I ’d already seen previous cuts of the new documentary Frost: The Story of a Lifetime, about the Yosemite Golden Age standout Tom Frost. But last week, viewing the version premiering on May 23 at the Mountainfilm Festival in Telluride, Colorado, I realized what had bothered me all along: I was watching a cradle-to-grave biography of a climber almost jarringly well-adjusted, the kind of quietly decent, ethical, and undamaged subject documentarists generally go out of their way to avoid. Here was a hardcore climber, one of the world’s best for a time, who did not refer to himself as a dirtbag or live in voluntary poverty, a Yosemite stalwart who didn’t conform to the grab bag of tropes reflexively deployed by creatives to accentuate the eccentricities and obsessions of their “protagonists,” who require a bit of texturizing to make them stickier on the page and screen. It’s doubtful that Frost, who learned rope craft at the Stanford Alpine Club before graduating in 1958 with a degree in mechanical engineering, had ever read Kerouac.
Viewing the 104-minute film, I was grateful for Deer Tick’s finger-style guitar soundtrack, Frost’s folksy banter, and the filmmakers’ light touch. As if to declare itself simple and good, the film was rendered in black and white, an homage to Frost’s photographs from the early ’60s, widely considered iconic images of Yosemite Valley’s Golden Age of climbing, marked by ascents of Half Dome and especially of El Capitan in the late ’50s and ’60s.
No sweat formed on my palms while watching the climbing footage; no vicarious emotional trauma, which sometimes happens when viewing intense documentaries about intense people doing intense things. Toward the end of the film, a big reveal: After 50 years, Frost, the buttoned-down Mormon (lapsed), expresses his love for Mother Earth. I began wondering—and I really did think this for a beat—whether someone should launch a decency campaign called “What Would Frost Do?”
I’ve known about this project for over 11 of its 15 years of production; I know the filmmaker, Tom Seawell, a San Francisco–based commercial photographer, videographer, and self-professed flatlander. He’s solicited my opinion of various cuts. (Alta Journal was an early sponsor of the film.) I was by Seawell’s side when he struggled with less-than-flattering information about Frost and whether to lay it bare. I told him to lean into it, invoking Hemingway’s line, “If it’s all beautiful you can’t believe in it—things aren’t that way.” I didn’t know if he would. Seawell, I knew, had fallen in love with his subject.
Which is to say that I settled in for a love letter. The film is mostly that. Not entirely.
We hear Frost before we see him: an elder’s voice, nasal, at times difficult to understand. He’s leaving Seawell a voicemail; it’s around 2013. He’d withdrawn his support several times. Now, enthused that production was underway, Frost says, “I’m in!”
Cut to the backyard of Royal Robbins, considered the dominant figure of the Golden Age. Robbins fills the screen; Frost sits to his right but out of the frame. “He was an unsung hero,” says Robbins, his speech slowed by the disease that would kill him in 2017. “It’s time to sing his song.”
And so we’re plunged into a panegyric voiced by an ensemble cast, whom we’ve seen in other Yosemite-centric documentaries, including Doug Robinson (an Alta contributor), Alex Honnold, and the writer Daniel Duane (another Alta contributor), the son of the Berkeley attorney Dick Duane (who plays a major role in the film).
Frost walks into Yosemite Valley in 1960 at age 24, joining Robbins, Joe Fitschen, and Chuck Pratt for the second ascent of the Nose route on El Capitan in one seven-day push. The following year, Frost, Robbins, and Pratt make the first ascent of the Salathé Wall. In 1964, the test piece: Frost climbs the North America Wall with Robbins, Pratt, and piton maker Yvon Chouinard. Together, they’re considered the four horsemen of Yosemite Valley: the world’s greatest rock climbers. Meanwhile, Frost meets his wife, converts to Mormonism, and becomes the kind of company man the counterculture would rebel against in a few years.
A precocious climber who’d picked up his technical chops stunningly fast, Frost had a certain sangfroid when pioneering foreboding walls never touched by human hands but was no less companionable and upbeat under extreme stress: the perfect expedition partner—Robbins’s steady second. Others through the years would pick up Golden Age folklore and, knowing him only through his photographs, infer the same kindness and basic decency. “You get the sense that part of his interior world or his soul is somehow not on the same plane as we are,” says climber and author Pete Takeda a minute into the film.
Thirteen minutes in, Frost’s youngest brother, Jeff, delivers the first glimpse of the man behind the façade. “Tom is both the most stoic person I know and the most vulnerable at the same time,” he says. “You don’t see the vulnerability. He hides that; the laugh hides that. Stoicism is the code that he lives by.”
The film pans chronologically across Frost’s career: a stint with the CIA, a marriage to Dorene del Fium, fatherhood, the Chouinard Equipment partnership, a climbing comeback in Yosemite with his son, Ryan, in ’97. Frost’s working philosophy, his idée fixe on the wall and off, becomes a guiding metaphor: It’s not getting to the top that counts; it’s how you get there.
Frost died in 2018. Soon after, Frost’s daughter, Marna, called Seawell: She had something important to tell him. Seawell and creative director and editor Jeff Wiant, believing the film was largely in the can, flew to Colorado with their cameras. Marna shared “the big family secret.” During the telling, Seawell and Wiant exchanged glances. “We realized we’d gone from 80 percent complete to 20 percent,” Seawell tells me. Frost, they learned, maintained walls impenetrable to most, certainly to them.
Marna recounts decades of marital fighting the family kept from outsiders. Her mother, Dorene, who had multiple sclerosis, threatened divorce for decades, but it was Frost who finally filed. “It was almost like a light switch,” Marna says in the film. “Then he just walked away.” A second marriage followed, the new wife cutting him off from his children—and by his daughter’s account, he let her. Ryan never spoke to him again. Marna eventually tested the wall: She brought her own children to the base of El Capitan and put their hands on it. Her father came to meet them. “Yes, he made mistakes, but he’s still my dad,” she tells the camera.
Ryan, who declined to appear in the film, talked with me by phone last week. He saw his father as an enigma—a man who’d accomplished extraordinary things and who, in private, naturally acquiesced to the stronger personality in the room: Dorene first, Joyce (the stepmother) second. But he later realized his father had agency and wasn’t using it; the anger shifted. Ryan didn’t visit his father when he was dying and didn’t go to the funeral. “I don’t think of him,” Ryan says.
The dissonance is all papered over by the final sequence, the film’s strongest, which recounts how Frost, a cofounder of the Friends of Yosemite Valley, sued the National Park Service (NPS) to save the climbers’ campground, Camp 4, from being demolished for employee housing, ultimately helping secure the camp’s designation on the National Register of Historic Places. Dick Duane, the lead attorney, describes an early meeting in San Francisco with NPS higher-ups, attended by Frost and the Valley’s best climbers, who round-robinned their love for the park. Frost’s speech, Duane recalls, marked the moment the case, which was considered a pipe dream, might have been won. “Well, we’re gonna sue you,” Frost said. “Because we love you. There are no good guys and no bad guys here.”
Many others were involved in the fight—notably John Middendorf, who’d been leafleting cars at night to oppose the NPS plan, and Greg Adair, Frost’s two co-organizers of Friends of Yosemite Valley—but the film largely ignores them. It foregrounds Frost, the charismatic lead and financier, who told Stanford Magazine that he spent $250,000 of his own savings to bankroll the suit.
“Frost brought this thing when nobody cared,” explains Duane. “Chouinard didn’t care. Robbins didn’t care. Sierra Club didn’t care. [Frost] cared, and he did it.”
What would Frost do? The photographer in him would probably say that shades of gray predominate on the big walls of Yosemite Valley. Photographs depict; they beg inference. The ease with which they are taken “suggests a very tenuous relation to knowing,” as Susan Sontag put it in On Photography. Because if it’s all beautiful—a photo, an aphorism—you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. Frost might tell you they never were.•
