The Valley Boy: Remembering Grant Cline

Sometime after midnight on June 6, Grant Cline finished up his shift washing dishes at the Yosemite Lodge. Much of his time was spent in the “pot room,” a steel trap of a room recessed deep within the Lodge’s Base Camp food court and surrounded by commercial sinks and Labrador retriever-sized stacks of trays. Grant turned 18 just the month before and was happy to finally have a job in the Valley. Now officially a man, he still retained his boyish good looks—sandy, overgrown hair with floppy bangs and rosy cheeks that often betrayed him. According to his mother, Grant was a bad liar.

He biked back to an Aramark employee housing area called Boystown, navigating the Valley by headlamp. Or maybe he didn’t use one. The night of June 6th had a waxing gibbous moon of about 80% illumination—more than half lit, but less than full. Sunlight and moonlight are tricky in the Valley. Its walls take up more than half the sky, and sugar pine and Douglas fir trees filter much of the light. Whether Grant used a headlamp or not is lost, but he was no stranger to navigating the night. He rarely slept, often going on climbing missions alone at one or two o’clock in the morning. “Some nights he’d come home, though,” his roommate Kelvin Pittman tells me.

All Boystown beds are thin mattresses rolled over springy twin-sized frames. Grant’s was easily found with posters of Alex Honnold, the Stonemasters, and Lynn Hill right above it. He kept his gear clipped neatly in various places and had random piles of Climbing Magazine issues. His favorite stories were the old Yosemite articles highlighting the scene in Camp 4.

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