In a career full of superhuman stories, Charlie Porter’s 1975 climb on Baffin Island’s Mt. Asgard stands out: He took a month just to ski in all his gear to the base of the route, lashing a long pole across his pack in case he fell into a crevasse.
He soloed up the wall over nine days, 40 pitches, a 5.10+ A4 first ascent that would come to be known as the Porter Route. It was late in the season, and when ice formed on the rope, his jumars wouldn’t grab, so he had to lick them to get them to grip.
From the summit, he downclimbed the Swiss Route, and realized his feet were incredibly swollen from a combination of frostbite and trenchfoot. He waited for the swelling to go down, then cut his boots open, forced his feet in and crawled and hobbled 30-plus miles to Overlord, where he met an Inuit boat.
“I’d run out of food about 10 days earlier, and the first thing they gave me was a Pepsi,” he told Rock & Ice in a 1993 interview (which is pretty much the only interview he ever granted to anyone in the climbing media). Porter said the climb was Grade VI, but everyone else decided it was Canada’s first Grade VII wall.
Porter was a superhero even within the climbing world-he was the idol of most people’s climbing idols. And he never talked about his achievements. He didn’t bring a camera on his climbs and he didn’t write about them. In 1976, he soloed the Cassin Ridge on Denali, grinding out the portion of the route from the top of the Japanese Couloir (at 13,400 feet) to the summit in 36 hours.
The American Alpine Journal ran a brief report of the climb, saying, “”With his usual reticence, Porter has given us no details.” Porter later admitted that he had pulmonary edema on the climb and could feel his lungs bubbling just below the summit.
Over a two-year period in 1972 and 1973, Porter put up five difficult and now famous routes on El Capitan: The Shield, Mescalito, Tangerine Trip, New Dawn, which he did solo, and Zodiac, also solo. In between his legendary climb on Mt. Asgard in 1975 and his solo of the Cassin Ridge in 1976, he teamed up with Bugs McKeith and Adrian and Alan Burgess to do the first ascent of Polar Circus, a 2,300-foot WI5 now considered to be one of the classic ice climbs of the Canadian Rockies.
Porter also built his own sailboat and launched it from the coast of Maine, teaching himself to sail as he made his way down to the Gulf of Mexico and then to Chile. In 1979, he navigated the Drake Passage, paddling a kayak around Cape Horn. Porter spent the last two decades of his life working as a scientist in South America, studying oceanography and climatology in Argentina and Chile.
At the end of a life of bold exploration and adventure, Porter died after a heart attack in his home in southern Chile in February 2014.
Photo courtesy Barnaby Porter
the last name fits the bill
What a true Legend.
On the same level as Ray Jardine.
Hatz off
A true legend also for me!!!
I’m surprised and thankfull to read something about my best climbing anti-heroe.
Paolo Masa Alpine Guide UIAGM from Val di Mello, Italy
A legend down here in Southern Chile. I only got to meet him once. Very humble and friendly. Wanted to extract some of all the information he has but then he was gone!
Para la salida de campo Alejandra …
Simply badass
An outdoorsman who should be remembered and honored at great lengths. They don’t make them like Charlie anymore
What a badass!!!
I met Charlie in the spring of 1975. I was 17 and thought I was a pretty good climber.
My partner and I had just rapped off of Becky’s Wall in Little Cottonwood Canyon. The route wasn’t hard, but it was a Little Cottonwood 5.7 (read hard 5.8 anywhere else) and before sticky rubber and chalk it demanded our attention and respect.
As we were coiling our rope and sorting our gear, a scruffy guy in a white cap and an old rag wool sweater scrambled uo to us. He asked us about the climb. I gave him my assessment with all the bravado of a cocky seventeen year old
He put out his hand and said I’m Charlie.
He then proceeded to solo (no rope or gear, just a pair of old worn EB’s) a route I had climbed with gear and trepidation.
We bumped into each other several times that spring and he was always pleasant affirming to us.
It wasn’t until a year or two later that I realized who Charlie Porter was.
Precursor to Marc A Lecleur?
Brossag Camp
True Climber! Grande Huevos !!!
I like you pic
BADASS!!
A true climber !!
Emmanuel Honaw hay que conseguirlo…para llegar a la cima de alguna de las hermosas sierras sonorenses 🙂
RIP Charlie..
Alejandra vamos preparando algo ligero, para cuando ya estés lista para ir a campo…
De acuerdo Emmanuel Honaw 🙂
A well-deserved badass
Ultralight backpacking
The only thing wrong with this is that it should have come out the day he died.
everything but the kitchen sink… aWesOmE!
Not only did he most likely have a kitchen sink, he probably had a backup sink, and a backup to the backup.
Before heading out on one expedition, we managed to get him to take 3 of 5 backup toilet bowls off his boat. That’s in addition to the 3 working and the 2 heads that could be re-commissioned.
Blessings upon thee.
Badass for sure
Sitting in my air conditioned living room reading this I feel so insignificant. Porter was not.
r there any books/docu./films,on charlie? thanks.geneo
Sheesh!
Wish I had known of this article 8 years ago.
Ive always been in awe of climbers, l dont and never have climbed any thing but the stairs!! But as an ex paratrooper l have some understanding of achievement. Mr. Porter, what an outstanding unnasuming human being you were,RIP, Pilgrim.
The boyish face rang a bell. I may have met him in Glacier Bay in the 80s .
I was in the west end on a kayak trip and met a pair of climbers in a Klepper as well coming off from what they told me was a first ascent. They had been stormed in on a bivouac for days before the summit climb. They looked tired and worn. From the self supported trip still a day or two back to Bartlett Cove. Charlie gave credit to his partner, an older guy with the ‘look’ of a seasoned mountaineer, glacier steel blue eyes, scars on his cheeks and a few missing finger tips which I figured were frostbite wounds.. I remember him as quiet and simply humble…
Sounds like he achieved his bucket list….and then some!! Remarkable spirit in human form
I think l read that on The Shield he did incredibly long sections of aid with nothing but RURPs. If he’d fallen he would have zippered huge long distances. Incredible stuff!
I’m not sure that i’ve ever heard of charlie but now i’ve got to see if i have that 1993 rock & ice issue. I started climbing in the late 80’s and i climbed in puerto rico in ’98. I hope you had fun in your climbing escapades charlie.