Camp 4 and the Birth of a Climbing Culture

The walk-in campground you are passing was, for roughly thirty years, the most important piece of real estate in the international climbing world. Not because of its facilities. The facilities were minimal: sites, a water spigot, a shared bathroom. Because of who slept there, and what they went out and did every morning.

From the nineteen fifties onward, Camp Four was where the generation of climbers who invented modern big-wall technique lived for weeks or months at a time. Royal Robbins came here. Yvon Chouinard, who would later found Patagonia, camped here and forged his first pitons in a coal forge he transported to the valley. Warren Harding, who spent forty-seven days of effort making the first ascent of El Capitan in nineteen fifty-eight, staged his climbs from here. They ate poorly, climbed everything in sight, argued constantly about ethics and style, and produced a body of ascents that reset the definition of what was possible on vertical granite.

The NPS tried to close or convert Camp Four on multiple occasions. The climbing community organized and fought the conversions, arguing that the campground met the specific definition of a historic site: a place where a documented cultural movement had developed. In two thousand three, Camp Four was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the first climbers' campsite in the United States to receive that designation.

It is still a campground. Still walk-in. Still minimal. The climbers sleeping here tonight are camping in a registered national historic landmark.