Dale Bard Was the “Heavyweight Champion of the Dirtbagging World”
This story was originally published in Climbing No. 233 (August 2003) under the same title. It is being republished here in light of Dale Bard’s recent death. Read a touching tribute but Bard’s longtime friend, Randy Leavitt, here.
The espresso machine snarled like a chained wolf, serving a listless procession of morning supplicants. I tipped my chair back and sipped bitter stimulation. Starbucks, in Redlands, California, out past San Bernardino on the far eastern edge of the Los Angeles basin. Spindly palm trees flopped their heads against a hazy sky. North, the gray-green slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains rose to meet a dusting of snow on the 11,500-foot summit of San Gorgonio. Citrus orchards abutting Redlands Boulevard perfumed the air between the car dealerships, Del Tacos, and strip malls. The place felt half-developed, but when the coffee maker wheezed silent, I could almost hear the torrents of asphalt and concrete pouring in from Los Angeles. It seemed a strange place to wait for one of America’s best climbers ever
Suddenly, I saw him, unmistakable, bounding across the parking lot, a small man in his late forties with buzz-cut hair, big ears, cutoff fatigue pants, glasses, and coarse, weathered skin. Thick veins twined down his arms. Dale Bard. He sat, palms on his thighs, smiled, and was, for a nanosecond, motionless, filling the air with the ozone smell of a stymied dynamo.
“You ready to go?” Bard asked. He’d trepidatiously agreed to escort me to a clandestine bouldering area he described as being somewhere between Yosemite and Patagonia.
Bard, 48, drove while I grappled with his Joycean stream-of-consciousness conversation, a tidal wave of sentences that seemed to end only in commas. “You’re gonna love this place, it’s awesome, killer rock, sweet edges, great setting, you’re just not going to believe where it’s at, did you bring good edging shoes?, too bad we can’t go there again tomorrow.” The guy should be wired into the power grid. We linked up en route with Randy Leavitt, Kevin Worrall, and the rest of Bard’s posse of heavy So-Cal locals.
Primo pink boulders reared up at the end of a dirt road. Bard and Leavitt toppled me into the dust and swore violence if I revealed the location in print. It was like being threatened by a pair of housecats. Kevin Worrall, glowering in the background, gave the threat substance, though there was no real danger of my revealing the name of a bouldering area where I could only do the downclimbs.
***
Bard and Leavitt have known each other since the late 1970s, back when Leavitt was just coming into his own, an unknown teenager staggering into Camp 4 after soloing the second ascent of Electric Ladyland (V 5.10a A4) on Washington Column. In those days Bard, then 25, was at the top of the game, high priest of the hardcore, trashing partners like a tornado tearing up a trailer park. Bard asked Leavitt to join him for a trip up the Pacific Ocean Wall (VI 5.9 A3) on El Cap, and Leavitt jumped at the opportunity to climb with the legend.
“Good,” said Bard. “We go up tomorrow.”
They hiked gear to the base that afternoon, and Bard peeled off his shirt. The veins on his stomach looked like a plate of unsauced spaghetti. Bard turned to Leavitt and said, “We’ll split the food bill.”
“Okaaay … how much did it cost?” said Leavitt, not knowing what to expect.
“Four dollars.”
Canned pineapples for breakfast, then, at night, after a full day of rickety aid on what at the time was one of the hardest wall routes in the world, a couple of lemons to scour the bad taste from their mouths. “I don’t know if Dale wanted to save money or if he just didn’t want to hassle with food,” said Leavitt. “He was so hyped, so motivated, I don’t think he really needed food.”
Leavitt took a 35-foot toss from the ninth pitch, banged his head, went a little wobbly. But he sucked it up and soldiered for the rim—he was awed to be climbing with Bard and didn’t want to seem soft. The pair stormed the 28-pitch wall in four-and-a-half days, making the route’s fourth ascent. The instant they got down to the valley floor, Bard charged off to Elephant Rock, to make a free attempt on Fatal Mistake (5.11a A1 at the time). “Dale climbs hard ice, does A5 and scary 5.12 first ascents, speed climbs, boulders hard,” Leavitt said. “He’s one of the original well-rounded hardmen.”
***
Bard rode the cutting edge of the climbing game through the 1970s and 1980s. He was one of the best rock climbers of the day, authoring a slew of tough free routes like the Rostrum’s Blind Faith (IV 5.11d). He did first, second, or early ascents of a huge number of big walls on El Capitan and Half Dome, including such landmark first ascents as Sea of Dreams (VI 5.9 A4) and Bushido (VI 5.10 A4). In the Buttermilk boulders outside of Bishop, California, Bard established—pre-crashpad and sans spotter—mega-classics like High Plains Drifter (V7).
The chink in Bard’s toughguy armor? On the Pacific Ocean Wall, Bard slept with a teddy bear.
***
Bard grew up in Alameda, a dockworkers’ town on the Oakland side of San Francisco Bay. His father was a 25-year Coast Guard vet who worked in an electronic warehouse after retiring from the service. Dale Bard started climbing as a 17-year-old with his older brother Gary, an Army Ranger just back from two tours in ‘Nam, at Berkeley’s Indian Rock. Then Dale fell under the wing of the more experienced Mike Caldwell (Tommy Caldwell’s father), who took him to the Valley. His first route was the notorious Steck-Salathé (V 5.9) on Sentinel Rock. The next weekend Bard and Caldwell did the East Face of Washington Column (V 5.9 A3; now Astroman, 5.11c), then, the following weekend, the West Face of Sentinel (V 5.9 A3)—three straight Grade Vs. Bard jumped to the top of the free-climbing grade—at that time, 5.10. His energy and mouthful of braces earned him the nickname “Sparkles.”
He commuted from Merritt College to the cliffs for a quarter, then quit and worked in his Dad’s warehouse for three more months before moving, permanently, to Yosemite. Alan, Dale’s slightly older brother, also moved to the Valley at the time, but took a steady job with the park concessionaire, the Curry Company, and thereby stayed in his folks’ good graces. Dale—unemployed, uneducated, living in the dirt, and climbing every day—was totally excommunicated.
“I lived for years on zero dollars,” Bard said.
Janet Sullins, Bard’s girlfriend, worked at the Four Seasons restaurant and collected leftover baked potatoes and prized hunks of cheesebread. Another friend passed Kit-Kat bars out the back door of the gift shop. Bard often cruised the Village McDonald’s at closing time to scarf unsold Big Macs. He grazed food scraps off abandoned cafeteria trays. “But I had my morals,” Bard said. “I wouldn’t go into dumpsters, and I never, ever canned.”
Bard once lived for an entire season on fifteen borrowed dollars. He bummed the money from Ron Kauk in the spring and paid him back with the first money he made the next fall. The 19-year-old Bard made a lasting impression on 15-year-old Kauk, who would come up to the Valley on weekend breaks from high school in Half-Moon Bay.
Bard lived in a converted bakery van that he had tricked out into a stealth RV. Inside, his ropes, gear, and headbands hung in perfect order. (Bard would inhabit self-customized vehicles for most of the next 15 years.) Jimi Hendrix jams drifted out of the van and mingled with the sound of the Valley’s thundering waterfalls and the smell of the pines. Kauk soaked it up like a sponge.
“Dale played a major role in showing me how to live off the minimum,” Kauk said. “He’s the one who showed me that the simple climbing life was even possible. I thought Dale was straight-up cool. And God, he had an awesome collection of headbands.” (Which were simply patterned napkins that Bard had nicked from a variety of restaurants.)
Bard’s hummingbird energy was contagious, and he and Kauk did dozens of routes together, three of their most notable first ascents being Freestone, a savage Grade IV 5.11c on the Geek Towers with Jim Bridwell, Blind Faith (5.11d), on the Rostrum, and Iron Hawk, a grim A4 on El Capitan.
One of the landmark climbs of the decade was the 1975 first one-day ascent of the Nose (VI 5.9 C2), done by Billy Westbay, John Long, and Bridwell in about 15 hours. A few days later, Long and Bard did the first one-day ascent of El Cap’s West Face (VI 5.10 A3)—in five hours. “Dale was a prince of a partner,” Long said. “He ran around on raw nervous energy, but here was the weird thing—way runout on the lead he was as calm as a bat. It’s like he needed to be out on the lead—it was the only thing that calmed him down.”
Kauk and Bard were supposed to do the Nose in a day together, but Kauk couldn’t wait—while Bard and Long were on the West Face, Kauk did the Nose with Werner Braun. Knowing Bard now lacked a partner, Long referred him to a young unknown named Tony Yaniro. With Yaniro rocket-jumaring behind him, Bard knocked off the Nose in nine hours. Bard was back down in the Valley, cleaned up, and at a party in Toulumne Meadows before dark. A day or two later, Bard and Kauk one-dayed the Salathé Wall (VI 5.9 C2) with ropes already fixed to Heart Ledge. A week before El Cap had never been climbed in a day. By the end of the week, Bard had climbed it in a day three times, by three different routes. Bard and Yaniro’s Nose speed record wasn’t broken for a decade, until Peter Croft and John Bachar shaved some time off as part of their one-day linkup of El Cap and Half Dome.
Bard’s diet was as legendary as his climbs. Pump a few morning calories into his tiny frame and he could climb all day. “Dale would get a five-pound jar of peanut butter, five pounds of wild honey, and a big sack of potatoes, and he’d be good for weeks,” Kauk said. Bard once inherited two gallons of brewer’s yeast from a departing climber: “I’d wake up in the morning, mix five tablespoons of that stuff into a glass of water, and that would do me for the day. I lived on that for the entire summer of 1977.” To supplement, Bard grazed on plates of leftovers abandoned by tourists in the cafeteria. When the Curry Company wanted to make an example of a dirtbagging climber, a security guard nabbed Bard.
Bard was arrested on a Sunday. The Yosemite magistrate didn’t sit until the following Friday, so the National Park Service trucked Bard down to the county lock-up in Mariposa and tossed him in a cell with a lineup of felons: a murderer standing trial, a hardcore thief, and three thugs accused of assault with intent to kill. The jailers issued Bard a mattress, a pillow, and a blanket. One of the thugs took all three. “I had nothing,” Bard said. “I slept on the concrete floor.” In the morning the other inmates stomped the bedding bully for an unrelated transgression of cellblock etiquette, and he was carted off to the hospital. (The deputies listening in the other room did nothing.) Bard inherited the vacated bunk. A day later the murderer was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, leaving Bard with three cellmates.
On night three, Ron, a burly Chino Penitentiary veteran being held for grand theft, lay in the bunk beneath Bard. Bob and John, the two other thugs were in another bunk, and they started talking about young kids, soft skin, being lonely in prison. “I was lying in bed, and pretty soon I realized they were talking about me.” Bard went steel cold, leapt off his bunk, and grabbed Bob, yelling, “If either one of you scumbags touches me I’m ripping both your balls off!” Flea-sized Bard thought he was a goner. Then Ron stood up, glared at the two thugs and said, “Enough,” and, turning to Bard, “Kid, you got balls.” Bard was only 19, but really, the cons had no idea: his granite action would have shriveled their damned souls.
Quite an ordeal for scarfing a plate of leftovers. Bard’s official charge read: “To accost persons in a public place with the purpose of begging or soliciting alms.” The magistrate dropped it—Bard hadn’t accosted anyone, only eaten abandoned food. Regardless, the NPS kicked him out of the park for 90 days. Nothing, however, could divide Bard from his beloved stone. He hid in the boulders behind Camp 4 until his exile expired.
“No way I was leaving. I was on fire in those days, climbing 24-7,” Bard said. “There was no such thing as a rest day. Bachar and Long thought I was nuts, but I told ‘em: first, I love it; second, I can’t sit still.” Would Bard have considered steady employment to break his penurious existence? “Good God, no!” John Long said. “He had routes to do. It wasn’t like Dale was panhandling around with nothing to do. He was out there grinding it down to a nub. Dale was making history every day, no way he was going to give up a day’s climbing to get a job.”
“I was in killer wall shape in 1977 and 1978,” Bard said, “Hooks, blades, heads, I didn’t care. I could stand on anything.” He doesn’t know exactly how many times he climbed El Cap—somewhere between 50 and 80. A wrist injury that kept him from top-grade free climbing spurred his wall binge, but the walls also became fun. Bard was so poor (and so good), that he prostituted himself for food on many big walls—his less-experienced partners had to foot the food bill in order to hitch rides up the big stone.
Bard’s El Cap career peaked in 1978, when he made three classic first ascents: Iron Hawk (VI 5.9 A4) with Ron Kauk, Sunkist (VI 5.9 A5) with Bill Price, and finally Sea of Dreams (VI 5.9 A4) with Jim Bridwell and Dave Diegleman. Of the three, Sea of Dreams, an improbable linkup of micro-features in the center of El Cap’s sweeping southeast face, was the most significant. Every pitch was hard. Today, many are downright legendary: the Laura Scudder Traverse underneath an expanding potato-chip flake; Hook or Book, 100 feet of tenuous, creative A5 hook traversing that had Diegleman equalizing hook placements on counter-oppositional edges above a bone-crunching corner; Don’t Skate, Mate; and Ace in Space and the Peruvian Flakes, two pitches of stunning hooking more than 20 pitches off the deck. At the time, the route was the world’s most sustained line of aid. The team rated nine of the 27 pitches A5. Even today, after many ascents and much chicken-bolt defilement, Sea of Dreams is considered one of the Captain’s most mighty lines, a bona fide testpiece holding solid at A4.
Midway through Dale’s 1978 charge, his parents came to the Valley to visit Alan. Dad finally asked about Dale, so Alan took his parents to El Cap Meadow and pointed to a tiny dot near the top of the monolith. “That’s him.”
Old Man Bard was stunned. Alan presented his father with a scrapbook of Dale’s press clippings from Mountain Magazine, to which Dad said, “I guess I was wrong, Dale went to college in his own way, to Yosemite U.”
***
In 1975, John Bachar took Bard up a WI2 ice slab on the June Lake Loop on the east side of the Sierra. Bard fell in love. He drove to New England in 1976 and spent the whole winter honing his skills on Northeastern ice. The next year, Bard and alpinist Jack Roberts drove up to Canada in Roberts’ unheated VW bus. They defrosted the windows with a climbing stove and made the first free ascent, and second overall, of 2,000-foot Polar Circus (V WI5). Not knowing to rappel the route, they were benighted on the ridge above in 30-below-zero temps. “We dug into this bench,” remembered Bard. “Roberts had Goretex, I had none, my sleeping bag was frozen solid … it was cold.”
Bard imparted his new passion for ice to Kauk in 1977, and the two set out to make the second ascent of the Widow’s Tears (V WI5), the best of Yosemite’s ephemeral ice climbs. It was snowing when they got to the base. Kauk led the first pitch getting bombed by big spindrifts. “We decided that this was not a good thing and rapped off,” Bard said. The bottom ice bowl was banked out with snow. Off rope, Kauk took one step into the bowl, and it avalanched, sweeping him away. Bard watched in terror as Kauk surfed atop a 20-foot wave of snow, which he rode 300 feet into what in the summer was a talus field. “Ron was down there yelling, ‘I’m alive! I’m alive!’ and I’m going yeah, yeah, that’s fine, but now I gotta solo down all this ice.”
They nailed the second ascent a few days later.
Bard spent 50 continuous days skiing 250 miles of the Sierra’s High Traverse and the John Muir Trail with Nadim Meloncotti, surviving two monster storms, then spent 21 out of the next 30 days on El Cap. He went up to Oregon to rig for the TV show “Survival of the Fittest.” Bard spent his earnings on a trip to Alaska with Chas Macquarrie and made three attempts on the then-unclimbed Moonflower Buttress on Mount Hunter’s north face. When he got back to California, Bard’s rigging boss called and asked him to go to Antarctica. His girlfriend, Janet, tired of playing Penelope, warned, “Don’t go, I’ll leave you.”
“So I didn’t go,” said Bard. “She left me anyway. I’ve always kind of resented that. I could have gone to Antarctica.”
In the Sierras, Bard knocked out the first ascent of Mount Mendel’s Ice Nine Couloir (WI5+), now commonly regarded as California’s best alpine ice climb.
“It was a magical time,” Ron Kauk said of 1970s Yosemite. “There was this energy of adventure, nature, and simplicity all mixed in the air, the music, the conversations. It was all encompassing.” Indeed, the glamour of the era shines across the decades like a searchlight. Less well-appreciated is how hard a life it was to maintain. “That life was thankless,” John Long said. There were no rewards. It was marginal and committing, and a lot of times it was very, very dangerous. “It would have been impossible to maintain if it wasn’t for the enthusiastic support of your peers,” Long continued, “and nobody could have been more enthusiastic or more supportive than Dale.” Bard doled out psyche—raw mental energy—by the bucket load. “Dale Bard was a true believer. He lived that life right to a tee.”
Bard himself doesn’t remember it as particularly hard. “I didn’t even think about it. All I wanted to do was climb.”
***
However, the decade on the walls and in the dirt did take its toll. By 1982, Bard was sick of being broke. He tried going back to school. It didn’t work out. He tried working for Patagonia and that didn’t work, either. He went back to the rock. Bard parked his van in the Buttermilks (his idyllic and secluded campsite amid the giant boulders is still known as Dale’s Camp), below the spine of the Eastern Sierras, and bouldered, still flat broke. High Plains Drifter, a V7/V8 highball just uphill from the Grandma Peabody boulder, is Bard’s signature effort from the era, but not his hardest. The modern bouldering brigade has tagged his most difficult problems at V9. All were done pre-crashpad and most were done without a spotter. His Transporter Room (V5 or 5.12X) is a problem so high and so bold that three generations of climbers have looked up in awe, gasping, “Oh my God, what was he thinking?” Bard worked the problem on toprope, then sent it sans cord in an effort that presaged the modern headpointing movement.
He fell in with up-and-coming climber Bobbi Bensman, and the two traveled the country, bouldering and climbing. Though Bard didn’t get entangled in the sport/trad imbroglios of the mid-1980s, he was frustrated with climbing when he and Bensman split up, disenchanted with the negative competitiveness that he felt was then destroying the sport. “Competitiveness was fine. We were always competitive, but we didn’t root for the other guy to fail.”
Bard again looked for other outlets. He went to school and studied physical therapy. He tried working for Patagonia once more, but again, he didn’t like it. He moved to Lake Tahoe and tended bar, then transplanted to Bend, Oregon, in 1987 and was part owner of Sport Climbing Systems, a company that made climbing holds. They landed the contract to built the Snowbird competition wall, yet lost $10,000 on the job. Bard got a Hollywood job rigging “Star Trek 5” to pay off the debt. He fell in love with the director’s wife, had a torrid affair, received death threats. Climbing lost its relevance. Bard moved to Los Angeles in 1989 and got out of climbing. Completely.
Bard had trouble with the adjustment. “I had no concept of how to react in a social world. I made people angry. I pissed off my parents, I pissed off my brothers. I had to learn that it isn’t all about Dale.” Initially, Bard could hardly hold a non-climbing conversation. Forget polite. He had no idea how to make small talk without being offensive.
Bard cleaned aquariums in L.A. and pools in Malibu for a year, then became a personal trainer at the posh Pacific Athletic Club, living in a fancy tree house up Latigo Canyon. Three years later Bard was still working at the gym, still living in the tree. Then one of the other trainers, a beefy 220-pound pro-volleyball player, came up to Bard and said, “You used to climb.”
“No, I didn’t,” Bard said.
Two weeks later the trainer came back with a guidebook, opened it, pointed to a picture, and said, “That’s you. You used to climb. You used to be good. I want to climb. You’re going to teach me.” The duo went to the Rockreation climbing gym in Costa Mesa. When Bard wrote his name on the membership application, the owner offered him a job. He took it.
While working at Rockreation, Bard phoned Black Diamond, looking for some competition prizes. Randy Hankins, an old friend, answered the telephone and Bard received another job offer. He moved to Salt Lake in 1995 and worked his way through the ranks at Black Diamond, topping out as the pro-purchase/sponsorship coordinator. While Dale was in Salt Lake, his brother Alan, also a lifelong climber, was killed guiding the Grand Teton. Dale was crushed: “I’ll never get over it, that was the worst thing,” he said, “but I swore I wouldn’t let Alan’s death affect my relationship with climbing.” In Salt Lake, Bard met and married Adrienne Jarrett. They relocated to Redlands when Dale landed the position of international-sales manager at Five Ten in 2000.
“Yep, summers are gross, 100-110 degrees six days a week,” Bard said. “But there are 5,000 routes within 90 minutes of Redlands. Williamson, Tahquitz, J-Tree. And hundreds of boulder problems.” Considering the amount of energy buzzing through Bard’s veins, he might end up doing them all, although these days he rarely uses a rope, preferring to boulder, which he does a lot—and very, very well. Nowadays, business challenges absorb his prodigious energies. His coworkers regularly threaten to change the locks at Five Ten to keep Dale out of his office, which, just like his bakery van in the old days, is perfectly organized.
“Being a sales manager is such new territory for me,” Bard said. “It’s like being way runout on a hard new wall.” Business can be just as dangerous, too. At the winter 2003 Outdoor Retailer trade show, Bard sprung out of bed at 5 a.m., tripped over his luggage, broke two ribs and punctured a lung. It’s the only serious injury he’s ever had.
Although life for Dale Bard has been a wild, convoluted adventure, a sine wave of ups and downs, these days it seems pretty good to the former heavyweight champion of the dirtbagging world. He enjoys being able to share a nice bottle of wine with his wife. “I must have done all the wrong things right,” he said. “Because I like where I am right now.”
The post Dale Bard Was the “Heavyweight Champion of the Dirtbagging World” appeared first on Climbing.