Liz Robbins Shares Untold Stories From Her Yosemite Days With Royal

The name Royal Robbins holds great weight in climbing. While he passed away nearly a decade ago, climbers remember him for his dedication to free climbing, unshakeable clean climbing ethics, his rivalry with Warren Harding, and his countless first ascents.

But alongside Royal through it all was an unsung hero of climbing: Liz, or “Lizard,” as she is commonly called by those close to her. Liz was Royal’s partner in life, love, business, and climbing. The couple met in 1960, when Royal was dirtbagging in the Yosemite Valley, and Liz was working at the Ahwahnee Hotel on break from university. They fell into an abiding love that would last decades. And at a time when few women were roping up, Liz moved into Camp Four with Royal and made history in her own right.

Now in her mid-eighties, Liz shared a few untold stories from her Yosemite days with Climbing this April. Her reflections shed light on her contributions to the sport, the onset of clean climbing, and her remarkable relationship with Royal.

The untold tale of Liz Robbins’s historic Half Dome ascent

In 1967, Liz Robbins became the first woman to climb a grade VI big wall with her ascent of the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome (5.9 C1). Groundbreaking as it was, she didn’t exactly dwell on it. “Royal and I were very spontaneous and not ever thinking too much about what something would mean historically,” she recalls.

A decade earlier, Royal had made the first ascent of the same route with Mike Sherrick and Jerry Gallwas. To mark the route’s 10-year anniversary, Royal asked Liz to climb it with him.

Liz says that the approach was the worst part of their Half Dome ascent. Instead of taking the longer route around, they went directly up from the valley to the base of the climb, bushwhacking their way through a trek that Liz remembers as “just horrendous.”

But ultimately, she loved the experience. The climb was powered by trail mix, sausage, and primitive gear (by today’s standards), yet involved no spats for the young couple. “The two and a half days on Half Dome were fabulous,” she reflects. “I still find it remarkable that I did it.”

What surprised Liz most about their time on Half Dome was that she actually got decent sleep, despite the fact that she considers herself a generally bad sleeper—and that the portaledge had yet to be invented.

Making climbing pants history

According to Yosemite Valley lore, when Liz and Royal topped out on Half Dome, they asked a tourist to snap their photo. In this portrait, they wear cut-off denim shorts and haggard tops blackened with dirt and grime. Rumor has it that after seeing the photo, they decided they needed to make better clothes for climbing.

Did this photo of two dirtbags atop Half Dome really spark the outdoor apparel company Royal Robbins?

“No,” Liz laughs, “that was just Royal’s sense of humor. It was a fun thing to say, but it was not accurate.”

Liz explains they had long been aware of the shortcomings of climbing in generic apparel. “It was all army surplus stuff designed for other things,” she recalls.

One day, Royal said, “Why don’t we do a climbing pant?”

He started relaying to Liz what he would need in a pair of climbing pants: “He would lift his knee up to his chin and say, ‘I’ve got to be able to move like this. And it has to be comfortable and durable.’” Liz adds that while Royal never expressed a demand for aesthetic excellence, from her perspective, “it had to look better, too.”

So she started searching for fabric. The challenge was that she lacked any experience designing clothes—or even sewing. For technical assistance, she reached out to her friend Susie Tompkins, who had established the apparel company Esprit, and whose husband, Doug, founded The North Face.

Another crux of the pants project? Elastic in the waist. “I was told by everyone—climbers, friends, people in the business—you can’t make a men’s pant with elastic in the waist,” Liz recalled. “But of course you can.” The key was making that elastic as visually inconspicuous as the holds on a 5.11 slab.

The 5.11 Pants came out in 1979, named for the cutting-edge free climbing grade in the Yosemite Decimal System at the time. Along with Patagonia’s Stand Up Pants that came out in the `70s, the 5.11s were among the first purpose-built climbing pants ever made, with technical features like an elasticized waist and gusseted crotch for mobility.

A heated rivalry in clean climbing

After traveling to England and climbing with Brits, Royal learned about using passive nuts for protection. “If he could prove that they worked on American rock as well as on British,” Liz wrote in a reflection for Alpinist in 2008, “then maybe American climbers would adopt this method, preventing the piton scars that had been damaging the walls.”

To prove that point, in the spring of 1967, Royal and Liz made the first ascent of Nutcracker Suite (5.8) on Manure Pile Buttress in the Yosemite Valley. Now often referred to simply as Nutcracker, the route constituted the first nut-only ascent in the U.S.

“I took out the two protecting nuts and studied the short, steep step split by a crack,” Liz recalled in that 2008 reflection. “Finally some pushing-pulling combinations and a bit of jamming got me to the ledge. Royal greeted me as if I’d just arrived from the moon … We’d done it: 600 feet long and no pitons!”

But of course, after that historic ascent, Yosemite climbers didn’t abandon pitons immediately. “I suppose there was a little resistance at first,” Liz reflects on the couple’s push to move to clean climbing with only nuts for protection.

Some of that resistance came from Liz and Royal’s own friends, including Yvon Chouinard and Chuck Pratt. While Liz explains that some of the reticence to switch to nuts stemmed from a general aversion to change among the climbing community, it may have been a little personal, too.

“It always rather annoyed them that Royal had some aspects that they didn’t quite get,” Liz says of Pratt and Chouinard. “And one was his appreciation of classical music.”

Liz recalls how when they were all living in Camp 4, Royal kept a record player on a camp table plugged into an outlet near the bathroom via an extension cord. He’d play Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Chopin, much to the bewilderment of the Stonemasters of the Swinging Sixties.

So that same year, Pratt and Chouinard put up a route 40 feet to the left of Nutcracker and called it Cocksucker Concierto (5.8, and since shortened to C.S. Concierto). “It was all in good fun,” Liz laughs. “We were all friends.”

The ultimate climbing partnership?

When Liz first met Royal in Yosemite in 1960, she was a sorority girl on break from classes at University of California, Berkeley. He was “aloof,” according to Liz, with a “contemplative demeanor” that concealed “intensity and passion.” She says that even just meeting him was an adventure.

After all, Liz had grown up in Modesto, California, a city that had grown to a population of 38,000 by 1960. As an only child, she helped out her parents at their paint shop in town. During the summer of 1960, when Liz took a job at Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel, women still couldn’t obtain a credit card without a male co-signer. And female icons in the world of climbing remained scarce at Yosemite and beyond. “Big Wall Bev” Johnson wouldn’t show up at Camp 4 until 1969. And legend Lynn Hill would arrive in the valley nearly two decades later.

Despite the gender dynamics at play, Liz describes her partnership with Royal as idyllic—and lucky. “I just had total respect for him and he did for me,” she says.

Royal and Liz weren’t planners, schemers, or dreamers—they were doers. “We just did what we felt like doing at the time,” she recalls. “And that included getting married.”

One day, John Harlin, the founder of the International School of Modern Mountaineering in the Swiss Alps, called up Royal to ask if he wanted to work for him. They figured doing so would be easier to travel to Switzerland if they were married when it came to passports, traveling, and “all that practical stuff,” as Liz puts its. So they got hitched.

“And that’s, in a way, the story of our life,” Liz says.

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