Oral History Program Brad Roghaar Interviewed by Colby Wayment 31 March 2009 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Brad Roghaar Interviewed by Colby Wayment 31 March 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, Brad, an oral history by Colby Wayment, 31 March 2009, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Brad Roghaar. It is being conducted on March 31, 2009 at Brad Roghaar's office concerning the Steinfell Climbing Club. The interviewer is Colby Wayment. CW: How did you get into it? BR: Well there were the group of people who started to climb in probably the late '50s. Some of these early members that really formed the Steinfell's, as I remember correctly, was Kent Christianson, who we used to call Hack, Frank Cunningham, Todd Maltby. These guys were probably fifteen years older than I was, which would make them twelve years older than my brother. They were all associated with Perkins Ltd. Dean Perkins was one of the first people who came into climbing, brought climbing equipment into the Ogden area. He had done a little climbing himself. The other area of interest was the Lowes. Jeff and Greg Lowe's father took an interest in climbing and got that family climbing as well. But Todd Maltby and those guys, Hack, and Frank Cunningham, they actually had a little sports car group going on. They all had different sports cars: MGs, Triumphs, and just old sports cars. They kind of formed this sports car club and that's really where Steinfell's kind of came from because they were also climbing. They had their mugger hats on. Most of them were skiers. I think they were just in love with the idea of Europe, the Alps. They started climbing around the canyons. They met up with Greg Lowe and Jeff Lowe. I was Jeff's age. My brother brought me home some klettershoes when I was 14. CW: Where did he get them from? 1 BR: From Perkins Ltd. We had started climbing on Goldline ropes and things all over up here. So, we were doing a lot of climbing before this club got started. I know my brother had been talking about it, going to meetings, and doing a lot climbing with this club called Steinfel's for about a year and they decided to allow Jeff Lowe and myself into it. We were really young. We were 14 or 15 years old. Most these guys were in their 20s. So they didn't know how we would fit. But we were certainly doing quite a bit of climbing. The original club probably had about half a dozen and within a year or two it probably had two dozen fairly active climbers. CW: As far as the age gap, were you and Jeff the only young ones? BR: My brother was only a few years older and Greg Lowe was too. Some of the founding members were only teenagers. Mike McConville got into the club a little later. He was a year younger than me. Keith Myers got in a few years after I did. He was younger. It was a pretty fluid thing. Whoever was really active at the time, they would be asked to be in the club. We had meetings about once a month. We met almost once a week, really. Bouldering was all summer long. Sometimes we would bring people in. I remember Tom Frost came in once and did a clinic for us. He was just passing through. I think Kent knew him or something. One of the big things we did was every Memorial Day weekend and every Labor Day weekend, we all packed up and went to City of Rocks, Idaho, which was unknown at the time. We drove up there and would have a big camp out up there. We would all climb for three or four days and camp two or three nights strait. We did a lot of the climbs at City of Rocks and had names for them that no longer exist. The guidebooks now have different names. We climbed there for fifteen or twenty years before anyone really discovered it. 2 CW: How many years did you go up to the City as part of the club? BR: I must have gone up about a dozen times. CW: So the club lasted like ten years almost? BR: Yeah. But when it didn't last any more it was still a memory. The same people were still climbing and knew each other. I don't really recall how the club disappeared necessarily. I think it just got too complex. People got tired of doing meetings or things like that and everybody's doing their climbing anyway. It just kind of faded out as I remember. It just kind of phased out. I quit climbing after I was a senior after a couple years. I had a circulation problem that made it difficult for me when it gets cold. I got back into it when I was about 22 and climbed until I was 28. CW: As far as the age gap goes, when you went on trips or to parties, was everybody together or were there different groups based on age? BR: No, they were all together - one big campground. I suppose that is what was exciting about the thing. There just wasn't that many people climbing. It wasn't popular. It was kind of a neat thing to do. But I suppose we just enjoyed each other's company. Some members were ten or fifteen years older. I don't even know because I don't remember. I remember, of course, that they were a lot older. But if you knew Hack, or Todd Maltby, or Frank Cunningham, they were just nice guys and they enjoyed teaching people. That's where I learned. They were very responsible kinds people in the sense that they taught you the proper way to belay and do all the safety things that you needed to do. They taught you respect for the mountains that you needed. I think it was very good for climbing because the people that were involved in climbing, most were in that club. So, 3 we kept it pretty safe because we all had the same kind of philosophy: climbing safely, taking care of each other. These older climbers wanted the younger climbers to climb. They respected you for what you did and we respected them. We were all in the same camp. We swore just like the rest of them. It was very inclusive. CW: All the people who came into the club after you, did they just know someone in the club, or did a few of them just wander into Perkins? BR: I think what would happen is that people might wander into Perkins and ask. They pretty much knew who was out and about doing it. Ogden was small, you know, so they would see you up climbing and maybe they would say, "I'd like to do that" and they would know that maybe you could get some equipment down there. They would go down there. Hack worked there. It was more like, "Will you show me how?" You would go up and spend a couple evenings showing them how and if they had that interest and started doing it a lot, they were probably invited in the club, basically. I don't think anybody tried to get in the club who wasn't well known by everybody there. But everybody in Ogden was well known. You had the Ross and different families who were very outdoor kind of families. Primarily it was those kids who came into it. CW: Do you have any anecdotes about the parties, City of Rocks trips, or bouldering sessions, or the clinics? BR: Well, the bouldering sessions and the clinics were great because it was just wonderful. You know how beautiful it is around here. In those days it was just as beautiful to wonder up into the boulders and try out new things. In those days, if you could hang by your fingertips and make one move that was pretty exciting. Compared to what people are doing now, you have athletes and they are practicing a lot in safe ways. So it was 4 very different. In those days it was a much bigger ordeal to hammer in pitons and hammer them out. It was physical draining compared to placing a chock. I remember a lot. I remember Greg Lowe showing up with super balls. They were rubber balls he cut in half and glued on the bottom of his tennis shoes. Which was very weird because you wouldn't even think of climbing in tennis shoes in those days. They were more like boots. The idea was to have a very solid sole, not one that would bend around. We used to use machine nuts before Chouinard or before nuts came out. They worked the same way. Greg Lowe was always coming up with some strange, technological thing. Of course he ended up really inventing the cam and features you see on every pack today. The original Lowe Alpine design pack was amazing. It was the first to have a sternum strap, adjustable straps, and compression straps. It was amazing how much Greg developed. I don't know if that was part of the club so much. We were continually doing things like that. I could tell you a lot of great stories about underage drinking, but those days were those days. We would go up to City of Rocks. We weren't strangers. We had a little wine and beer. It was more of a camaraderie. It didn't make much difference, everybody was treated the same in the club. It was just a lot of fun to go up there, sit around the campfire at night, swap stories, talk about what you were going to do, watch each other do different routes, and solve different problems, and do that hadn't been done before. It was fun. All the sudden you did it. It was like, "Oh, that was amazing." A lot of those today would be pretty standard kinds of things, but in those days they were pretty big deals. So it was just a mutual support. I suppose the whole club was not seen as a real conservative club. People who skied, people who climbed, people who drove sports cars, all that stuff, they were a wilder kind of people. 5 CW: I haven't asked this question yet, but did you try and meet any girls - take them dating? BR: Yeah. I would have to tell you the truth. In those days it was pretty cool to be a climber. There weren't that many around. There was a mystic about climbing and danger and all that stuff. I remember taking dates climbing, in a sense, like bouldering because that was a different thing to do. It was a way to get them alone in the mountains. It was pretty good. There was a mystic about it and certainly people were aware about it and people in the club were aware about it. CW: Jeff kind of claims the opposite; he didn't want to tell anyone he was a climber because climbing was on the fringe and seen as stupid. BR: I would interpret that this way. I don't think it was seen as stupid. I think it was seen as dangerous and kind of strange. Let me backtrack a little bit. There was a mystic involved. The mystic was better off if you didn't talk about it a lot because that would have been very uncool if you walked around and said, "I'm a climber." The people who were in it were definitely in it because they enjoyed what they were doing. It wasn't a cool thing to do in the sense that everybody thought it was cool so everybody wants to do it. But there was a mystic about it, I think. But it was very uncool to talk about it in the sense of how cool this is. I think that's what he probably was getting at. So you didn't go around and advertise it, but certain people were aware of this group of people who were climbing - how strange that was or weird. It was just a real joy to get up on a Saturday and do your little chores, then meet and get a ride someplace with the older members up in Ogden Canyon to climbing. That was just the thing. And yeah, I can't say it wasn't fun as a 15 year old to have a beer after that. So all those things, it was just very normal. There was nothing weird about it. We read a lot of books: Annapurna and all 6 these exciting books about climbers. We knew their names and scrambles amongst the Alps: Rebufat's Snow and Ice. All these books we would read were exciting books about people doing what we saw as neat stuff. We talked about them and I'm sure we all saw ourselves in different ways. I will say this about Jeff. He's not the run-of-mill climber. He was a terrific skier on the Junior National team. He climbed things before I met him and even during the time I was climbing with him that I didn't know about. I've since known his stories; he was very young and climbed up the backside of Mt. Ogden alone and bivouacking up there. That would have been pretty strange at that time. I don't know anybody who was doing that. We would go up there and bivouac, but we would go with three or four people. I didn't know about it until a couple years ago. He didn't come back and say, "I've done this." When he went off to school, he went to Paradise College near Lake Tahoe. They had a little college there. It was a Junior Olympic camp. All the Olympic skiers and stuff on the Junior Team were going there, but he just got into climbing more than skiing. A year later, or so, he came through and he was a pretty different guy. He had spent a whole year in Lake Tahoe, near "Frisco", and it had changed him. As far as I know, when he went to school he was thinking of an education to a certain extent. I don't think he was when he came back. He was thinking of a career; he was going to climb. That was 1969. That was the big thing: do your own thing. I could see this when I climbed with him when I was 15, 16, and 17 years old. I didn't consider myself a terrible climber. I was a good climber. He did things I couldn't have led. I could follow them, but there wasn't much to that. But he was smaller and would make moves that were different from most people; his concentration was different. You could see that. I don't think I could have articulated it when I was younger 7 except to say, "He's a great climber." But I think that he always had a different way of looking at what he was doing, which I think that was perfect for what he was doing. It's like a basketball player who has all the skills - you can see that - but then maybe he has a little different something else. Plus he has a little more joy in doing what they are doing than the average person. Even more than that they have a mental capacity that seems different. They don't seem to feel the pressure of a jump shot. They don't seem to get nervous or things don't interfere with their thinking when they are in the middle of a difficult thing. Some people are gifted within a bunch of different ways and they are all put together within that particular thing and that is why they are so successful - why he was able to do what he did. 8