Rephotographing Cragmont Park Climbers

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I needed to get out of the house for an hour or so today so I hopped in the car and drove from Alameda over to Cragmont Park in Berkeley. With me I had some snapshots from Lewis Clark's collection of Richard Leonard and friends on one of their climbing exercises in the park. The area has considerably more foliage today making it pretty difficult to rephotograph any of the actual climbing photos but the great old stone bench is pretty much unchanged but for a bit of moss.

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And who exactly were these people? Steve Roper explained in Camp 4.

"Those California mountaineers who had seen Yosemite Valley knew that its cliffs were orders of magnitude above lowly Cragmont Rock. Leonard, by 1933 the prime mover of the group (one could, without much argument, call him the father of California rock climbing), insisted that no one was going to climb in Yosemite until he or she had mastered the proper techniques. That this took a few years may seem strange, but these folks were either serious students or young professionals; neither group had the time or money, especially at the height of the Depression, to go climbing often. In fact, they thought it a good season if they went to the local rocks eight times a year and to the High Sierra once."



L to R: Jules Eichorn, Bestor Robinson, Richard Leonard.
August 25,1934 first ascent. Photo probably by Marjory Farquhar. Rescued from SF Examiner photo files, 2012.