“I was pounding a piton, and—zing—the hammer handle broke, sending the hammerhead flying past my ear. There I was in the middle of that pitch with no hammer,” Jerry Gallwas recalls of the 1953 second ascent of the Steck-Salathé Route on Sentinel Rock. “Royal [Robbins] came to my rescue. After that, I bought a second hammer and took it on every climb.”

Their First Big Wall

“The Salathé/Steck on Sentinel was my first really big route,” Royal Robbins wrote in Mountain #18. “I did the second ascent with Jerry Gallwas and Don Wilson. We went prepared for five days and got to the top in two.”

The team was still in their teens: Robbins was 18, Gallwas 16, and Wilson 19. The route had been pioneered just three years earlier (June 30–July 4, 1950) by John Salathé (age 51), a Swiss blacksmith, and Allen Steck (age 24), an American geologist, prolific climber, and writer. Their first ascent involved a mix of direct aid and free climbing on what is now one of Yosemite’s most storied lines.

Today, the 1,500-foot route—featuring punishing chimneys and offwidths like the infamous Narrows—is rated 5.10b (16 pitches, 13 of which are wide). It appears in Fifty Classic Climbs of North America, and Steck documented the ordeal in his Sierra Club Bulletin article, “Ordeal by Piton.” Henry Barber free-soloed it at 2:30 in 1973; the late Zach Milligan made 275 solo ascents.

“The climb’s reputation for being long, wide, and physical is well deserved,” says Mountain Project, “but the quality of the climbing, the exposure, and the adventure shouldn’t be understated.”

“We’d read and re-read Steck’s article… and pictured ourselves on the wall, suffering like they had in July’s heat,” wrote Robbins in a story Gallwas sent me.

Getting There | A Bear

Gallwas took a Greyhound from San Diego to LA, then joined Robbins and Don in Wilson’s 1950 Mercury for the drive to Yosemite. En route, they flipped off a train conductor near Fresno, who responded by donning a giant glove and raising his hand with an exaggerated middle finger—“We cracked up laughing, and so did he,” Gallwas says.

Once in Yosemite Valley and approaching Sentinel in the dark, they hit a snag: “A big black bear was asleep on the trail. You don’t wake a bear and say, ‘Excuse me,’ so we scrambled around it,” Gallwas says.

After scrambling 1,300 feet to the base, they tied the rope around their waist, slung 30 pitons and 40 carabiners, and prepared to haul a quart of water per person (rationed for five days), plus gorp, tuna, crackers, and dark chocolate (chosen because it wouldn’t melt). Wool sweaters and anoraks served as their bivy gear. Robbins led the first pitch.

On the Wall

Swapping leads, they reached midway at the Flying Buttress by dusk. “We shivered all night, assuming cold bivies were just part of climbing,” Robbins wrote. “Years later, down jackets would change that.”

Day two included off-route aid climbing on dead-end cracks, reversing sections to find the right way, and at one point, Robbins took a huge pendulum during a traverse after releasing his weight from a piton he left in place. “I bounced 30 feet past the crack, swung back 45,” he wrote.

When they reached the Narrows, where Salathé and Steck had ascended pitons adjacent to the wide crack, Robbins and his team chose to battle the tight chimney instead. “Once you’re in, it’s all 5th class,” Gallwas says.

By the afternoon of the second day, they summited. “The last pitches were free except for one steep section,” Robbins noted. “We were jubilant.”

Rockfall & Root Beer Floats

But the way down didn’t go without incident. After down scrambling and negotiating around giant boulders, they reached a talus slope with unstable rocks. The “gully is often loose and very steep at times and requires much care,” Mountain Project says.

“Rockfall nearly wiped out Don—he was jumping like crazy,” Gallwas says. The same thing happens coming off the Cathedral Rocks. Those gullies are really hazardous.”

Once back in the Valley, they celebrated with root beer floats served by a soda jerk. “That was in the old Yosemite lodge, and they had a creaky soda fountain bar,” Gallwas says.

Gallwas adds about his two days and one night on the Steck-Salathé, “It’s a wonderful route. When you look at it, that sheer face… just stunning. It was quite an adventure.”

Jerry Gallwas is a board member of the Yosemite Climbing Association. The organization has preserved 10,000 climbing artifacts, images, and memorabilia and removed 1.2 million pounds of trash from Yosemite through the annual Facelift clean-up events. To donate to the non-profit, click here.

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