RETURN TO CAMP 4
THE WAY MY FATHER TELLS IT, THE STORY BEGINS WITH A WIRY AND WHITE-HAIRED MAN named Tom Frost hitting a painful crossroads in his early 60s—heart attack, divorce. Like a lot of middle-aged people in hard times, Frost decided to save himself by returning to youthful sources of strength and happiness. Like few people of any age, however, Frost had been a key player during the golden age of Yosemite climbing, a near-mythic time in the 1950s and ’60s when Frost and other young men, including Royal Robbins and Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, spent months at a time in a scruffy Yosemite campground called Camp 4. Climbing all day and talking late into the night, they pioneered new hardware and techniques and made dramatic first ascents of extremely difficult climbs on great walls like El Capitan.
By the time Frost hit his rough patch, in 1997, he hadn’t been climbing in over 30 years. He was living in Colorado, playing a significant role in his local Mormon church, and running a photographic lighting company that he’d cofounded, called Chimera Lighting. But Frost had an adult son named Ryan who was a good climber, so Frost bought a Porsche 911—call it a midlife crisis if you want, but don’t judge until you’ve heard the whole tale. Frost drove that Porsche to an outdoor store, spent several thousand dollars acquiring all the equipment necessary for multiday climbs of El Cap, and then raced west with his son—across the Rocky Mountains and the desert vastness of the Great Basin and over the California state line into the Sierra Nevada.
Yosemite Valley was a lush green that summer, thanks to massive snowfall the previous winter and subsequent flooding. As Frost drove around the gentle curves of the Yosemite Valley loop road, below huge
