Oral History Program Bruce Roghaar Interviewed by Colby Wayment 14 April 2009 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Bruce Roghaar Interviewed by Colby Wayment 14 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: Roghaar, Bruce, an oral history by Colby Wayment, 14 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 Bruce Roghaar. It is being conducted on April 14, 2009, in Logan, concerning the Steinfel Club. Steve Johnson is with us. CW: Were you one of the first members then - a founding member? BR: Yeah. I'll just give you a little history as I recall. It's been a while. I climbed a little bit, but I didn't know what I was doing. I got real interested in climbing and went down to the library and checked out a book and read it. But I didn't do anything for months and by then forgot about it. I started with a hemp rope. This neighbor friend of mine, we just got interested in climbing. I dug an old cement hammer out of the basement and we bagged some pitons that people had left in the cliff up there above 24th street along the front there above Castle Rock. I had bought a couple of old Army steel carabineers. They weighed about 50 pounds apiece. We didn't know what we were doing; we were lucky we didn't get killed. But we ran into a couple young climbers up there, Mike McConville and Bob Barren. They were some of the earliest young climbers and they kind of showed us some stuff. I graduated in 1965. I got into serious climbing in the fall of 1962 and started working for my uncle. There was a store called Perkins Ltd. He had kind of a neat idea, really. Half of the store was men's clothing. He put that part of the store in the front in the spring and the summer. In the back he put the ski gear. In the fall he would reverse everything and put the ski stuff out front. He got into climbing and he was kind of part of my interest and my mentor in a sense. So I started working for him and my parents didn't want me to climb. He was my uncle and he finally talked my mother, his sister, into letting me climb. He said that it's like living next to the ocean and not teaching him to swim. He loves to do it. I used to sneak out because my parents were 1 worried. He took me up the canyon and showed me some stuff. I climbed with him a little bit. Now at that time in Ogden, as Steve said, there was a pretty small group of climbers. There was a guy named John Narcisean, Pete Townsend, Sheer, John Moore, Kent Christianson. John Moore was on the ski patrol too. And some of them climbed and had gone up the Grand Teton and stuff. Dean ran a little climbing school. So I started working there in the fall and in his store he carried a little climbing corner. He'd carry a couple ropes, couple of climbing packs, a couple of piton hammers, a dozen pins, some carabineers, and maybe a book or two. This is all pre-Chouinard chromoly. There were basically five pins. There were horizontals, verticals, ring-wafers (thinner), ring angles, and spoons. CW: Did you have Klettershoes by then, or was that later? BR: The cool climbers wore heavy boots. I couldn't afford them so I bought Klettershoes, which ended up being the cool thing. This was right on the cusp of change. That was part of the Steinfel's history. What happened was - I'll just call them the old guard - it was very traditional European climbing: no harnesses, no leg loops, and all pitons. About that time, George Lowe Jr., who was from Ogden but had gone to California for school, started climbing in Yosemite. So there was all that new Yosemite technique that was starting to come out. And we started getting Summit magazine and there were articles and all that stuff about what was going on in California. The younger guys, we started going that direction. There was just enough of a generation gap and enough of a difference in philosophy that the older guys just kind of faded. And that's about when the club started. After that, everybody started climbing in Klettershoes. There was a popular one called Spiders and were made by a company, I think, called Cortina. We ordered a 2 bunch of them in. Like Steve said, we would get epoxy and cement all the seams so they wouldn't blow out and buy them way small. That's when we first started buying for technique rather that comfort. SJ: We wouldn't use them for the approach. BR: So I started working at Perkins and I started meeting guys because they would come in - I met Steve down there - and they would buy some pins. When I was working I met a guy named Kent Christianson. He worked there as the ski binding mount. And the mounting shop was back by the stock. When I first started working, I did mostly stock then I would work on the floor at sales. A couple of guys his age, Frank Cunningham and John Moore, I met them through the store. I think, I can't remember for positive, but it was either the winter of '63 or '64, Hack invited me to go climb the South Face of Ben Lomond in the winter with Frank Cunningham. It's just a snow slog; it isn't technical, but it turned out to be a physical beat-out because of the snow conditions. We post-holed most of the way up and went up and down in a day. We were pretty exhausted by the end of the day. I just felt kind of neat to be invited by those guys. I guess I got to know Hack; we talked a lot. One day down in the shop we were talking about climbing and he said, "What would you think about a climbing club?" I am sure he was talking to other people as well. I was pretty keen on the idea, I guess, but I'm not a real organization person. The more we talked about it, I got kind of excited about it. So he decided, and this was like in February of '64, we had a meeting in his house. He invited a bunch of climbers. I don't remember Dean Perkins being there, but these other guys, John Narcisean, Townsend, this Sheer guy, Cunningham, John Moore, and myself. Mike Lowe was the first Lowe and he came around the second or third meeting. We batted 3 the idea around, and as I recall, it didn't really take off with some of these older guys. So, we met again and invited some more guys. I don't remember who came when, but some of the early members were Kent, myself, John Marsh (the guy who became for a couple years my main climbing partner), Steve, Dean, Stew Richards, Jake Entjes was pretty early, Todd Maltby. Lance Wilcox was fairly early. Rob Brown was and he always had broken bones. We finally got the club going and those older guys didn't really get involved. Things had changed. There was a bunch of young guys and they the older guys were in their own little clique. We were just a bunch of young kids. Kent, John Moore, and Cunningham were kind of in between in the generations. Those three were there. John had a younger brother, Frank, and he got involved but he didn't stay real active. We knew about the Alpenbock in Salt Lake and the Wasatch Mountain club. We thought it would be kind of cool but we wanted to climb. We didn't want it to be a bureaucracy thing. When we talked about it, by-laws and stuff like that, we didn't have any really. We had a president, but it was real loose. He was just kind of a coordinator was what it was. We purposely didn't want a bunch of rules. And to get in, we didn't want just anybody in either. After the initial handful of us, you had to climb with somebody and they would recommend you. It was pretty low key and laid back. CW: Was there anyone who may have wanted to be a member but you guys determined they were unsafe or something? BR: I can't think of anyone, who didn't hang around and climb a bunch, who didn't get accepted. There weren't that many of us. Maybe the second or the third meeting, Mike Lowe came. He had been an exchange student in Germany. So we were bouncing names around and he came up with Steinfel, "stone cliff." 4 CW: How were you brought into Search and Rescue? BR: When I came on board, it was May of 1966. John Moore called me and some kid had fallen off the backside of Ben Lomond. You know Scouts. They got up on the peak and they got their lunches out. There's always someone who gets teased. They threw this kid's lunch off the summit and it landed on a ledge. It was still part snow up there. It was about sixty feet and it landed on a ledge. So this kid starts hiking down this slope, couloir kind of thing, and it looked like he broke through the snow pack and tripped. And he slid and couldn't stop. He went over one cliff, hit the next ledge and went over it, hit the next ledge and went over it, then hit the snowfield at the bottom. He must have been going fast. But he fell over 1000 feet. He finally hit a big rock about the size of a Volkswagen. He hit it and bounced over on the other side. He was in deep shock to say the least. Well, they left a couple of kids with him. And they booked down having to go clear to Ogden Canyon to get a phone. By the time we got called, it was about 3:00. They couldn't find the guys who usually did Search & Rescue and John Moore called me. I met John and we blitzed up there. Todd Maltby and one other guy came up to back us up. But the time we got to Snowbasin, they alerted the basin. They had someone to turn on the lift. We hurried as fast as we could. When we got there, he would lie there for two or three minutes and then have these horrendous convulsions. These stupid kids, they didn't know what to do because the leader took off to get help. I honestly thought he would die any second. It seems like he had three scalp wounds that went to the brain. So I held him. We did the standard first aid: put our clothes on him and John bandaged his head the best he could. Finally, these other guys got there and some of the Jeep patrol got to the cliff and they drug a litter up. We loaded him in that 5 and started down. When we got on the snow slope, some of the Jeep guys came and we took the litter to an open spot and the chopper came and got him. On the way downI can't remember the sheriff's deputy who was in charge - he asked me if I'd like to be involved with the mountain rescue unit. CW: Did the Ross incident affect a lot of people? When McQuarrie died in SLC, the guidebook says a lot of Alpenbock members quit. BR: I don't think anybody quit except for Preston Richey. He quit for a while. CW: Was there a particular person who brought the idea for going up to the City of Rocks? BR: There were two guys, I can't remember one of them. There was a guy named Ebb Radford. We called one of the Twin Sisters the Eberhorn after him. They did a route on the Twin Sister. They told and Hack found out about it. In a meeting we decided that we ought to go check this place out. That was our first Memorial Day trip, which would have been 1964. I remember there was, Hack, John Moore, probably Frank Cunningham, and Stew Richards might have been there. There were eight or ten of us. That was our first trip. We had such a good time. We went up a lot more than Memorial Day but that became an annual thing. We never saw climbers up there. We were so excited it was Paradise. There were no campgrounds and nobody knew about it. A rancher would drive through every once in a while and some people would drive their dirt bikes up there. We got water up over the summit where that trough is. That's been there forever. Our first campsite, we called it the Sphinx; it's called the Breadloves now. We camped on the east side of it but the wind would come over that pass and you would get flapped to death. Most guys were probably so drunk they couldn't hear the tent flap but it drove me crazy. So we camped at that other place. We were such a close group that you 6 would just have to say, "What did you do?" "Well, there's this crack down here." "What is it?" "I don't know, hard." We resisted at first using ratings because, for one thing, we didn't know what to rate it. We started climbing down in Salt Lake on the granite and that sort of gave us a guideline. It was almost a conscious decision that we didn't want to do a guidebook. We didn't want anybody to find out about it City of Rocks . CW: Was there anything else like the belay test that you guys did for novices? BR: Just before the club we did an instructional thing for the National Guard. It was a basic rock-climbing thing. But that was the fall just before the club. CW: Were there any really novice people who entered the club where there would have been a mentor/apprentice relationship? BR: I would say so. There were guys that came in with not much experience, but they knew some. They weren't boneheads; they understood the basics. Most of them came in as friends and family. My brother was Jeff's age and they were friends. So when Jeff came in, my brother got interested. But he didn't climb seriously, but I don't know if he even became an official member because after a while we kind of did away with the official member thing. Usually you would have already climbed with people. That's how they found out. You came to a couple club activities like bouldering and stuff like that to get to know people. Then we kind of had a little induction thing where we would ask if everybody felt okay about it. The member would go behind a tree or in the other room and we would vote. You could get a patch. That's about as formal as it got. CW: Were there membership dues? 7 BR: We talked about dues and said we were not doing dues. You would just chip in and buy your own food and beer. CW: You were talking about not consciously doing guidebooks. Compared to Yosemite or Salt Lake or everywhere else, your group was the only one to really keep the climbing obscure. BR: I don't know maybe it was our nature. By nature we weren't that competitive people. There were a couple guys that kind of brought it. We just wanted to be left alone in this treasure land of climbing, as far as City of Rocks goes. John Marsh went up to Utah State and met some guys who climbed. And through some associations with guys from Salt Lake who went up on Memorial Day, and George Lowe. Within a couple years some Salt Lake guys had come up and then some Burley guys had come down. Probably after two or three years it became eclectic. Then after a few more, it became "discovered" and really took off. 8