Like a shark in the ocean: the semiotics of extreme precarity in Joshua Tree rock climbing

Sally Ann Ness

doi:10.1515/sem-2022-0074

Article

Like a shark in the ocean: the semiotics of extreme precarity in Joshua Tree rock climbing

Sally Ann Ness

Published/Copyright: August 29, 2022

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From the journal Semiotica Volume 2022 Issue 248

Abstract

During the mid-1970s the extraordinarily dangerous style of free solo climbing (climbing without protection) emerged in the collective practice of a small community of “Stonemaster” climbers actively developing new climbing routes and the new “free” style of roped climbing in what is now Joshua Tree National Park, California. While its emergence might be interpreted as an affectively-driven, macho embodied social semiotic or ethnomotricity, in actuality the evolution of free soloing in the case of Stonemaster-era climbing at Joshua Tree may be more accurately understood as the logical consequence of an intensive regime of practice in which climbers developed a near absolute bodily familiarity with certain climbing routes. Eventually, the reasonableness of climbing with little and even no protection on a subset of these routes became self-evident and conventional. Free soloing, in the semiotic perspective of the later Peirce, manifested as a Normal Logical Interpretant in the Joshua Tree landscape. It embodied the living definition of self-controlled conduct, and the Symbols it cultivated testified persuasively to the growth of a creative corporeal intelligence actualizing near absolute degrees of free will.

Keywords: dynamic interpretant; Joshua Tree National Park; normal interpretant; Peirce; rock climbing

Corresponding author: Sally Ann Ness, University of California Riverside, Riverside, USA, E-mail: sally.ness@ucr.edu

Acknowlegments

The research for this study was undertaken as part of a Cooperative Task Agreement (#PA119AC01223) between the U.S. Department of Interior National Park Service (NPS) and the University of California, Riverside (UCR) in order to produce an Historic Resource Study of Recreational Rock Climbing in Joshua Tree National Park. The oral history study has to date involved the production and transcription of seventeen oral history interviews with senior members of Joshua Tree’s climbing community, including three members of the Stonemaster group, Mari Gingery, Mike Lechlinski, and John Long. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the interviewees as well as to the NPS officers and staff of Joshua Tree National Park, especially to Climbing Ranger Bernadette Regan, for their participation in and support for this research. Acknowledgement is also due to UCR research assistants David Asplund, Jaqueline Torres, who served as research assistants and Emilio Triguero, who also served as co-interviewer and transcriber for the oral history interviews.

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Received: 2022-06-20

Accepted: 2022-07-21

Published Online: 2022-08-29

Published in Print: 2022-09-27

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2022-0074

Keywords for this article

dynamic interpretant; Joshua Tree National Park; normal interpretant; Peirce; rock climbing