock and get them off. I didn't suffer the indignation of having to be hauled over the top. Greg and I, we got our ropes clean and I went back to the bottom with Little Igor. This guy was alive. They put an air cast on him. He had some pretty serious injuries. We grabbed a hold of him and carried this stretcher out of there. Have you ever carried a stretcher in the mountains? I don't know anything tougher than that. People will lurch and weight will come on you. You'll slip. We were just working our guts out going to the top of this cliff where the helicopter pad was. As we got up and got closer, somebody brought out a camera. All the sudden everybody was trying to get in there. People were grabbing on to my clothes and my wrist so they could be seen carrying the stretcher, which was fine because we needed a rest. When it was on the scree slope and go up around the steep side of the cliff, that's when we could have used help. I think they were paying extras seven dollars a day, but if you said you could climb, it was twenty-five. They needed climbers and all the sudden everybody could climb. You didn't need to be a climber; you just need to have some common sense. If 10 you've ever been on a rock face at all, you wouldn't have done all the stupid things they did. If you watch it, you'll see people get about that far off the ground. You won't see them go over the top. They never did film it again. CW: That was just one day? PR: I'm trying to remember. We were going to do it for two days. It seems to me like we went down the first day and we got basically nothing done. We did the one shot the first day. The second day we had the problem and that was fairly early on and they didn't want to re-shoot. It seems like we got two days out of it, but it might have only been one. CW: Do you remember any City of Rocks tips? PR: Yeah. One of the features of City of Rocks was staying up all night and singing ribald songs. We were a little intimidated with Val Marsch there, but as it turned out we still ended up singing dirty songs and drinking till all hours of the night. One of the things we did was sometimes we would do a mass assault. There is this rock there called the Incisor. Little Igor and I went right up a Chimney in the middle. It was basically climbing, drinking, staying up, talking, and arguing. I remember one night Larry Ross was arguing with Mike Lowe for hours and hours just because he liked to argue, I think. Whatever view Mike took Larry would take the opposite. I remember driving in. You used to get a flat tire practically every trip the roads were so bad. All you did was kind of blaze across country. It was kind of like riding a rollercoaster. You come over a hill and you would just be airborne. They didn't cut-fill at all. You used to drive really, really fast. I remember hitting a mud puddle and Greg had to come drag me out because I flooded it. There was so much water. It rained on us lots of times. It was either hotter than Hades up there or it rained. Memorial Day is kind of a dicey time. It could still snow. Through it all, 11 we would go up. You would always try to do something that had never been done before. CW: But you had no guidebook? PR: Everybody knew. That was the thing. We would sit around the fire and we had names for everything. As long as it was the Steinfel's Club there, then everybody knew what had been climbed and who had done it. I guess we went our separate ways. The years passed then somebody started a guidebook. Lost Arrow was one that if you hadn't done it, everybody had to do the Lost Arrow. CW: The singing you did at night, did you guys have instruments? PR: If we had a climbing party, there would be someone with a guitar. It was kind of the folk music era. You would sing "500 miles," "Tom Dooley," or something like that. It was song after song after song. Sometimes we had a guitar, but a lot of times it was just singing. We used to play drinking games. Everybody would have a sign and you would have to make their sign, your sign, and the sign of somebody else. But you couldn't make the sign of somebody that had previously been made. If you missed out, you would have to drink. Interestingly enough, I never drank at any of the parties and managed to have a wonderful time. Like I said, it was a very eclectic group who were pretty accepting. CW: How long did you end up climbing? When did you get out of it? PR: I got married in 1970. After I got married, I climbed a little for a couple of years. I was trying to finish my degree. Then I got a degree and was trying to support a family. Nixon's wage and price controls conspired to keep me broke. So I quit. As far as 12 climbing, it was interesting. I love climbing a lot, but climbing is not like riding a bike. I can get on my bike and I can remember how to ride a bike. If you lay off of climbing, and start climbing again, you feel like you're just a complete klutz. You don't have balance or confidence. Every year you would climb, you would start climbing early and by the end of the year you were doing better things. Each year, if you wanted to get better, you would climb more and more. And when you broke that cycle, it kind of broke my heart. It took the joy out of it to know how good I had been and then to be bad at it. It hit the high point in my climbing when I was climbing with Larry Ross. I took off one college spring break and went with Whitey down to Capitol Reef and did a really nice climb. Then I went down to Yosemite and did the West Face of the Sentinel. At that point it was obvious to me that he and I are in different classes and he was just being nice to me to drag me along. It was fun nonetheless. That would probably be about the end of it. CW: It's starting to seem to me that everyone went to Ogden High, at least the younger kids. I don't know about Hack and the older guys? It seems like you guys were just networked together at school from before the club. PR: Well, I didn't know some of these guys until the club. Bruce Roghaar and I did London Spire. We were talking about doing the first ascent of the North Face and danged if Whitey didn't get up there a week before we did. Bruce was a year older that me. Steve was older than me. I really don't see Ogden High School as being the network. I think the networking was more just you climbed and went in. It was probably Kent Christianson as much as anybody. Everybody knew him. Kent would say, "Let's all go climbing." We would go to the hermitage and sit and drink beer after climbing. You might have six to ten people climbing in the canyon and then you would go to the 13 hermitage and sit around and drink beer. That was more the social networking. Ogden High School was where it was at. The best boulders and climbing was within the district. If that was where you lived you were more likely to be attracted. If you went to Weber High School you were likely with the cows and the flatlands. Where I lived, we could walk up to Waterfall Canyon. Greg was right next to the boulder field. Bruce lived on 20th and something. Steve Johnson and Stew Richards were neighbors. The people were right up close to where the good rock was. Hack had a theory that quartzite made you a better climber. If you got to where you could climb well on quartzite, when you got to granite it was easy. It was a real good training ground. If I was going to say, why was the level of climbing high, I would say it was basically the Lowes. 14