Valley Walls

Before the first free ascent of the Dawn Wall on El Capitan captivated the world, a rag-tag group of innovators built the sport of modern American rock climbing from a makeshift home base in Yosemite's Camp 4. Photographer Glen Denny was a key figure in that Golden Age of climbing, capturing pioneering feats on camera while tackling challenging ascents himself. Now, in prose both exhilarating and poignant, he gives us true tales of colorful characters and a legendary locale, of brotherhood and sky-high quests, and of living cheap and dodging park rangers. Denny learned the game with the mythic Warren Harding, hauled water in glass gallon jugs up the east face of Washington Column, dangled overnight on El Capitan's Dihedral Wall in a lightning storm, and felt "rock that had not been touched since it emerged from the ice a million years ago, clean and white." A young man comes of age in these pages, at the dawn of a new era.