David Craig, Jonathan Cape

My last main landfall in America, and a Mecca of many years standing, was the granite massif east of Yosemite, at Tuolumne Meadows. "Tuolumne," with the accent on the "o," had always felt so caressing a name that saying it was like letting larch tassels run through your hair. We had come north via Death Valley, a dreadful mineral cleft where the very water and air seemed sick; north again across the vacant uplands of southwest Nevada; and west around the tail of the White Mountains to Big Pine and Mammoth Lakes, to visit the Devil's Postpile, a stack of vertical "timbers" twenty metres high which are actually columns of crystalized basalt identical with the organ-pipe formation near the Giant's Causeway. Here the tops of the hexagonal cross sections have been worn glassy by the feet of countless visitors and Anne just managed to save a little boy, without alarming his parents, as he pranced happily backward towards the brink of the drop.

Tuolumne turned out to be less luxurious than its name. It had a Canadian asperity, due to its height (2,000 metres above sea level) and also to the treading of many thousand mountain pilgrims' feet. The grassland is trodden permanently close so that it looks like the upper valleys of the granite Highlands in Aberdeenshire when the snows have not long melted, leaving the sward flattened. In the 1870s, when John Muir, the pioneering genius of the Yosemite, first came this way, nobody had been here except the Tuolumne tribe themselves. They are now extinct.

From these open green lands and their flocks and herds of pine trees, the domes arise. They are silvery white, like crystalline re-frozen snow. Moon after moon of them rises out of the upland, voluptuous as swathes of silver fox fur. Your eyes stroke them, as they curve up in the distance. Close up they are formidable, sheer as snowdrifts, with scarcely a weakness to let in the fingers or the toes. I was climbing with Michael Cohen, after writing to him on the strength of his deep-reaching interpretation of Muir's wilderness ideas in a book called "The Pathless Way." He turned out to be a seasoned climber from western California, now based in Utah, still in love with Yosemite. He and his wife, a Parks guide, had had their wedding ceremony on one of the domes and lived in a log cabin originally built by Lembert, a pioneer who had reached here not long after Muir.

We went for a route whose line followed a huge exfoliation--a swan's wing of white granite fifty or sixty metres high that opened slowly out from the shoulder of Stately Pleasure Dome. How could they call it that! What has this broad head of enduring rock to do with Coleridge's abortive little fantasy, his tawdry special effects, his incense-bearing trees and demon lovers? Michael too winced at it. The valley of Yosemite and the domes of Tuolumne are absolutely places that you want to remain unviolated by signposts or handrails or marketing gimmicks. I had asked for the route, from several Michael suggested, purely on the fine simplicity of its name, Great White Book. It was as beautiful as its name, foam-pale and smooth as a magnolia petal parting from the sleek candle of its bud. Magnolia may sound too tender for such a place yet the tree was wild at this latitude 40 million years ago, in the epoch of the global jungle, until it was replaced by Joshua trees and cacti as the climate dried.

We padded unroped up a smooth glacis, getting used to its leaning. It was the merest doorstep of the dome yet we were already fifty metres above the road and the glittering lake beside it. Above our heads, astride the cleavage between wing and mother-rock, a young man was climbing rapidly downwards, alone and unprotected--jogging you might say, as though the surface under his feet were at 0', not 60'. In his dusty black jeans he looked like a cross between a hippy and a raven, with his hair permed in a kind of Afro-shock. Courteously he perched on the crest of the wing to let us pass and conversed briefly.

"Some days," he said with the playful self-absorption of the West Coast youth culture, "I think I'll come up here and kill myself."

"We-e-ll ..." said Michael with a shrug that implied "A man's gotta do ..."

"Well what?" the raven broke in, pretending to be hurt that anyone should write him off like this. "Naw - I wouldn't do that: and he danced on downwards. It must have been wonderful to inhabit the dome with your gaze turned outwards like that, scanning across the entire range. We resumed our canny balancing upwards, facing inwards.

On our left was the naked, shallow-dimpled shoulder, or breast, of the dome, on the right the wing, with a cool morning shadow under it that made it possible to see the slender lodgements that were all we had for our toes. Further up, in the full glare, the surface was all blind white and it was as well that Michael led the final, unprotected thirty metres--his sun-glasses filtered the light and made the dimples visible. Choosing these minimal holds was fascinating, a very thinking type of climbing--playing chess with your body, as Al Alvarez calls it. The two lower pitches, between the wing and the breast, were by contrast gymnastic, strenuous, demanding leverage I had never used before. Steady the right haunch against the wing, wedge the right foot in the cleft, perch the left foot on any minimal fulcrum--a felspar crystal, the lower rim of a scar where a flake has spalled off--and palm downwards with the left hand, trusting the friction ... If you bit off too much with a move, the delicate mechanics of it all would burst outwards from the centre of your gravity and cast you off.

It had all been security itself compared with the final pitches on the nakedness of the slope above the wing. Entering on that was a spacewalk, or at least a moon-walk (for me; a good climber would have found the angle child's-play). As I turned my back on Michael's progress above me, to avoid being dazzled by the sunlight reflecting from the granite mirror, I concentrated my mind by focusing on the slack of the rope lying on the slab below me. It slowly shrank upwards with the contraction of a snake--no limbs, no visible eyes, only the continuous muscle inching towards me, leaving no trace, until It had crawled past me and it was time for me to climb.