Oral History Program Dave Smith Interviewed by Colby Wayment 17 April 2009 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Dave Smith Interviewed by Colby Wayment 17 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: Smith, Dave, an oral history by Colby Wayment, 17 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 Dave Smith. It is being conducted on April 17, 2009 at his house in Sandy concerning the history of climbing clubs in Salt Lake and his personal interactions with the Ogden area climbers. CW: Is there a reason you weren't part of the Alpenbock club? DS: The Alpenbock club was a little before. The Alpenbock club, I think, started in the late 1950’s. It was significantly different than the Wasatch Mountain Club. The Wasatch Mountain Club was more or less a public club. They published a newsletter and posted their trips. The Alpenbock was more of an outgrowth of a collection of a relatively small group of friends. The other thing that I think happened with the Alpenbock was a lot of the real active Alpenbock folks ended up being involved in the Tetons on the rescue team or working in Jenny Lake as climbing rangers. I took a climbing course through the Wasatch Mountain Club in '66. At that time I was just 15 and I wasn't able to do a whole lot of climbing until the fall of '68. By that time I had a driver's license and access to a car. I think the Alpenbock period of doing a lot of new routes in Little Cottonwood Canyon was pretty much over at that point. CW: Was the Wasatch Mountain Club pretty well known? I guess it is still in existence today. DS: The Wasatch Mountain Club is a pretty diverse club. Its climbing group has always been a pretty small part of the club. It's more hiking, river running, and now more snowshoeing and ski touring. But that was how I got my initial climbing instruction. I was a mountaineering director for them for couple of years back in the early 70’s. CW: How did you hear about them? 1 DS: It was real interesting. I grew up in the local area in Murray and did a lot of hunting and fishing with my father. I got more involved in hiking for the sake of hiking and backpacking with the boy scouts. I was always more interested in the hiking than the scouts I was with. Through reading, I kind of got interested in climbing because there were no climbing gyms around at that point in time. In my junior high school one year, one of the teachers, Chuck Saderfield, who had guided for Exum in the Tetons and had been on a trip to Peru with the Iowa Mountaineers Club, did an assembly slideshow of this trip to Peru. He wasn't particularly interested in saddling himself with a 15 year-old beginner. But he pointed me in the direction of the Wasatch Mountain Club. CW: Was yours the first guidebook for the area? What did you have to build on? DS: Not quite. I guess a couple of things. Back in 1964, there was a number of outing clubs associated with colleges around the country. At the University of Utah it was the Ute Alpine Club. This was a few years before I was involved in climbing. They had this mountaineers' weekend event that kind of rotated around to different areas and was hosted by the particular outing club of the college in that area. In '64, the Ute Alpine Club was the host and there was a paperback publication they put out for this event. It had an article on ski touring and one on hiking and one on caving. Court Richards had written one on climbing in Little Cottonwood. So he had probably published the first descriptions of some of the more popular routes just with the idea of having a source for climbers coming and visiting. Dave Allen, who was a director for the Wasatch Mountain Club for two or three years, had started writing some descriptions of routes in Little Cottonwood and Bell's Canyon that he published as articles in the Wasatch Mountain Club's publication, The Rambler. I think he started doing that in '67. He just kind of did 2 them as he was interested. One month he would have on article on the Gate Buttress in Little Cottonwood. Another month it was the Coffin Crack area. He had written those descriptions. Also, I guess the source for most of the early route information in Little Cottonwood and Bell's Canyon were the Alpenbock scrapbooks. CW: So they had a binder with pictures and routes drawn on them? DS: They had two volumes actually. They were pretty good at keeping track of what they were doing as far as new routes. Of course everything they did in Little Cottonwood at that time was new. They had photographs and descriptions and what not. Those were really the source for most of the early route information. The real active climbers in the Alpenbock were particularly Ted Wilson and Rick Reese. Those were probably the two most active climbers. But there were others: Ralph Tingey and Court Richards. There was a younger climber in the Alpenbock named Mark McQuarrie. He was killed in '67 on an attempt on the Church Buttress with George Lowe. CW: In the case of McQuarrie, I guess he was part of the Alpenbock club and the Ute Alpine Club. Were there a lot of cross associations? DS: There weren't many people climbing then. I don't think as much with the Alpenbock, but certainly with the Ute Alpine Club and the Wasatch Mountain Club. There weren't a lot of women climbing back then. I tend to say guys, but there were a few. They might get introduced to climbing at the "U" as part of their college experience, be members of the Ute Alpine Club, and graduate from college. And if they stayed in the area, some of them maintained ties with the Ute Alpine Club. Charlie Lessley is perhaps the best example of that. But a number of them, after graduating, maybe moved into the 3 Wasatch Mountain Club. But chances were if you were serious about climbing, you knew most people. You may not climb with everybody, but you had mutual friends. CW: You mentioned earlier the gathering of the college clubs, what colleges would have had the clubs? DS: That was '64 when it was here and I didn't start climbing until '66. Probably, Carl Dunn is, I think, still in Salt Lake. I think he climbed with people in the Wasatch Mountain Club and believe he was involved with the Alpine Club before that even. He might be a good person. Dave George might be a person to talk to. CW: The Steinfel was pretty responsible for opening up the City of Rocks and the Wind Rivers to climbing. I was wondering how that might have translated to the Alpenbock? I know they started going up there shortly after too. DS: I don't think the Alpenbock did a whole lot as a club in the City of Rocks. The interest in the '60s and 70s - that was the Golden Age of Yosemite - was granite. So there wasn't as much intermixing between Ogden area climbers and Salt Lake Climbers as you might have thought given the short distance. The exception was George, who grew up in Ogden, and his cousins Jeff and Greg, who would come down with George and then later independently. I started through an Ogden climber, Dick Grow. I was working at a small climbing shop in town, Timberline Sports. I met Dick working at Timberline and he would come down here and ask about routes and what not. He invited me to come up to Ogden and one weekend I did. Through Dick on that particular trip, I met Kent Christianson, Jim Wheeler and Bruce Roghaar. For a period of time, probably close to two seasons, I was not infrequently climbing with Dick and other various other 4 combinations. One weekend we would go to Ogden and the next we would come back here. Dick took me to the City of Rocks for the first time. That was probably '73. CW: Did you go on one of the club trips to City of Rocks? DS: Not that trip, but later on. But for a number of years, the Steinfel's – my impression was that they were pretty informal - but they spent Memorial Day and Labor Day at the City of Rocks. I ended up going on a number of trips. By that time I was climbing fairly frequently with Dick and Kent. CW: You ended up going on a few, but not that time? DS: No that time it was just Dick, his first wife, and I that weekend. CW: Do you have any particular recollections of climbing in Ogden or the City of Rocks? DS: Yeah. You could probably make a pretty good argument, at least I hinted at that in the guidebook I wrote, that the finest route of the time in Little Cottonwood Canyon was the Dorsal Fin that George Lowe and Mark McQuarrie did. There was a certain element of competition between George and his cousin Greg. Greg was probably, of all the Lowe brothers and his cousins, the best pure rock climber. Had been involved in gymnastics and trained very hard. Greg's response, I don't know if it was a response, but his statement in the City of Rocks was a route called Infinite. The Dorsal Fin was done in '65 and Infinite, I think, was done in '66. I remember one trip. I believe it was a Memorial Day trip. There's a climber that grew up in Rexburg and was going to school in BYU, Kim Miller. Kim was really kind of the first climber to start, independently, doing the hardest Lowe routes in Little Cottonwood. We were up there at the City of Rocks and Kim was there. A partner I was with Lenny Nelson, and Max Townsend, we had gone 5 off to do a climb. Everyone camped in the same area. We were heading off in one direction and Kim was heading off to try Infinite. We did the route we were going to do and came back to camp for lunch, and what not, and Kent Christianson had spent the morning, up on a boulder with binoculars, watching Kim on Infinite. I guess Kim was taking a number of falls. We had lunch and went off to do another climb and heard the report that Kim had come back to camp to get some pitons and Greg. Kim didn't succeed that trip. A later trip, I think it was October, Kim called me and he was living in Provo at that time. He wanted to drive up to City of Rocks to try Infinite again. So we drove up just for the day. Kim had a Volkswagen Beetle at that time. It was Kim, Bruce Roghaar, myself, and one other fellow who was a friend of Kim's. Kim succeeded that day and the rest of us followed with various amounts of tension from the climbing rope. That was a pretty memorable trip. 6