by Ed » Wed Oct 03, 2018 9:19 am
I am hesitant to over-generalize about people's motivations. To give you an idea of what it was like to climb with Barbara Lilley, see the below.
In the mid-1970's, four of us went to the Beartooth Mountains in Montana for a week: Barbara, RJ Secor, who was in his late teens at the time, and my first wife and I. Barbara was on a kick to climb the western state highpoints, and the main objective was Granite Peak, the highest mountain in Montana.
The first day we backpacked in, the second day we climbed Granite. It was a long day, starting before sunrise and ending after sunset. Cloudy, with thunder and lightning. On the way we ran into a group from Missoula, the only people we saw on the entire trip. They were roped, and when we scrambled around them they threw a few angry words at us. Later on we broke out our rope, for a stretch of about a hundred feet below the summit. To our amazement and horror, Barbara pulled a piton hammer out of her pack and whacked in a piton. By this time chocks had replaced pitons, and pitons, though safer, were viewed as the devil's tools. At the summit, RJ tried to climb the summit block to sign the register, received an electrical jolt, and climbed back down. I repeated the experience. We decided the base of the summit block was good enough. On the way back to camp in the dark, RJ let out a shriek. He had walked off a drop of several feet, fortunately no harm done.
The next day I was looking forward to a day of rest, in a beautiful spot. It was not to be. Every day Barbara rousted us out of our sleeping bags, because we had to bag a new peak every day. Mount Who Cares and Peak Never Heard of It. Up and down, down and up. Not even safe, because of the lightning nearly every afternoon.
The day before we packed out, Barbara and RJ had a route disagreement. RJ turned around in a huff and went back to camp. Around 3pm, we were toiling up a chute, with no visibility up or to the sides. Probably not far from the summit, but no guarantee that this route would 'go'. I took Barbara aside to talk to her. I said if she wanted to continue, we would stay with her. But surely that would mean a bivouac for the night. Rather than replying to me, she walked around in small circles, muttering angrily to herself. She was not angry with me, she was angry at the situation. Finally she turned around. Good thing. Around sunset we were looking up at a steep, long talus slope we had to ascend to make it back to camp. I remember pausing to stare up at it, thinking 'We have to do this, we can do it, but God I would like to sit down and cry and hope this situation simply goes away!'
That is what climbing with Barbara was like. In her mid-forties, well past her prime. Barbara was not internalizing anyone else's values, or playing to any audience. Barbara was Barbara.