Who the hell is Jim Beyer?

I've been trying to research this absolute enigma of a climber for a while, specifically what he's done in Yosemite. I read on the "Controlled Burn" route guide that he messed up WOEML and Hockey Night in Canada. Other accounts range from him being a down to earth, seasoned badass with multiple hard routes to his name in the desert, to him being an incompetent madman with poor ethics and overly contrived routes. Anyone want to set the record straight?

Greg Child did a great profile on Beyer in one of his books.  

Asa Cianchette wrote:

I've been trying to research this absolute enigma of a climber for a while, specifically what he's done in Yosemite. I read on the "Controlled Burn" route guide that he messed up WOEML and Hockey Night in Canada. Other accounts range from him being a down to earth, seasoned badass with multiple hard routes to his name in the desert, to him being an incompetent madman with poor ethics and overly contrived routes. Anyone want to set the record straight?

Have you tried the search function? There was just a lengthy thread about Jim a little while back. 

Michael Rush wrote:

Have you tried the search function? There was just a lengthy thread about Jim a little while back. 

I did, I think the one you're talking about is "anybody repeat Jim Beyer’s routes?". That was helpful, but at this point I'm more interested in him as a person rather than his routes and their non-existent repeats.

Jake907 wrote:

Greg Child did a great profile on Beyer in one of his books.  

Duly noted, thanks!

Go right to the source.  Just PM him from here.  He’s answered me before. 

Isaiah aka Zay Foulks wrote:

I doubt anyone on Mountainproject will set the record straight on Beyer.

Based on your post, you likely know more about him than 99 percent of users here.

Mark Smith/Richard Jensons' write up about the second ascent of Intifada was pretty damning.

"A6 death route" actually turned out to be like A3 and they found holes that had clearly been filled deliberately with sand, all over the place.

This was in the AAJ correct?

Asa Cianchette wrote:

Duly noted, thanks!

The High Lonesome by John long has a full chapter that talks about Jim. I highly recommend the book. 

I've climbed with him, he is a bit of a loner and overall just a character. Less of a talker and more of a do-er you could say. 

He wore a beard before beards were trendy!

Jim Beyer is busy! -- SuperTopo

Required reading for anyone interested in Jim Beyer. Lots of stories from both sides of the spectrum. He's put up absolute classics in the Tetons -- Caveat Emptor in Death Canyon, Beyer East Face on the Grand just to name a few. His free climbs seem to be the best of anyone out there, but the horror stories on his aid routes, especially the ones put up by himself, seem to be aplenty. 

You can find him and another contemporary of his still disagreeing on MP comments. From one of Jim's new routes at Blacktail Butte. I make sure to call my friends stupid sport climbers when they botch cruxes now. "Go left 2 feet then up, you stupid sport climber" This is the new shit 5.8 - George vs. Jim

George Bracksieck

While I appreciate the development of this and adjacent routes, I would like to provide a public service by telling it like it is. The New Shit is just that: poorly bolted, poorly protected, sandbagged. The dark chert nodules, however, make the climbing possible and interesting. I stick-clipped the second bolt because the first is useful only for a possible aid point to help reach hook placements on the nodules during a ground-up first ascent. After struggling to and past that second bolt, I continued past two more and reached the rubble-strewn ledge below the exit routes. I continued up the poorly protected 5.8 Exit Crack to reach an anchor.

I wonder if anyone has ever witnessed Mr Beyer establishing any of his hundreds or thousands of ground-up routes. I wonder what shenanigans may take place. I’m guessing that he hangs from a hook or gear when too steep to stand and drill. Perhaps he uses aid to ascend, which wouldn’t be bad as long as he would leave the rest of us honestly protected routes to climb. In his posted route list he says that he hand-drilled for all of his bolts at Upper Blacktail and that those routes appear to be “sport climbs” when in fact those are ground-ups. I think the difference is obvious between the routes with strange bolt placements allowing for ground falls and routes more intelligently protected.

Jim Beyer
The bolts on this route are well placed well spaced and quality stainless steel. There is one detail that I should have mentioned. On this climb, you don't just climb straight up the bolt line like a stupid sport climber. If you do it's .10. Instead, you clip a bolt, traverse left 3', go up 4', then step right 3' to the next bolt. This is .8 and avoids the .10. Routes are rated for the easiest way up. All my recent routes are complex mazes and I don't usually write detailed beta but in this case a normal .8 sport climber might not expect such a situation and blunder into .10. I might have made the same blunder when I was a .8 climber. Most climbers would call this a well protected route . I think George is whining because he flailed so much on this route and blames the route. Glad I got the name right.

^ Informative post.

Full Supertopo link:

http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=2403537&tn=0&mr=0

• MP thread about him, "Anybody Repeat Jim Beyer's Routes?" 
  • https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/117264293/anybody-repeat-jim-beyers-routes
• Another MP thread about him, "Really Jim?"
  • https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/116842150/really-jim
• "Jim Beyer is Busy" thread on Supertopo: 
  • http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=2403537&tn=0&mr=0 
• "Jim Beyer Stories" thread on Supertopo: 
  • http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=231905&tn=0&mr=0 
• His article on Alpinist Magazine were he talks about chopping bolts on Wall of Early Morning Light while putting up Martyrs Brigade: 
  • http://www.alpinist.com/doc/ALP01/climbing-note-beyer 
• "Wall of Early Morning Light" thread on Supertopo (discussing his chopping of bolts on WOEML during his FA of Martyr's Brigade: 
  • http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=39962&tn=0&mr=0 
• A waybackmachine scan of Richard Jensen's (FAist of Wings of Steel)TR from his ascent of Beyer's "Intifada" where he questions and researches its initial A6 grade and ethics: 
  • https://web.archive.org/web/20090922182423/ jensenconsultations.com/cli… 
• A write up, "Friends to Oblivion" by Chris Van Leuven, of his ascent of one of Beyer's routes on Leaning Tower, "Heading Towards Oblivion": 
  • https://www.climbing.com/news/friends-to-oblivion/ 
• His most recent route, "Controlled Burn" had its comments scrubbed by someone, but it used to describe how he was power drilling and throwing mud falcons (brown paper bags full of his poop) off the wall onto climbers below (and reason why he'll likely never get a bigwall permit in Yosemite again) 
  • (https://www.mountainproject.com/route/120774999/controlled-burn)
• Another route of his, "Ready to Go" also had its comments scrubbed (wtf admins?) where there was a lively back and forth between him and another notable climber regarding chopping bolts on each others routes. 
  • (https://www.mountainproject.com/route/114450000/ready-to-go)
• Another route of his, "Wild World" (which was put up along with "Steel on Steel Wall" on Liberty Cap in an area that was agreed upon to be off limits to new routing due to it being directly above the tourists hiking trail) shows his relatively weird concept of aid ratings where he has pitches full of rivet ladders that are rated A4(+)
  • (https://www.mountainproject.com/route/108914835/wild-world)
• Beyer's write up of his route, "Project Mayhem" (VII 5.10c A5c) on Mt. Thor in Baffin
  • http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200213400/
• Section about Jim Beyer in "Climb!" by Achey and Chelton
  • https://www.google.com/books/edition/Climb/0LaPC9IAfDQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Jim%20Beyer

I think he is an overall net negative to the climbing world but damn some of his write ups are pretty damn funny.  I remember one in Alpinist years ago talking about living down by the Colorado River training for some impossible climb that had me rolling.  I don't think he meant it to be funny, his obvious self promotion and insecurity bleed out so much in his chest pounding writing that you have to laugh.  

Jake907 wrote:

Greg Child did a great profile on Beyer in one of his books.  

From the online preview of Child's book, Mixed Emotions 

Link to Online Preview

PARTY OF ONE: A PROFILE OF JIM BEYER, AN AMERICAN SOLOIST

I first encountered Jim Beyer from a distance, in Yosemite Valley, in 1977. He was 2000 feet above me, on El Capitan, making the first solo ascent of the Shield. I stood among a group of climbers in El Cap meadow, watching spring storm mists swirl around the wall and Beyer. I still recall the patter of rain against our raincoats, the beat of the Grateful Dead playing from a tinny portable tape deck and the awe that the sight of El Cap filled us with back then, glistening wet and gold as it did that day, like a fearful, shiny beast. It was the year a drug lord's plane had ditched in a frozen lake in the high country, and bales of weed were still being hauled out of the ice. Life in the valley was deliciously deranged, we were young, our hair was long and we lived and breathed climbing.

The sky darkened as a Sierra Nevada thunderhead regrouped to pelt the valley with another assault of sleet. On El Cap, climbers, sodden, cold and bad-enough, could be seen rappelling off the Nose and Tangerine Trip. Only one remained, ,going up, not down.

"Who is that guy up there?" l asked.

"That's Jim Beyer," someone replied.

"He must be freaking out in this weather."

"Nah. Beyer can handle it He soloed the Dihedral Wall last year. He...

- - - Some pages are omitted from this book preview. - - -

American monoliths, but that ended in agonizing defeat in the Karakoram Range of Pakistan. It's the story of self-discovery through extreme climbing and, by the end, of an alchemical metamorphosis of purpose.

But who is Jim Beyer? Most readers of climbing magazines will draw a blank on the name, for he is not the doyen of the climbing print trade. He doesn't pen articles about his climbs, save for understated accounts in the back pages of the American Alpine Journal. Never before has a photo of Beyer appeared in a magazine. He possesses neither the lean, leonine leotards nor physique of the sport-climbing set. Beyer is a house-builder who dresses in well-worn, sawdust-scented work clothes. His Falstaffian physique is built for endurance rather than sport. He is a soloist in more avenues than climbing: he kayaks whitewater solo, and even the spec houses he builds for a living are mostly Beyer's work alone.

Beyer is suspicious of anyone who basks in the glow of fame in climbing. Magazine profiles are anathema to him. Sponsored climbers and sport-climbing heroes are "posers." Thus, it took some convincing on my part to get him to discuss his career. But talk he did, on a winter weekend in 1991 in Boulder, Colorado, in the half-finished shell of his latest spec house, and in Eldorado Canyon. "My agenda in spilling my guts to you," he told me, "is to show there are traditionalists left in climbing." That was his conscious agenda. If he had an unconscious agenda, then it was to unburden himself of himself, for in the world of a soloist there are few people to listen.

Jim Beyer's brand of climbing-solo big-wall climbing-is not everyone's cup of tea. It's a slow and laborious process. a mental and physical marathon. It is, essentially, aid climbing for pitch after pitch up huge cliffs, using a roped self-belay system. Such climbs might take two weeks, and on them the climber must carry masses of hardware, bivouac gear, food and water. The endeavor means hauling loads weighing hundreds of pounds; it means complex ropework and sleeping in porta-ledges. On a hard pitch, the climber might nail fragile flakes, make multiple moves on skyhooks or step off an A5 aid placement to begin free-climbing into unknown territory-with no one at the other end of the rope to whimper to. To embark on a solo climb, the climber must be driven to succeed and fueled by a deep belief in himself. Thus, for a soloist, defeat comes hard because there is only himself to blame for failure.

Born in Florida but a longtime resident of Boulder, Colorado, Beyer, now thirty-six, made his big-wall solo debut at age seventeen, with, Sunshine (VI 5.9 A3) on the Diamond Face of Long's Peak. The route was a first ascent-remarkable for a youngster-and it set the course of his climbing: inevitably solo, usually first ascents, unsupported and unpublicized to the extent that few people knew where he was, and he placed bolts only as a last resort.

The original premise of climbing-that all routes should be climbed from the ground up, without previewing is, to Beyer, both ethic and religion. His traditional convictions are bred of twenty-three seasons in Yosemite, ten in the Tetons and three in the Karakoram. He despairs of, and endorses guerrilla warfare on the gridwork rap-bolting practices of sport-climbers. Like the Earth First! environmentalists who creep into forests to hammer mill-saw-wrecking spikes into old-growth trees, he has, under cover of darkness, erased several efforts of the Bosch generation. “Anyone has the right to place a bolt wherever he wants," he says, "but anyone is also free to remove it..." In a letter to Climbing magazine, he challenged its editors to publish a “how to" article on bolt removal to balance the plethora of advice on bolting, hangdogging and sport-climbing techniques filling today's magazines.

But the story of Jim Beyer, student of traditional ethics, pales against the talc of Jim Beyer, graduate of the school of hard knocks.

The year Beyer soloed the Shield he left Yosemite to climb in the Canadian Rockies, driving a VW Bug crammed with his possessions. In Banff, while hanging around a parking lot outside a pub with a friend, Beyer was accosted by a man wearing a leather jacket. "He grabbed me by my sweater and cranked me up close to smell my breath. Then he flashed a police badge," says Beyer.

Ordered to empty his pockets:, Beyer produced an apple. The undercover agent was disappointed; he was looking for contraband. But Beyer's back pocket contained a joint. His survival instinct took over. Beyer backed out of his sweater, leaving it in the agent's hands, and ran. Cutting his losses, the narc arrested Beyer's friend. After a cold bivouac in the woods, Beyer traded himself to the police for his buddy's release and spent a week in Spy Hill Correctional Institute.

On his first day there, he recalled, Elvis Presley had just died, so the radio stations played nothing but Elvis songs. After bearing "ln the Ghetto" for the eighth time, everybody was yelling, "Turn it off, turn it off!”

This youthful debacle ended when Beyer was deported, handcuffed, from Canada as a persona non grata. Across the border, he sped back to California, visited his girlfriend, found their relationship had ended and proceeded to the haven of Yosemite. Near Merced, at 2:00 A.M. he parked and entered an orchard to sleep. When he awoke bis car was gone; while he'd slept it had been burglarized, torched and then towed to the scrapyard. Beyer had lost everything he owned.

Beyer quit climbing for a couple of years after that. "Jim's epic on the Shield really scared him, and a run or bad luck hit him hard," says Steve Quinlan, a climber and carpenter from Wyoming and one of Beyer's oldest friends. "I think it shocked him to discover his capacity for getting himself into hot water."

So Beyer filled his life with other things. For a time he drifted with radical pro-environmentalists. Later he earned a place on the U.S. National Kayak Team as a flatwater racer. Curious to examine left-wing politics from the inside, he visited Nicaragua after the Sandinista Revolution with an American group to help harvest the coffee crop. Beyer did not adapt well to his new surroundings, however, and tired of the endless political lectures, barracks living and constant surveillance. Instead of kowtowing to the propagandists, he argued with them. One day he rented a car and went to the beach without official permission. Such independent thinking didn't sit well with his Sandinista hosts: he was deported from Nicaragua by armed escort. Authority and Beyer did not mix.

Beyer' s own tales to me create a picture of a Ioner. But people who know Beyer reveal another side of the man.

"Jim Beyer is the most politically aware climber I've ever met," says Quinlan, who told me of Beyer's support of environmental and political causes over many years. On one occasion Beyer marched with a group across Utah, from Moab to Salt Lake City, as a protest against a planned nuclear dump in tbe desert, near North Six Shooter peak. As for Beyer the climber, Quinlan affectionately describes a curmudgeonly reactionary traditionalist who refused to use the modem camming gadgets, Friends, for several years and who, till recently, often didn't report his routes, especially those in the Wind River Range.

By 1982 Beyer quit believing he could find a more significant purpose in life other than climbing. If he had abandoned climbing because be suspected its tunnel-visioned lifestyle made him unsuited to normal society, then he returned to it because it was the most gratifying life he knew. And when he returned to Yosemite it was to activate the plan he had been nurturing since his earliest solo walls; to embark on a series of climbs that would harden him for his ultimate dream-a new route. solo, alpine style, boltless, in the Karakoram Range.

Methodically he ticked off a succession of new Yosemite walls. On Heading for Oblivion (VI A4+) on Leaning Tower he copperheaded his way up tenuous seams just forty feet right of the original Harding route. But, unlike Harding, Beyer did little drilling. He regards this as his hardest Yosemite wall. Later, on a twenty-three-and-a-half-hour solo roped repeat of El Cap's west face, he accomplished the monolith's first one-day solo.

Solid Yosemite granite polished Beyer's technical skills, but to harden himself against isolation and pure fear he turned to the vertiginous Fisher Towers near Moab, Utah. These lonely, weirdly eroded sandstone spires of crumbling rock, says Beyer, are "an alien, hostile environment., perfect for training for the Karakoram." During the 1980s he forced himself up five new 900-foot-high solo routes there.

To describe these routes, he coined a term-"shakefest," a climb that reduces the leader to a state of quivering terror. Beyer's route names reflect his mindset at a given time. Sandinista Couloir and Revolutionary Crest from the Tetons in the early 1980s show his political period. In the Fisher Towers, his route names reflect a darker mood: Run Amok (VI 5. 9 A4a), World's End (VI 5.9 A5a), Death of American Democracy (VI 5. 10 A4d) and Deadman's Party (VI 5.10 A5c). On these, he conditioned himself to climb alone and never give up. No matter how scary or awful. On Run Amok, in 1979, he climbed a pitch-length curtain of vertical dirt by chopping steps into it with a hammer. He looked at Deadman's Party for five years before finding the gumption to try it. On it he discovered the use of copperheads in soft rock. Such placements, aid-climbing aficionados will attest, provide all the security of walking on thin ice in a heat wave. On Intifada, his masterpiece on the east face of Cottontail

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John Middendorf, a bigwaller with many hard desert and Yosemite walls to his credit, says. "Jim's tactics are unusual. He sometimes fixes ropes till the final ascent, bivying on the ground rather than the wall. And his free tactics are questionable. He sometimes aids a pitch first, then subsequently frees the moves while hanging on jumars from fixed rope."

Beyer admits to these methods in accounts in the American Alpine Journal. On Intifada in the Fisher Towers, he states that "the 900-foot climb took nine days and one night on the wall." On a new route on El Capitan left of the west face, Reach for the Sky (VI 5.11d A4d), he records his tactic of working a pitch free from fixed rope. "My only question about climbing like that," Middendorf says, "is that subsequent leaders are unlikely to find themselves on-sighting 5.12 when the only protection are A3 copperheads that the first ascent placed on aid but subsequently removed."

After his sagas on the Fisher Towers, Beyer noticed something an impartial observer might call strange: he was more comfortable climbing alone than with a partner. "On multiday aid routes," he explains during our Boulder meeting, "you need mental stamina to focus on the technical situation. Being with another person breaks my concentration."

With the dream of a Karakoram wall of rock and ice in his mind. Beyer spent hundreds of hours running, weight-lifting and biking. He crafted his diet to create physical bulk to sustain his body on long walls. Even on a simple pitch in Eldorado, he always shouldered a full rack to stay used to carrying the heavy gear needed on long routes.

In the mid-1980s he began experimenting with a form of sports meditation or self-hypnosis. "It's mental preprogramming," says Beyer. "It helps me cope with instances when I need an automatic reaction to survive:· He would visualize himself in dangerous climbing situations and store survival responses. Long before a climb, Beyer would be psychologically ready, for he had already visualized the worst a climb could present even hideous injury. By indoctrinating himself with planned, automatic escapes from every situation he learned to push himself harder. "Some people buy insurance; I train mentally and physically to slay alive," he says.

By 1989 Beyer deemed himself ready for the Karakoram. He arrived at the base of the Grand Cathedral, a lofty, 19,245-foot-high granite layer cake of walls overlooking the Baltoro Glacier. With only a cook at base camp as support, Beyer set off on his dream climb. At just about the same time, Mark Wilford and I stumbled out from a thirteen-day nightmare of storm and failure on Trango Tower. Once again, as in Yosemite in 1977, I found myself on the ground watching Beyer, who appeared as a dot on the wall. Beyer's cook, a Balti, handed me a cup of tea, and we sat on a boulder watching him solo a searing crack line. ''Jim good man," said the cook, "but a little bit crazy."

Fifty-four pitches. Thirteen days. The Beyer Route on Grand Cathedral was no pushover, but it went smoothly in good weather. Beyer rated the experience V 11 5. 10 A4+, Perhaps it was a fantasy realized too easily, for in 1990 he was back in the Karakoram, this time in the Hunza region.

"On some of my climbs l've gone for the summit at all costs, exceeding what could be called intelligent actions. This might compromise my credibility with some people," says Beyer as he begins to tell me the story of his solo of Bib-O-li-Motin, a 19,685-foot rocky fang above the village of Karimabad.

I, too, knew the peak well. I'd attempted it in 1985, but fusillades of stonefall from its couloirs and 2200-foot walls sent me and my companions running, as it has many other expeditions since then. The only previous ascent when Beyer tried it in 1990 was by Patrick Cordicr's French party in 1982, via the mixed cast ridge. The stupendous southeast face was unclimbed, and that was Beyer and Pat Mclnerny's goal.

Beyer had befriended Mclnemy, a climbing guide, that year in Moab. To prepare for the Karakoram the two climbed a new route on the Diamond (Steep Is Flat, VI 5.10 A4+) and had an impressive season in the French Alps.

On Bib-O-li-Motin, the pair spent twelve dangerous days dodging rockfall, while fixing rope and load-carrying up a 200-foot ice cliff in the approach couloir, before dumping their gear at the foot of the wall. Avalanches are common in this region-two Japanese attempts on Ultar, beside Bib-O-li-Motin, have ended tragically this way, and in 1985 I'd seen slides rake the gullies and flow over the meadows, sweeping away sheep and goats with them.

The night Beyer and McInerny set off, they found their fixed ropes piled at the foot of the ice cliff, having been shredded by an avalanche. Undeterred, Beyer patched a makeshift line together from bits of five-millimeter and nine-millimeter cord and beaded back up the ice cliff. At the final overhanging lip, Beyer, totally without protection because all their gear was beneath the wall, struck rotten ice that he couldn't get his ice tools to stick in. Each time he struck or kicked a crampon into it, chunks blew out and his placement skated. A shakefest began that Beyer called "worse than A6." Says McInerny, “It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen. For five minutes Jim would dangle from one ice axe, get the other in and then the first would pop out, along with his feet. He was gasping desperately. If he'd fallen he'd have gone 200 feet, and the rope would surely have snapped.'.

But Beyer got them over the bulge. They reached the wall in a storm and began to climb. Two days later it was still storming, and they were 500 feet up, climbing rotten rock. Cold numbed their hands. Mclnemy dropped a rope. As he rigged a rappel to fetch it from a rock snag, his doubts about the sanity of their adventure welled to the surface. ''Maybe I'll just rap down to the rope and keep going and let you solo this nightmare," Mclnemy said.

"Why don't you do that," replied Beyer calmly, and the pair divided some gear for McInerny to descend.

The partnership they'd begun on the Diamond was hard for McInerny to break. "I felt bad leaving Jim," McInerny later told me. "I wanted to be there, but I was way out of my depth."

As McInerny began the first rappel, Beyer smiled at him reassuringly, to let him know he bore no grudge. "Don't worry, dude," he said in a fatherly tone. "You're like 99 percent of the people: you’re afraid of dying"

A V wrote:

Obligatory link to a legendary article written by climbing’s Hunter S. Thompson: publications.americanalpine…

"It was good, a simple life filled with the simple joy of achieving simple goals. But that was long ago, and this simpleton somehow morphed over the years into a sword-swinging psycho."

That was a good read

By day six Beyer was near the top, having climbed a dozen ice-coated free and aid pitches. But three days later he hadn't moved, trapped in his bivy sack as a snowstorm raged around him. On the ninth day he pressed on in frigid weather. Beyer's resolve and equipment were now wearing thin. His ropes were frozen cables, his ice hammer had snapped at the head, food was dwindling and the weather, by the tenth evening, was again deteriorating. The whole time Beyer climbed, a Japanese expedition on nearby Ultar deemed the weather so bad they didn't move out of base camp.

'Every hour or two," says Beyer, I’d stop and shout into the storm, 'Do I really want to go on?'" Each time he decided he did, he'd swallow a caffeine pill and continue.

Sixty feet from the top he found himself stemming free up a rime-coated dihedral, his boots skating. Suddenly the snow blobs forming his footholds collapsed, and he was hurtling through the air.

Self-belay falls tend to be long and often messy, and Beyer could ill afford such folly. His mental programming kicked into gear. He rotated and lunged for his last piece of pro and caught it with both hands. Had this catch been in a baseball game, Beyer would be in the Hall of Fame, but where he was, his only reward was survival. Grappling with the corner again, he thrashed up and over the summit rim to find himself in darkness and storm, without headlamp or bivouac gear. He was not, however, on top. but on a rubble-strewn slope below a thorny crown of possible summits.

The situation was deflating. "My adrenaline rush had long gone," says Beyer. "The survivor in me said, 'No more. " He turned around.

Bitter thoughts wracked Beyer on the descent. He felt he no longer cared about summits. He hated mountains. But by the time he reached the meadows and McInerny two days later, he realized that, although he hadn't stood on the highest pile of rubble on top, there was an element of success to his climb: he had completed a wall that had thwarted four expeditions, and he and his partner were going home alive.

By 1991 Beyer figured he was ready to climb the hardest big-wall route in the world. Using money from a spec house he built in Boulder, he organized an expedition to Trango Tower (also called Nameless Tower; 20,463 feet) in Pakistan and, since he was in the land of the 8000-meter peaks, Gasherbrum II (26,360 feet). Two solo "training routes," in 1989 and 1990 in Colorado's Black Canyon of the Gunnison - Like a Psycho on the Painted Wall and Black Planet on North Chasm View Wall, both boltless and rated VI A4d-had put him in good stead.

Perhaps Bib-O-li-Motin had left a residue of fear in him. Shortly before departing for Pakistan, Beyer visited Yosemite to seek a partner for Tango Tower. John Middendorf was keen. Though Middendorf had seen Beyer around for years and knew he was a master big-wall climber, they'd never climbed together. "Jim was always an outsider to the cliques of Yosemite," says Middendorf, who suggested they climb a wall to get acquainted. "But I couldn't get him up on a wall. It was as if he was scared of committing to climb with another person." Beyer and Middendorf’s Pakistan plan never got off the ground. Perhaps in the solitary constellation of Beyer's universe, the idea of climbing with a partner had become more disquieting than soloing.

Beyer arrived alone in Islamabad a few weeks after the defeat of Saddam Hussein's army. Many climbers had canceled their trips to Islamic Pakistan, but not Beyer. He called his expedition the "1991 Karakoram Shakefest." He wanted an experience beyond any of his other climbs. This he got, but not in the way he planned.

His problems arose in Islamabad. Says Beyer, "A paperwork mixup between my expedition and some other group had led my young liaison officer {LO) to believe three women were on my team. His first question to me was, “Where are the ladies?' When I explained there was only me, his fantasy of a vacation in a base camp of women was shattered."

To fathom Beyer's further fiascoes, one must understand that Pakistan's mountaineering rules in 1991 required expeditions to have at least four members. Through negotiations with the Ministry of Tourism, Beyer solved this glitch by hiring three Pakistani high-altitude porters to be bis partners. It wasn't an ideal situation, and was costly, but it got Beyer moving to the mountains. The problem was, though paid and contracted to do so, this trio refused to carry loads. During the approach along the Baltoro, these paid members and Beyer' s other porters held daily sit-down strikes, demanding better equipment and more pay.

But Beyer’s main conflicts arose from the bad chemistry between him and his LO, whom Beyer paints as a rigid martinet who protested at every opportunity. "Jim, you'll take 101 risks on this climb, but l will not take a single risk," said the LO at the start of the trip. "Every rule must be followed exactly." Things went downhill from there, says Beyer, beginning when the LO, while examining the expedition clothing provided by Beyer, found he was getting used long-johns and other hand-me-downs from Beyer's wardrobe. The combination of the LO's intractability and Beyer's distrust of authority figures and naivete on how to interact with bis Pakistani hosts created an explosive situation

Perhaps Beyer had preprogrammed himself for the showdown that followed on the Dunge Glacier. On the final day of the approach, trouble began within sight of the granite bulwark of Trango Tower. Beyer attempted to pay off and send back one of his three paid members. This plan - intended to save him money and endorsed by the Ministry of Tourism, says Beyer - precipitated an argument when the member refused to leave. He wanted to stay to earn more money. Backed up by the LO, the others quit in sympathy, leaving Beyer with six regular porters to shuttle his ten loads to the peak. Beyer left the four bickering on the talus fields and set off, happy to be rid of them. An hour later, sweating under a heavy load, Beyer heard the LO behind him hailing the group to stop.

Awaiting the LO's arrival, Beyer instructed the porters to remove their loads and pile them in a heap. "No man approach me," he ordered and positioned them ten feet away.

"The expedition is over,'' declared the LO. "We return to Skardu. Porters, pick up your loads and follow me."

"Don't touch the loads. Everyone stand back," Beyer countered.

The LO cited a technical point: because three members had quit, Beyer was no longer the team of four stipulated by the rules. Also illegal was the fact that the team had split into two groups. Such details are commonly overlooked by LOs, who usually do their utmost to help an expedition climb its peak. But in this case expedition justice became perverted.

A war of words ensued. Beyer made it clear he was staying. Essentially, he was in the right - the rules state that the expedition leader is the ultimate leader of the trip, and if he disagrees with an LO's decision he must state the nature of the disagreement in writing but need not follow the LO' s orders.

Meanwhile a witness appeared out of the rubble: a Spanish climber heading up to jumar his ropes on Great Trango Tower. "He seemed torn between his climb and this crazy spectacle," says Beyer. "l said, 'Hey, man, wait a few minutes and you’ll see the biggest fistfight of all time.” I knew I couldn't fight off ten guys, but a witness might be useful."

Despite the offer of a ringside seat, the Spaniard left. With a cry of "Porters, follow me," the LO charged at Beyer, who pushed the enraged soldier onto his back. Successive charges - unaided by the flabbergasted Balti porters - ended identically.

- - - Some pages are omitted from this book preview. - - -

 

ask MP and ye shall receive...thanks for the awesome info!

Holy crap! Epic excerpts, Kevin!

Stupid Sport Climber is gonna be a good route name soon.

Beyer wins again!

Climbing needs sword swinging psychos. I always thought Jensen’s obsession over Beyer was psychotic too. Crazies attract. Long live Jim Beyer!