The Climber as Visionary 
 Doug Robinson 

 In 1914 George Mallory, later to become famous for an offhand definition of why 
people climb, wrote an article entitled 'The Mountaineer as Artist', which 
appeared in the Climber's Club Journal. In an attempt to justify his climber's 
feeling of superiority over other sportsmen, he asserts that the climber is an 
artist. He says that "a day well spent in the Alps is like some great symphony," 
and justifies the lack of any tangible production - for artists are generally 
expected to produce works of art which others may see - by saying that "artists, 
in this sense, are not distinguished by the power of expressing emotion, but the 
power of feeling that emotional experience out of which Art is made... 
mountaineers are all artistic... because they cultivate emotional experience for 
its own sake." While fully justifying the elevated regard we have for climbing as 
an activity, Mallory's assertion leaves no room for distinguishing the creator of 
a route from an admirer of it. Mountaineering can produce tangible artistic 
results which are then on public view. A route is an artistic statement on the 
side of a mountain, accessible to the view and thus the admiration or criticism of 
other climbers. Just as the line of a route determines its aesthetics, the manner 
in which it was climbed constitutes its style. A climb has the qualities of a work 
of art and its creator is responsible for its direction and style just as an 
artist is. We recognize those climbers who are especially gifted at creating 
forceful and aesthetic lines, and respect them for their gift. 

 But just as Mallory did not go far enough in ascribing artistic functions to the 
act of creating outstanding new climbs, so I think he uses the word 'artist' too 
broadly when he means it to include an aesthetic response as well as an aesthetic 
creation. For this response, which is essentially passive and receptive rather 
than aggressive and creative, I would use the word visionary. Not visionary in the 
usual sense of idle and unrealizable dreaming, of building castles in the air, but 
rather in seeing the objects and actions of ordinary experience with greater 
intensity, penetrating them further, seeing their marvels and mysteries, their 
forms, moods, and motions. Being a visionary in this sense involves nothing 
supernatural or otherworldly; it amounts to bringing fresh vision to the familiar 
things of the world. I use the word visionary very simply, taking its origins from 
'vision', to mean seeing, always to great degrees of intensity, but never beyond 
the boundaries of the real and physically present. To take a familiar example, it 
would be hard to look at Van Gogh's  Starry Night without seeing the visionary 
quality in the way the artist sees the world. He has not painted anything that is 
not in the original scene, yet others would have trouble recognizing what he has 
depicted, and the difference likes in the intensity of his perception, hear of the 
visionary experience. He is painting from a higher state of consciousness. 
Climbers too have their 'Starry Nights'. Consider the following, from an account 
by Allen Steck, of the Hummingbird Ridge climb on Mt. Logan: "I turned for a 
moment and was completely lost in the silent appraisal of the beautiful sensuous 
simplicity of windblown snow." The beauty of that moment, the form and motion of 
the blowing snow was such a powerful impression, was so wonderfully sufficient, 
that the climber was lost in it. It is said to be only a moment, yet by virtue of 
total absorption he is lost in it and the winds of eternity blow though it. A 
second example comes from the account of the seventh day's climbing on the eight-
day first ascent, under trying conditions, of El Capitan's Muir Wall. Yvon 
Chouinard relates in the 1966  American Alpine Journal: 

 With the more receptive senses we now appreciated everything around us. Each 
individual crystal in the granite stood out in bold relief. The varied shapes of 
the clouds never ceased to attract our attention. For the first time we noticed 
tiny bugs that were all over the walls, so tiny they were barely noticeable. While 
belaying, I stared at one for fifteen minutes, watching him move and admiring his 
brilliant red color. 

 How could one ever be bored with so many good things to see and feel? This unity 
with our joyous surrounding, this ultra-penetrating perception gave us a feeling 
of contentment that we had not had for years. 

 In these passages the qualities that make up the climber's visionary experience 
are apparent; the overwhelming beauty of the most ordinary objects - clouds, 
granite, snow - of the climber's experience, a sense of the slowing down of time 
even to the point of disappearing, and a "feeling of contentment" an oceanic 
feeling of the supreme sufficiency of the present. And while delicate in 
substance, these feelings are strong enough to intrude forcefully in to the middle 
of dangerous circumstances and remain there, temporarily superseding even 
apprehension and drive for achievement. 

 Chouinard's words begin to give us an idea of the origin of these experiences as 
well as their character. he begins by referring to "the more receptive senses." 
What made their sense more receptive? It seems integrally connected wit what they 
were doing, and that it was their seventh day of uninterrupted concentration. 
Climbing tends to induce visionary experiences. We should explore which 
characteristics of the climbing process prepare its practitioners for these 
experiences. 

 Climbing requires intense concentration. I know of no other activity in which I 
can so easily lose all the hours of an afternoon without a trace. Or a regret. I 
have had storms creep up on me as if I have been asleep, yet I knew the whole time 
I was in the grip of an intense concentration, focused first on a few square feet 
of rock, and then on a few feet more, I have gone off across camp to boulder and 
returned to find the stew burned. Sometimes in the lowlands when it is hard to 
work I am jealous of how easily concentration coms in climbing. This concentration 
may be intense, but it is not the same as the intensity of the visionary periods; 
it is a prerequisite intensity. 

 But the concentration is not continuous. It is often intermittent and sporadic, 
sometimes cyclic and rhythmic. After facing the successive few square feet of rock 
for a while, the end of the rope is reached and it is time to belay. The belay 
time is a break in the concentration, a gap, a small chance to relax. The climber 
changes from an aggressive and productive stance to a passive and receptive one, 
from doer to observer, and in fact from artist to visionary. The climbing day goes 
on through the climb-belay-climb-belay cycle by a regular series of concentrations 
and relaxations. It is of one of these relaxations that Chouinard speaks. when 
limbs go to the rock and muscles contract, then the will contracts also. And and 
the belay stance, tied in to a scrub oak, the muscles relax and the will also, 
which has been concentrating on moves, expands and takes in the world again, and 
the world is new and bright. It is freshly created, for it really had ceased to 
exist. By contrast, the disadvantage of the usual low-level activity is that it 
cannot shut out the world, which then never ceases being familiar and is thus 
ignored. To climb with intense concentration is to shut out the world, which, when 
it reappears, will be as a fresh experience, strange and wonderful in its newness. 

 These belay relaxations are not total; the climb is not over, pitches lie ahead, 
even the crux; days more may be needed to be through. We notice that as the cycle 
of intense contraction takes over, and as this cycle becomes the daily routine, 
even consumes the daily routine, the relaxations on belay yield more frequent or 
intense visionary experiences. It is no accident that Chouinard's experiences 
occurred near the end of the climb; he had been building up to them for six days. 
The summit, capping off the cycling and giving a final release from the tension of 
contractions, should offer the climber some of his most intense moments, and a 
look into the literature reveals this to be so. The summit is also a release from 
the sensory desert of the climb; from the starkness of concentrating on 
configurations of rock we go to the visual richness of the summit. But there is 
still the descent to worry about, another contraction of will to be followed by 
relaxation at the climb's foot. Sitting on a log changing from klittershoes into 
boots, and looking over the Valley, we are suffused with oceanic feelings of 
clarity, distance, union, oneness. There is carryover from one climb to the next, 
from one day on the hot white walls to the next, however, punctuated by wine dark 
evenings in Camp 4. Once a pathway has been tried it becomes more familiar and is 
easier to follow the second time, more so on subsequent trips. The threshold has 
been lowered. Practice is as useful to the climber's visionary faculty as to his 
crack technique. It also applies outside of climbing. In John Harlin's words, 
although he was speaking about will and not vision, the experience can be 
"borrowed and projected." It will apply in the climber's life in general, in his 
flat, ground and lowland hours. But it is the climbing that has taught him to be a 
visionary. Lest we get too self-important about consciously preparing ourselves 
for visionary activity, however, we remember that the incredible beauty of the 
mountains is always at hand, always ready to nudge us into awareness. 

 The period of these cycles varies widely. If you sometimes cycle through lucid 
periods from pitch to pitch or even take days to run a complete course, it may 
also be virtually instantaneous, as, pulling up on a hold after a moment's 
hesitation and doubt, you feel at once the warmth of sun through your shirt and 
without pausing reach on. 

 Nor does the alteration of consciousness have to be large. A small change can be 
profound. The gulf between looking without seeing and looking with real vision is 
at times of such a low order that we may be continually shifting back and forth in 
daily life. Further heightening of the visionary faculty consists of more deeply 
perceiving what is already there. Vision is intense seeing. Vision is seeing what 
is more deeply interfused, and following this process leads to a sense of ecology. 
It is an intuitive rather than a scientific ecology; it is John Muir's kind, 
starting not from generalizations for trees, rocks, air, but rather from  that  
tree with the goiter part way up the trunk, from the rocks as Chouinard saw them, 
supremely sufficient and aloof, blazing away their perfect light, and from that 
air which blew clean and hot up off the eastern desert and carries lingering 
memories of snow fields on the Dana Plateau and miles of Tuolumne treetops as it 
pours over the rim of the Valley on its way to the Pacific. 

 These visionary changes in the climber's mind have a physiological basis. The 
alternation of hope and fear spoken of in climbing describes an emotional state 
with a biochemical basis. These physiological mechanisms have been used for 
thousands of years by prophets and mystics, and for a few centuries by climbers. 
There are two complementary mechanisms operating independently: carbon dioxide 
level and adrenalin breakdown products, the first keyed by exertion, the second by 
apprehension. During the active part of the climb the body is working hard, 
building up its CO2 level (oxygen debt) and releasing adrenalin in anticipation of 
difficult or dangerous moves, so that by the time the climber moves into belay at 
the end of the pitch he has established an oxygen debt and a supply of now 
unneeded adrenalin. Oxygen debt manifests itself on the cellular level as lactic 
acid, a cellular poison, which may possibly be the agent that has a visionary 
effect on the mind. Visionary activity can be induced experimentally by 
administering CO2, and this phenomenon begins to explain the place of singing and 
long-winded chanting in the medieval Church as well as breath-control exercises of 
Eastern religions. Adrenalin, carried to all parts of the body through the blood 
stream, is an unstable compound and if unused, soon begins to break down. Some of 
the visionary experience; in fact, they are naturally occurring body chemicals 
which closely resemble the psychedelic drugs, and may help someday to shed light 
on the action of these mind-expanding agents. So we see that the activity of the 
climbing, coupled with its anxiety, produces a chemical climate in the body that 
is conducive to visionary experience. There is one other long-range factor that 
may begin to figure in Chouinard's example: diet. Either simple starvation or 
vitamin deficiency tends to prepare the body, apparently by weakening it, for 
visionary experiences. Such a vitamin deficiency will result in a decreased level 
of nicotinic acid, a member of the B-vitamin complex and a known anti-psychedelic 
agent, thus nourishing the visionary experience. Chouinard comments on the low 
rations at several points in his account. For a further discussion of physical 
pathways to the visionary state, see Aldous Huxley's two essays, 'The Doors of 
Perception' and 'Heaven and Hell.' 

 There is an interesting relationship between the climber-visionary and his 
counterpart in the neighboring subculture of psychedelic drug users. These drugs 
are becoming increasingly common and many young people will come to climbing from 
a visionary vantage point unique in its history. These drugs have been through a 
series of erroneous names, based on false models of their action:  psychotomimetic  
for a supposed ability to produce a model psychosis, and  hallucinogen , when the 
hallucination was thought to be the central reality of the experience. Their 
present names means simply 'mind manifesting,' which is at least neutral. These 
drugs are providing people with a window into the visionary experience. They come 
away knowing that there is a place where the objects of ordinary sensations remind 
them of many spontaneous or 'peak' experiences and thus confirm or place a 
previous set of observations. But this is the end. There is no going back to the 
heightened reality, to the supreme sufficiency of the present moment. The window 
has been shut and cannot even be found without recourse to the drug. 

 I am not in the least prepared to say that drug users take up climbing in order 
to search for the window. It couldn't occur to them. Anyone unused to disciplined 
physical activity would have trouble imagining that it produced anything but 
sweat. But when the two cultures overlap, and a young climber begins to find 
parallels between the visionary result of his climbing discipline and his formerly 
drug-induced visionary life, he is on the threshold of control. There is now a 
clear path of discipline leading to the window. It consists of the sensory desert, 
intensity of concentrated effort, and rhythmical cycling of contraction and 
relaxation. This path is not unique to climbing, of course, but here we are 
thinking of the peculiar form that the elements of the path assume in climbing. I 
call it the Holy Slow Road because, although time consuming and painful, it is an 
unaided way to the visionary state; by following it the climber will find himself 
better prepared to appreciate the visionary in himself, and by returning gradually 
and with eyes open to ordinary waking consciousness he now knows where the window 
lies, how it is unlocked, and he carries some of the experience back with him. The 
Holy Slow Road assures that the climber's soul, tempered by the very experiences 
that have made him a visionary, has been refined so that he can handle his 
visionary activity while still remaining balanced and active (the result of too 
much visionary activity without accompanying personality growth being the dropout, 
an essentially unproductive stance). The climbing which has prepared him to be a 
visionary has also prepared the climber to handle his visions. This is not, 
however, a momentous change. It is still as close as seeing instead of mere 
looking. Experiencing a permanent change in perception may take years of 
discipline. 

 A potential pitfall is seeing the 'discipline' of the Holy Slow Road in the iron-
willed tradition of the Protestant ethic, and that will not work. The climbs will 
provide all the necessary rigor of discipline without having to add to it. And as 
the visionary faculty comes closer to the surface, what is needed is not an effort 
of discipline but an effort of relaxation, a submission of self to the wonderful, 
supportive, and sufficient world. 

 I first began to consider these ideas in the summer of 1965 in Yosemite with 
Chris Fredricks. Sensing a similarity of experience, or else a similar approach to 
experience, we sat many nights talking together at the edge of the climbers' camp 
and spent some of our days testing our words in kinesthetic sunshine. Chris had 
become interested in Zen Buddhism, and as he told me of this Oriental religion I 
was amazed that I had never before heard of such a system that fit the facts of 
outward reality as I saw them without any pushing or straining. We never, that I 
remember, mentioned the visionary experience as such, yet its substance was rarely 
far from our reflections. We entered into one of those find parallel states of 
mind such that it is impossible now for me to say what thoughts came from which of 
us. We began to consider some aspects of climbing as Western equivalents of 
Eastern practices; the even movements of the belayer taking in slack, the regular 
footfall of walking through the woods, even the rhythmic movements of climbing on 
easy or familiar ground' all approach the function meditation and breath-control. 
Both the laborious and visionary parts of climbing seemed well suited to 
liberating the individual from his concept of self, the one by intimidating his 
aspirations, the other by showing the self to be only a small part of a subtle 
integrated universe. We watched the visionary surface in each other with its 
mixture of joy and serenity, and walking down from climbs we often felt like 
little children in the Garden of Eden, pointing, nodding, and laughing. We 
explored timeless moments and wondered at the suspension of ordinary consciousness 
while the visionary faculty was operating. It occurred to us that there was no 
remembering such times of being truly happy and at peace; all that could be said 
of them later was that they had been and that they had been truly fine; the usual 
details of memory were gone. This applies also to most of our conversations. I 
remember only that we talked and that we came to understand things. I believe it 
was in these conversations that the first seeds of the climber as visionary were 
planted. 

 William Blake has spoken of the visionary experience by saying, "If the doors of 
perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." 
Stumbling upon the cleansed doors, the climber wonders how he came into that 
privileged visionary position vis-a-vis the universe. He finds the answer in the 
activity of his climbing and the chemistry of his mind and he begins to see that 
he is practicing a special application of some very ancient mind-opening 
techniques. Chouinard's vision was no accident. It was the result of days of 
climbing. He was tempered by technical difficulties, pain, apprehension, 
dehydration, striving, the sensory desert, weariness, the gradual loss of self. It 
is a system. You need only copy the ingredients to commit yourself to them. They 
lead to the door. It is not necessary to attain to Chouinard's technical level - 
few can do - only to his degree of commitment. It is not essential that one climb 
El Capitan to be a visionary; I never have, yet I try in my climbing to push my 
personal limit, to do climbs that are questionable for me. Thus we all walk the 
feather edge - each man his own unique edge - and go on to the visionary. For all 
the precision with which the visionary state can be placed and described, it is 
still elusive. You do not one day become a visionary and ever after remain one. It 
is a state that one flows in and out of, gaining it through directed effort or 
spontaneously in gratuitous moment. Oddly, it is not consciously worked for, but 
come as the almost accidental product of effort in another direction and on a 
different plane. It is at its own whim momentary or lingering suspended in the 
air, suspending time in its turn, forever momentarily eternal, as, stepping out of 
the last rappel you turn and behold the rich green wonder of the forest. 

 Ascent 1969