“I had a futon in my cave. I cooked food up there, you know,” Ben Zartman tells me from his home in Rhode Island while looking back to his days in Yosemite in the 90s. We’re reminiscing about our climbing partnership spanning some 30 years and talking about his new maritime and climbing gear company and plans to sail to Baffin Island to climb big walls. It’s a low-emissions trip he calls Greenpointing.

I did my first big wall in Yosemite with Ben back in 1995. Though the RNWF of Half Dome became trivial over the years, taking us a few hours once we got our wings, that first climb was utterly terrifying for me. Armed with tri cams, hexes, and homemade cams he picked up in Mexico, I was so freaked out throughout the whole experience that I almost gave up climbing for good. He laughed at my discomfort and coined me the handle “Spaz.” No one in the park knew me back then, but boy, did they like hearing stories around the campfire about Ben tricking Spaz off ledges and him penduluming into corners and shivering the night away while hanging in slings. (I don’t think anyone knew my name was Chris for at least a few more years after that.)

For those 30 endless hours, all I could think was how much I hated climbing and never wanted to go again (I was also just a little fast-talking, mumbling 18-year-old with the whole world ahead of him). Too big, too much rock, too overwhelming. It took me weeks to recover – mostly emotionally from being in over my head for too long. Somehow, I forgot the awfulness of the experience and eventually got back on the stone. I’ve since ended up logging a couple of dozen El Cap routes, freed a few big walls, and still boulder a few times a week. Climbing is my favorite thing, so I guess I got over that first gnarly experience.

Two years after Half Dome, we climbed the Pacific Ocean Wall on El Cap over nine stormy days. Flakes ripped off at random, causing us to fall, aging rivets snapped off under body weight, and at one point, we bivied off a quarter incher while raging winds tossed us in our ledge as my pajamas, clipped to the outside, whipped in the wind.

We lived off the same food he would feed me when I visited his cave – tortillas with deli honey packets and peanut butter, pudding cups, and tuna with pepper packets. As one storm cleared, he removed his harness, stepped out onto a spacious, sloping ledge, and munched down a pudding cup while donning cut-off cotton sweatpants and a shirt he snagged behind a Goodwill. He looked so relaxed, right in his element. Meanwhile, I was wrapped in Gore-Tex since everything I touched in the ledge was damp and soggy, giving me chills.

Over his Valley time, Ben banged out nine El Cap routes ranging from the obscure – the dirt-choked Son of Heart – to A5s, including the Atlantic Ocean Wall. AO was my first taste of A5, and we share our experiences from that, with me telling him that Chris McNamara and I bailed right after our route joined Iron Hawk because of an incoming storm. I didn’t know you could bail that high on El Cap, but Chris had no hesitation, and we nailed it without issue despite rapping off bolts that went into the rock before I was born (today, I’m old as dirt). He talked about the interesting expanding sections and his partner’s fall on the crux, where he was lucky enough to avoid slamming into a ledge.

“Now, when I go climbing, I realize in around 1997 and 98 when I was climbing hard, I was in such wicked good cardio shape. I had flow, man.”

For more summers than I can remember, he frequented various caves by night – the moldy Harding Cave, the Chongo Cave, etc. – and by day, he’d free solo and climb up to 5.12. Ben rope soloed several El Cap routes, where once on Zodiac, he accidentally dropped his lead line (it slid through his Gri Gri and dropped to the previous anchor), and instead of staying put and losing his mind as I would, he finished the pitch Aid Man Bob style and waited for the next team to bring it back to him.

Today, we still climb together, and that makes me happy. As we catch up, he tells me about shivering in SAR site one winter under the Camp 4 wall, where rockfall thundered around him.

“Every night you could hear it from the Camp 4 Wall,” he says. “I kept thinking a rock was going to destroy my tent. It was like this endless drumming of rock fall, cascading off Rickson’s Pinnacle area. It was sketchy where I bivied, but I never worried about it in my cave because I had a monster rock hanging over.”

Today, married and with three kids in tow (he calls each one “child”), Ben lives a modest lifestyle, where he still has his boat he hand-made in Mariposa, located a short distance from Yosemite, which he used to sail around the world with his family. He’s a licensed captain, a writer like me, and operates Zartman Rigging, where he hand splices custom climbing and marine gear, equipment that costs a far cry from his dirtbag days where he tied his slings and wrapped a swami around his waist as he couldn’t afford a store-bought harness. His custom daisy chain costs $220 MSRP, a shoulder-length sling costs $60, and a double-length one costs $160.

His gear is UIAA-certified and is available at specialty shops throughout the Northeast. He says 95 percent of his gear is purchased by mariners, with a scant 5 percent sold to climbers. His gear takes a lot of time to craft, as he wraps Dyneema thread continuously, making his virtually indestructible equipment. He still wears his first daisy chain when sailing and climbing, one he used to cross the Northwest Passage with Mark Synott and Renan Ozturk in 2020. He tells me it still looks brand new and has no plans to retire it in the foreseeable future.

I imagine Ben out to sea during that trip, rocking the homemade swami that fastens with Dyneema twine instead of the knot his Yosemite version had – as he captained the ship through ice-chocked peninsulas and navigated through slushy seas.

“I take it every time I go sailing; I use it as my tether on the boat,” he says. “And every time I go up the mast for work, I use it as my safety leash. And that’s part of my everyday work.”

“It’s not selling as fast as I wish,” he tells me of his new gear. “I do have some internet sales here and there. But I do sell it to some climbing shops, where they have it on the shelves. I’m randomly emailing climbing shops. I’ll just Google ‘climbing shop, Utah’ and, you know, get in touch with Pagan Mountaineering, and I send them an email through the contact form. I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m making gear here in the US, blah, blah, blah.’ I’ve probably gotten a 60% response rate from shops like that. I’ve been in contact with four or five shops that might carry my stuff.”

“I have yet to go to REI or the big ones. I thought about running an ad in Gripped, but they’re expensive.”

“I had to join the UIAA as a manufacturer, what they call a safety label holder, which means I had to pay them €400. Then, I had to send a sample of my gear to a lab so that it was ISO-certified. They have a list of the testing labs, and I selected one in the UK because they speak English. I paid them about $500 or whatever to break-test it. I sent them some samples, and they broke them. They sent me a certificate saying this breaks at this rate. Then, they sent me a UIAA certificate that I put on the slings. Now, if you look at my business Abednego Marine, you can see all the products I have had rated, and I can put a safety label on them that says UIAA, USA 2024.

“You’re supposed to put the year of manufacture in there. They need to be UIAA-rated since insurance companies require that.”

Though most of his gear is out of my price range, there is one new invention that I could see buying and using on the regular. “These slings that I’m selling for $60 would never get out of a marine shop door for less than $110. Those guys are going for a different demographic, and you have different parameters. I’m selling this for as low as possible so that I can break into the market and see what happens.”

Soy Sauce Packet Rope Markers

“I came up with a better way to make a center mark on a rope. You know how you can buy a pen from Black Diamond, and it’s like $12, and then you lose the pen in the back of your truck?

“I’m putting rope dye into little soy sauce packets that will cost almost nothing. They are single-use. You put the dye on your rope and throw the soy sauce packet away. It’s a dye that’s made specifically for ropes, so it doesn’t damage them. I made a countertop display that mountain shops can have, so this way my logo is on everybody’s countertop. I will put a video out about it on Instagram as soon as I have it all together.”

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Sailing to Baffin

We switch topics and discuss what he has coming up, including a sailing expedition where he plans to climb big walls with potential partners Caro North and Matt Cornell. On a personal note, Matt is one of my favorite climbing partners. We climbed Astroman in Yosemite a few seasons ago under smoke-filled orange skies. I don’t know Caro, but I helped connect them through social media channels. Ben tells me North Face ambassodor and sailor Mark Synott is helping him secure funding for the trip. The expedition would take four months.

In typical Ben fashion, he’ll travel in a minimalist style. No gas, no solar panels – he hates how they look when fastened on top of a boat – instead relying on a methanol fuel cell to generate some electricity to charge batteries. “This little generator would be inside the boat since it doesn’t make noise and it doesn’t make emissions. I can just put it right in the cabin, it’ll just sit there and trickle charge the batteries using Methanol. That’s part of the proposal.”

He plans to bring prototype titanium jumars and a scant 6mm marine cord for fixing. The cord is ultra-abrasion resistant and designed to withstand rough sea conditions, such as salt water, winches, and jammers.

“There’s sailing technology that blows doors on what climbers have, and climbers are starting to discover it. The climbing companies are starting to put Aramid into rope covers, but like mariners are miles ahead of them already with the technology. For an expedition like this, using my stuff would really put the company on the map because then people would be like, oh, this is legit expedition gear.”

Ben hopes to sail to Baffin next year. In the meantime, he tells me he’ll be at home stockpiling his gear for that trip and more for his wife, Danielle, to sell when he’s in the field.

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