Lost Arrow Chimney, Yosemite, 1955: Jerry Gallwas Recalls Climbing this Wide Testpiece
“We were in tennis shoes, t-shirts, Levi’s, had strong arms, and not a hell of a lot of judgment.”
Jerry Gallwas collection. Courtesy of Yosemite Climbing Association
“No, no, we didn’t have bivy gear,” Jerry Gallwas says when recounting the third ascent of Lost Arrow Chimney in Yosemite in 1955, which required him and his partners—Don Wilson and Chuck Wilts—three days to complete. “We were used to (open) bivouacking—like I’d done on the second ascent of the Steck-Salathé on Sentinel Rock with Royal Robbins and Wilson—and we expected to find ledges in the chimney. There are some bivouac spots, but we never managed to reach them, and we always ended up hanging in slings for the night.”
First climbed in September 1947 and feared by many to this day for its ten continuously wide pitches—ranging from offwidth to chimney and rated 5.10a—Lost Arrow Chimney is as historic as it is burly, inspiring Allen Steck to write about it in the American Alpine Journal. He wrote, “When Anton (“Ax”) Nelson and John Salathé reached the summit of the Lost Arrow via the Arrow Chimney, they had just completed the most demanding climb yet in the brief history of Yosemite climbing.”
Fast forward to today: When Hannes Puman visited Yosemite this past fall and freed the Nose via the Schnoz variation, he also wanted to challenge himself on the hardest routes in the park—but not leave out the challenging and historic ones. He and David Johansson endured an epic on Lost Arrow Chimney, with Johansson breaking his hand and the team retreating through the night in sub-freezing conditions. Read about it here and scroll down to Epic on the Lost Arrow Chimney.
Seven years after Nelson and Salathé nabbed the first ascent 1954, Warren Harding, Bob Swift, and Frank Tarver snagged the second, enduring four bivouacs. Eight years to the day after the first ascent, Gallwas and company started up the climb. Gallwas adds, “Remember, there weren’t very many climbers in those days.”
But first, they had to get permission from the Park Service, which was especially tricky since Gallwas was only 17 years old—and also needed his parents’ permission. For context, the climb came one year before Gallwas, Don Wilson, Robbins, and Harding attempted the Northwest Face of Half Dome before retreating. Gallwas, Mike Sherrick, and Robbins succeeded in 1957.
“With the exception of the request that the climb be attempted at a time other than the maximum travel period, it appears that you and your companions have met the conditions that are required in the interest of safety,” wrote the park’s superintendent in the letter of approval. And with that, they were off.
This was before the use of ascenders, and since the team didn’t pack a haul line, they followed the pitches, used prusiks, and carried their supplies on their backs. They lived off tuna, crackers, a few nuts, and sips of water they rationed throughout the climb. “When you don’t have a lot of water, you don’t end up eating a lot of food,” Gallwas says. They had trained their bodies in advance to get by on as little as a quart per person per day. Gallwas even took it one step further: “I climbed at Tahquitz with just an 8-ounce can of tomato juice all day.”
Though his climbing career was relatively brief—it lasted just seven years before a sliding fall down Mt. Baldy in Southern California left him with internal injuries—Gallwas constantly climbed before the Lost Arrow Chimney. Read about his fall here.
“In ’53, I climbed 50 weekends out of the year. I was only home for Thanksgiving and Christmas,” he says.
When they set off up Lost Arrow Chimney, daytime temps reached 100 degrees. They carried homemade pitons, including many crafted by Gallwas on an anvil he dragged out of an abandoned mining camp. For the wide sections, they slung chockstones jammed in the cracks.
“We were there for the excitement,” he says. “The spiritual part, the intellectual part, just wasn’t there.”
As 70 years have passed, Gallwas remembers few details of the climb. The uncomfortable bivies are etched in his mind, along with a meeting near the summit with Harding, who hoisted him up the last stretch, and later, speeding through the Valley in Bob Swift’s Austin Healey.
Gallwas’s most vivid memory, though, is of Chuck Wilts’s wife and kids yodeling up to them as they climbed. “She had the most beautiful yodeling voice, and so when she yodeled, we yodeled back, and the sounds echoed through the chimney.”
Today, Jerry Gallwas sits on the board of directors for the Yosemite Climbing Association, which is launching a weekly newsletter. Learn more at YosemiteClimbing.org.
