Oral History Program Jeff Lowe Interviewed by Colby Wayment 24 February 2009 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jeff Lowe Interviewed by Colby Wayment 24 February 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: Lowe, Jeff, an oral history by Colby Wayment, 24 February 2009, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: This is an oral interview with Jeff Lowe. It is being conducted on February 24, 2009, at Jeff Lowe's house concerning the Steinfel Club and how it promoted climbing in the Ogden area. The interviewer is Colby Wayment. CW: When did you join and are you the one who started the club? JL: I'm not sure exactly who started it, but I think it was Kent Christianson. We used to call him "Hack" and I think it was probably 1963 or so. It could have been a year or two earlier, but probably not much later than that. I was just getting into climbing really serious at that time and I wasn't part of the first year or two of Steinfel's. I know my brother Greg was and my older brother Mike. But I'm pretty sure it was Kent Christianson who came up with the name and started getting people together around the idea of a climbing club. CW: Where did the name come from, do you know? JL: Well, I think it means, according to Hack it means "cliff dweller" in German. I'm not sure that's exactly accurate, but something like that. I'm pretty sure the name came from Kent. CW: Greg and Mike were older than you, so they got into it early? JL: Yeah, Mike was about 5 years older and Greg was a couple years older. CW: How would you describe the relationship you had with others in the club? JL: The age range was pretty narrow, but it covered about fifteen years. We had guys like Hack who was maybe ten years older than me. So, he would have been, when I first got 1 involved in Steinfel's when I was thirteen or fourteen, he would have been in his early to mid-twenties. And then, I would probably be about the youngest, at that point, in the club. There were some other guys involved that were Hack's age, maybe even a few years older. It was really a pretty narrow age range and a bunch of us were in high school like my brothers, and eventually I went on to high school to from junior high. So, it was a pretty young crowd. CW: Was there kind of the mentor/apprentice relationship in the club? JL: There was. Hack was a mentor to me. He was a mentor in climbing techniques but also a mentor in other things like beer drinking and smoking cigarettes - all the important stuff, drinking coffee - not when I was thirteen, but by the time I was 15 or 16 on trips to City of Rocks and whatever. They weren't shy of letting the younger guys have a beer or do what he wanted, which was important to me. That kept my interest high because I didn't feel I was excluded in any way. And it never really hurt me badly because I didn't keep up with it. Well I kept up with beer drinking, but with not smoking cigarettes and that kind of thing. It was just a matter of being accepted by older men. You know, it was kind of that passage from childhood into adulthood. That was a good part of it for me. CW: This is kind of the same question, what was the role of Steinfel Club in promoting and teaching climbing to others. JL: Usually through Hack, once again, we would invite famous climbers like Yvon Chouinard, Layton Kor, Royal Robbins or Chuck Pratt to come to town and do a slideshow and when they would come to town they would expose us to the latest techniques in the Yosemite Valley or whatever. So, we got to learn from some of the best in those days. I remember when Chouinard came to town, I was 14, so it would 2 have been 1965 and Chouinard came to do an aid climbing clinic and he also brought a film that he and Tom Frost had just finished on climbing the West Face of the Sentinel in Yosemite Valley and so that film was the first time I had seen a film of that kind of highly technical climbing and I just loved it. It really motivated me to want to learn how to do that type of climbing and to do that. That exposure really motivated myself and I know a bunch of us got turned on by that exposure. Then Chouinard was really influential to me too when he came and gave this clinic. After the clinic, which was up in Ogden Canyon, we would walk around and he'd find a certain kind of crack and show us how to work with it from an aid climbing perspective. He showed us how to get our systems together for aiding and all the things - everything from tying the aiders because we used to tie them. They weren't sewn back then. Sewn etriers didn't come into existence until the early seventies. Prior to that it was all just knotted webbing. Anyway, he showed us all these techniques to make aid-climbing go smoothly and that was critical for me personally, because the next year I started doing these walls and everything I needed to know had been taught at this seminar. Anyway, at the end of that seminar, Yvon, up Ogden Canyon, went exploring around and soloing stuff and I followed him. And he let me follow him and he didn't say, "hey kid, go away." I was really impressed with it because even then I realized he was taking a big risk letting a 14 year-old kid follow him around, soloing. But he, Yvon, was a guy who always "walked the talk." He believed in the kind of self-determination that goes with climbing and let other people, including a 14 year-old kid, make their own choices doing that - something that I wouldn't do now-days. You know, I would never let a student of any age follow me around soloing. But he was bold in that way and it really meant a lot to me. 3 CW: Had you already done the North Face of the Grand or the Black Ice Couloir? You did those when you were 15 or so? JL: Well, no. Actually the biggest climb I had done at that point was, well, l had climbed the Grand, the Exum Ridge, when I was seven. That was my first real climb. I started climbing at Pete's Rock in Salt Lake when I was about five or six with Harold Goodro. I don't remember Harold very well but I do remember him being encouraging. You know, just as an aside, we've got a pretty amazing history here in Northern Utah beginning with Harold and Goodro's Wall in 1949. Beginning with that climb and going to cousin George's climbs in Little Cottonwood and Greg's climbs in this area and up in City of Rocks. Many standards were set here, although they weren't known. It's kind of like Harold was the archetype of a Northern Utah standard setting climb. It was done in complete obscurity and not known, for decades, that it was a really standards setting climb. CW: You mention Royal Robbins and Chouinard coming. Did they ever come to repeat those? JL: They had no idea about them. But Robbins came; maybe it wasn't during one of the seminars, but he came back to Little Cottonwood at one point. I don't remember when exactly, probably mid-sixties, but he and Ted Wilson climbed the Thumb and did that off-width crack at the top of the Thumb, which was a 5.10 climb. So that was probably the first 5.10 climb in Little Cottonwood. Greg had already done 5.10 and 5.11 up here, but that hadn't been known. They weren't rated 5.10 or 5.11. It really interests me, this fact that many of the standards, if you really go back in time. They were, though they weren't known at the time for being this standard, they kind of were. On a world basis, 4 the same thing happened in Dresden, Germany, were they were climbing 5.11 back in 1913, Oliver Perry Smith. So all these stories about the first 5.11, and all that, they're way off. People have known how to climb hard since they've been climbing. It's just the parochial nature of people's knowledge about the history of climbing that they keep repeating these things like the first 5.11 was maybe Pat Ament's Supremacy Crack or something. No way. That's probably outside your project. CW: How much you were involved in getting Royal Robbins and Yvon Chouinard here. Was it difficult? Was Ogden even on the map? JL: No, it wasn't on the map from a climbing standpoint. Salt Lake was a bit. You know, Fred Beckey coming to climb Question Mark Wall and stuff in the early sixties. CW: Was it kind of a tour that they did? JL: No. CW: Someone wrote them a letter? JL: Or called them on the phone or something. How it worked was, probably Hack again, would figure out how to get in touch with these guys and just call them up and say, "Hey will you come out and do this?" And then he would figure out how much it would take to pay their gas because they didn't fly. You know people wouldn't just jump on an airplane like you do today. And gas cost twenty cents a gallon so it was easier to just drive out. But these guys - let's say we had twenty members of Steinfel's - we could get Chouinard out here for four or five days to do a slideshow and the whole thing for probably five bucks a piece or ten bucks a piece. So we'd gather up everybody and chip 5 in their five or ten bucks and get the person out here. So the whole thing would cost us 100 or 200 bucks. CW: So was it almost pro bono on their part other than you were just paying their cost? JL: Oh, maybe they made 50 bucks for 4 or 5 days out here, and the travel and everything. So it would be like a week and they get 50 bucks for it. Pretty amazing. Climbing was not like it is now. These guys were all kind of geeky in a way. Climbers didn't used to be cool. They were misfits and mavericks and I liked that too. Now days, the top climbers are in the media. They're kind of considered great athletes and stuff. Back then it wasn't that way. It just changed that was a neat time to be a climber. For instance, I would never tell anybody I climbed because it always brought up, "You must be crazy; that's so stupid." I just didn't want to have to answer to all that. Now days, you tell somebody you climb and the response is "Oh yeah, I've done that; it's really fun. I've been to the gym." It's a whole different world. CW: Could you explain your personal background, your family and how you think that that led you to get into climbing in general and the climbing club? JL: That was pretty simple. My dad was a climber. He had grown up on the west side of the Tetons in St. Anthony, ID, working on a ranch up there. And when he and his brother, my uncle George were teenagers they hooked up a buggy and drove it out to the Tetons and climbed the Grand from the west side there. I think dad was 16 at the time, and since then, he maintained an interest in mountaineering. Then after the war, he would go up into the Tetons and do some climbing. He was friends with the Exum guides up there and his kids that wanted to go along could go along. And I always wanted to go along. So, as I said, I climbed the Grand when I was seven. But I got 6 scared on that climb and I had nightmares. So I didn't really climb munch until I was about twelve. And that summer, when I was twelve, and my brother Greg was about 13 or 14, we started climbing together around locally here on the Schoolroom Cliffs and up Ogden Canyon and we would go out most every day in the summer and go climbing just on our own and the parents were fine with that. Everything we did was obviously a new route. I can't remember them all because we didn't think so much about first ascents or new routes. We were just climbing. Since not much had been done, it was all new. Although there was classic stuff that had been done up Ogden Canyon. There was Perkins' Chimney. Dean Perkins had been one of the first people to bring climbing to Ogden along with dad. Dean had a store called Perkins Ltd. down on 24th street that was a men's clothing store (maybe women's too) but he also had a climbing shop in there. That was the first place we could buy climbing gear. He had down parkas, some European packs, ropes, carabineer, pitons, and stuff. That was, along with the Steinfel's climbing club, the first readily accessible way to get into climbing in this area. It used to be, back in the sixties, throughout North America, it was hard to get climbing gear. It all came from Europe. REI (Recreational Equipment Incorporated) started in Seattle, in that time, to bring gear in so the members of the Seattle Mountaineers could get gear. It was really so different from now where there is a decent climbing shop not too far from almost anywhere in the country. CW: In addition to selling gear, was Perkins Ltd. kind of a place where climbers would loiter and hang out? A social gathering? JL: I did. I certainly did because I didn't have any money. I just wanted to go down and look at the gear. I would hang out down there. Kent Christensen, Hack, ran the climbing 7 department down there. So I would go down and hang out with him and he would tell stories. He was a great storyteller. I don't know how many of them are true or not. He was a decent climber; Hack was. But I think he also did a lot of climbing in his mind. To hear him tell it, he was best friends with Chouinard, Robbins, Frost, and Pratt, and all these guys who were doing the first ascents of the big walls in Yosemite and stuff. And somehow he did get them here. So, somehow he knew them. He used to talk about the climbs he had done with them and stuff. I don't think he did that much climbing with them. But with Hack it didn't matter; his stories were so good. He would be pulling your leg half the time and you wouldn't know it. CW: It's funny how in climbing we take everything kind of at face value whether it's a first ascent, which I do like. I like trusting someone's assertion that they did something, but it sounds like there is a lot of embellishing going on. JL: I think that's the nature of the beast and the campfire tales are part of the history of climbing even if it didn't happen. CW: I read that one quote on Supertopo a climbing internet forum , you borrowed a line from Ken Kesey, in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, "It's the truth, even if it didn't happen." JL: I like that one. There's truth in it even if it wasn't the exact way it happened. CW: So, in the Perkins Ltd., was there also a bulletin board? If climbing wasn't that popular, how did you recruit people, if you didn't want to express that you were a climber? JL: No, there wasn't a bulletin board. It was word of mouth. Since I was not one of the "recruiters," I was the "recruitee." But basically I think it was Hack that was the glue for this whole thing, to get this thing going. I think he probably talked Dean into carrying the 8 climbing equipment in the store. It probably was not very difficult to talk Dean into it because Dean had done a lot of ski racing in Europe and had done some climbing over there too and he was very interested. In terms of the kinds of people who were important to the early days in Ogden, it would be dad, Dean Perkins, and Kent Christensen. CW: Could you expound a little bit? Your dad, did he live in Ogden previously or did he locate here because of the outdoors in general? JL: Well, he came down from St. Anthony with his parents. They moved from Idaho to Ogden at some point, I forget when exactly, but probably before the war, probably in the thirties they moved down here to 26th street. So he just moved with his parents. He didn't consciously choose Ogden, but he loved it here. He was always hiking up Malan's or Mt. Ogden, or something, or Ben Lomond, and the kids could always go with him if we wanted and I always wanted to go because I always thought it was fun hiking. CW: So it was circumstantial? JL: Yeah, but he recognized the beauty that was here. He was one of the early skiers in the area. He was, I think, one of the founding members of the Mt. Ogden Ski Club. Although dad was never, I think, an official member of Steinfel's. That was a younger group. I don't think we had anybody our parent's age in the club that I can recall. CW: Are there any anecdotes or anything else to illustrate the Steinfel's Club, like going to City of Rocks? There is Steinfel's Dome. I don't know how that got its name. JL: When I first became aware of Steinfel's and City of Rocks, it was kind of the same period. Greg as I said was about eighteen or twenty months older than me - he still is by 9 the way eighteen or twenty months older - he was just enough older that he was getting into climbing a little bit before I was. As I said, I was climbing the Grand. I got scared and didn't really want to climb for a few years and then I started climbing again when I was about twelve. Greg would have been about 13 or 14 at that time and he started going with the Steinfel's Club to City of Rocks before I was part of that, a year or so before. I saw pictures of these guys climbing. The first thing I remember is pictures of them climbing on what they called Steinfel's Dome on the South Face. Greg had led up on the South Face; there's a nice little crack through a roof on it. It's like a 5.10 thing or something. And those pictures looked like Yosemite to me back then and I'd think, "Wow, that's a neat place." That was probably about '64 or '63. That's when I became aware that there was a club that Greg was a member of and I think Mike was a member of the club too. So, I wanted to become a member. I think you had to have somebody sponsor you to become a member or something. And I think Hack sponsored me. I'm not sure how our membership worked. I think all you had to do was show some interest become a member and you had to pay your dues, which was I think seven dollars and fifty cents for a year or something like that. And then we had meetings at people's houses, or in the summer we would have a meeting, say, in the foothills. There were some campfire rings up there and we would go meet up there, bring beer. Usually it would be a bouldering session first and finish up with a campfire telling stories. Or a few times we would go up to snow basin and hang out at a picnic area up there. We used to climb quite a lot up on Mt. Ogden, on the east side of Mt. Ogden. That was one of our early mountaineering type areas along with the Willard Spires area. It's not world class climbing, but you can learn to climb here and you can definitely learn to deal with 10 less than perfect rock. We didn't know it was what we now call "choss." We thought that was just rock in the mountains. Nowadays people are so spoiled by Yosemite, and even places like Little Cottonwood, where the rock is so good that when they get to normal mountain rock, which is looser, more fractured and broken, it's a big deal. But back then we just assumed that was normal. CW: You guys had a good eye for picking out lines routes like Pass or Fail or Tree Crack. JL: That was Greg. Although, I did a climb up there I haven't heard of anybody else... well there are two climbs up there I think are pretty good. One I called Larry's Crack because I did it with Larry Ross. You heard about Larry Ross, right? CW: Yeah, the Ross Route in Little Cottonwood and he was killed on Haystack. JL: Once again, I think when we did that route, we called it 5.9 because 5.9 was supposed to be desperate and that was pretty desperate. I bet it's 5.11. Greg was so much better than me as a free climber; I always thought I really sucked. Actually I was climbing 5.10 back in the mid-sixties too, and maybe some 5.11, without knowing it. But because Greg could climb so much harder I just assumed that I was a horrible free climber and he was my normal partner. CW: I'm just trying to picture you guys back in the sixties looking at Tree Crack, and the group in general. Would you say that the Steinfel Club would go to certain cliffs in a group and there was a kind of one-upmanship? JL: No there was none of that. Basically, it was a romantic approach. It wasn't a competitive approach. Because Greg was so much better that everyone else, nobody tried to compete with Greg and I actually didn't even like to go climbing with him too much 11 sometimes because he wanted to do these that were so much harder than anything I wanted to do. That was not that much fun for me. He would just find a belayer. That's all he wanted was a belayer. He had projects he wanted to go and do like Infinite on the Clamshell up there in the City of Rocks. That was probably the hardest slab climb in the country when he did it in '66. You know, 5.11c - run out 11c. CW: Did he cycle through partners a lot, because of this, no one wanted to follow him? JL: Well, Yeah. And since they couldn't climb it, they'd be pulled up the route. I could usually follow him and I did enjoy climbing with him. He was my first major climbing partner for sure. He was definitely head and shoulders above anybody else in terms of climbing ability. And I was behind him, but I was that much ahead of all the rest of them too. There was Greg and there was me. George wasn't really climbing in this area. He started climbing out in California when he went to Harvey Mudd College out there. So he came back and started climbing in Little Cottonwood in the sixties and he was climbing at a good level too. But that was almost independent of Greg and me. Then I started climbing with George in the mid-sixties. Greg and George were my two main partners back then. CW: Greg was a gymnast, correct? Is that how he got so strong? JL: Oh yeah, he was a gymnast and had all the strength - one arm and one finger pull-ups. CW: Did Greg raising the bar made everybody else in the club lift themselves up too, or were they just kind of content climbing whatever they could? JL: He didn't really raise everybody else up because he was operating too far ahead the rest of us. He raised me up a little. There's one route I know the rating of that I did when 12 I was 14 with Greg and I led this route. I think we rated it 5.8 or something, but I see in the guide it's called Airtime or something like that. It's rated 10c now. That was the first really intense summer of climbing I had when I was 14. We spent, I think it was, 72 days straight that summer not missing a day climbing and doing routes around and that was one of the routes. So, without knowing, 10c back in 1965 was pretty much state of the art. And without knowing it I was climbing at that level and Greg was climbing 3 grades harder. CW: Was there a focus on training? I imagine with Greg there would for sure because he was a gymnast. But for you guys, did you lift weights aside? JL: Greg was a real boulder. He was a John Gill type boulderer. His problems were so outside of anyone's ability; no one could tell what he was doing back then. I'm sure he was doing V8s. CW: I don't know if you could speak for the other Steinfel members, but you, did you lift weights or focus on training aside from bouldering? JL: Well Greg used to do specific workouts and I did them with him. Above the garage doors, at the family house, it is those two-inch bricks and there is a little space between each brick with a half-inch depth. For training, we would open the garage doors, reach up and grab the first brick and go brick to brick, up and down, up and down with your feet dangling free. We would do other things. You would have like twenty moves in a very short period of time and it took accuracy. To go up and down on those things is very much like people do campus boards now. He wouldn't pass a door-jam without doing twenty fingertip pull-ups. He was constantly training and I was, once again, behind him on that, but I was doing some of it too. But he was intense and he was doing 13 a lot of martial arts at that time, too - karate and toughening his hands. He could do all those tricks - breaking bricks and boards. He was very aggressive with training. And as far as working with weights and stuff, not too much working with weights, but a lot of gymnastic workouts: rings. We had a set of rings in the back yard that we trained on and Greg could do the front and back levers and all those. We had heard about John Gill and the things he could do and Greg was making sure that he could do all the things Gill could do. He could do them all. I don't think he ever got a one-arm front lever, though, that Gill could do. I don't think Greg ever did that, but he could do everything else. He had the strength that you needed for those kinds of climbs. CW: Pushing the limits came natural for you guys? JL: There wasn't an emphasis on weight training. We use to kind of laugh...climbing back in the sixties, you didn't want to train too much because it was not cool to train too much. Greg was different; he was just ferocious about it. It was more the English attitude of go drink and climb with a hangover. You were a good climber if you could climb after a night of carousing. 14