Layton Kor As A Climber Of The Golden Age

651 Words2 Pages

Richard Reed

“Imagine you're 15, in your bedroom at your parents' house. It's 5, maybe 6 a.m., still dark outside. You hear a tap at the bedroom window, and there's nobody there. Then you hear the back door open, and then the refrigerator door, and there's Layton, making breakfast for us because we're going climbing”, Pat Ament said. Ament was a close climbing partner and friend to Layton Kor, who is considered to be the most legendary climber of the Golden Age.
Layton Kor was born in Canby, Minnesota, on June 11, 1938 and was a part of a family who traveled often, as his father was always searching for work. While living in Texas as a teenager, one of Kor’s first encounters with climbing was when he saw a movie about ice climbing. His interest peaked and there was no time like the present to start climbing. His first experience climbing was on a sloped clay embankment using ice axes. He chipped steps into the embankment, as any mountaineer would do in the ice or snow. Kor became instantly hooked on the sport and it became his whole life.
After multiple moves, Kor and his family eventually settled down in Boulder, Colorado during the late 1950s. With the abundance of raw boulders and other rock, he located and made his first ascents in Eldorado Canyon. Layton was hooked on this new sort of lifestyle and even once told his family that if they left Boulder, they would be leaving without him. As his journey went on, Kor began to take on the hardest of challenges from The Naked Edge in Eldorado Canyon, to The Diagonal Lower East Face on Longs Peak. His list did not stop there. Kor made legendary first ascents on some of the hardest unclimbed towers in Utah including a route on Castleton Tower in 1961, that was later named after Kor...

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...reshes into the uppermost loop, while teetering there in the most precarious one (one would think) tiring position, repeats the same process again and again without pausing.”
Within only 10 years, Kor completed more first ascents than any other American did before or since. It is not surprising that Kor was the most comfortable on rocks that were loose and crumbly since he began on a simple clay mound in his backyard. Layton Kor’s years of climbing came to an end in 1968 when he decided to become a door-to-door preacher, but even then he missed climbing. Unfortunately he became very ill with kidney disease but received so much support from friends and former climbing partners that were able to raise money for his medical expenses. At the age of 70, Kor did one last climb in Arizona. He said, “Climbing is hard to give up, it’s just as hard to give up as cigarettes.”

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