L-R: John Gill, Helmut Rohrl on a
warm-up buttress at Devil's Lake photo:PG
John Gill at Devil's Lake: Doorway
and Tombstone
John Gill at Devil's Lake: montage
of '58-'59 climbs
In John's own words:
John
Gill
I began
climbing in Georgia in 1953 while in high school. After
graduating from college, I attended the University of Chicago
for 12
months during 1958-59, studying meteorology as preparation for
my work in
the USAF. During that time I visited Devils Lake on several
occasions with
fellow
members of the UCMC.
I climbed
and bouldered for many years, until my late 60s, when
arthritis
and rotator cuff problems sidelined me. After probable surgery I
hope to
eventually get back on the rock.
How would one guess, from the diffident
statement above, that John Gill was thirty years ahead of his time;
arguably the best boulderer in the country, if not the world, until
injury and arthritis forced him to back off; and the leading exponent
and innovator, at least in this country, of what most climbers today
mean by "climbing".
When John first started climbing with us in 1958, we regarded Devil's
Lake as a practice area for pitches we might encounter in the
mountains. If there had been "real" climbing, by which we meant
mountaineering, within a two hour drive from Chicago, it is unlikely
that we would have spent much time at Devil's Lake. After all,
from a distance, the "climbing area" at Devil's Lake is nothing more
than a few rocks poking through the trees.
John had a very different view of matters. He felt that bouldering, as
he called it, was a fine sport in its own right, not a "practice" for
anything else. The first wave of UCMC pioneers, myself among them,
resisted John's notion to varying degrees. It was too radical a
change from our mind-set, and it also involved the inconvenient
necessity of specific strength-enhancing exercises.
How quaint all this sounds now. For every "trad" mountaineering climb
done
today, I daresay hundreds of short, technically demanding rockclimbs
are done on boulders and cliff faces around the country. Even at
strongholds of "trad" mountaineering such as the Tetons, the focus of
new activity tends to be individual buttresses and faces, without
regard for summiting. I confess I didn't foresee
this. The fact that I didn't want to, probably was a factor!
Photos of
some of John's climbs
Link to John's superb website