The Leap at Wall Street: Glenn Exum's 1931 Grand Teton Solo Breakthrough

The Boy from North Carolina

In the high summer of 1931, the Teton Range was experiencing an explosion of pioneering exploration. Paul Petzoldt, the legendary local guide who had summitted the Grand Teton as a sixteen-year-old cowboy, had established a tent camp at South Jenny Lake. Working alongside him as a wrangler, camp cook, and guide apprentice was twenty-year-old Glenn Exum, a gifted musician and natural athlete from North Carolina who had fallen deeply in love with the high granite spires.

Petzoldt had long studied the majestic, golden-hued south ridge of the Grand Teton, which plunged dramatically from the 4,199-metre summit toward the Lower Saddle. It appeared to offer the most direct, elegant line on the entire mountain, but its vertical towers and smooth slab faces looked unclimbable from below.

On July 14, 1931, Petzoldt told Exum: “Glenn, take a walk up onto the south ridge and see if there is a way through. If it looks impossible, turn back.”

Exum owned no specialized European climbing boots or nailed tricounis. Instead, he wore a pair of high-top leather football shoes borrowed from a friend, having carefully shaved down the cleats with a pocketknife until only thin leather nubs remained for friction. Carrying no rope, pitons, or pack, Exum began hiking up Garnet Canyon in the morning sun.

The Shelf of Wall Street

Bivouacking under the stars on the Lower Saddle at 3,535 metres, Exum rose at dawn on July 15, 1931. Scrambling up the Central Gully toward the Upper Saddle, he veered right onto the soaring southeast face of the peak, searching for an entrance to the south ridge.

To his amazement, Exum discovered an ascending natural terrace etched into the massive face of Precambrian gneiss. At first broad enough to walk comfortably, the ledge curved around the mountain, suspended thousands of feet above Avalanche Canyon. Exum named it Wall Street, marveling at its sheer grandeur.

However, as Exum advanced along Wall Street, the ledge steadily narrowed from four feet to two feet, and finally to barely eighteen inches wide. The overarching rock above bulged outward, forcing him to lean his chest against the cold stone, his toes gripping the edge of the abyss.

Then, abruptly, Wall Street ended.

Directly ahead lay an open vertical cleft where the rock face broke away entirely, plunging two thousand feet straight down into the boulderfields of Garnet Canyon. On the far side of the void, perched slightly higher and out of reach, stood a flat, horn-shaped granite boulder marking the start of the main south ridgecrest.

The Seven Paces and the Leap

Exum stood frozen on the eighteen-inch shelf. To retrace his steps meant admitting defeat on the greatest exploratory climb of his life. To attempt the gap without a rope meant betting his life on a single physical move.

Years later, Exum recalled the psychological battle that unfolded on the ledge: “I stood there looking across that terrible drop. My heart was pounding like a hammer. I backed up several paces along the ledge, turned around, and walked to the edge. My nerve failed me. I backed up again. I paced back and forth across that ledge seven times, staring at that boulder on the other side.”

On the seventh approach, Exum banished all doubt from his mind. Gathering all his athletic power, he took two rapid steps along the ledge and launched himself outward into the empty air in a standing leap.

For an instant, his body hung suspended above two thousand feet of space. His leather-soled football shoes slammed down onto the boulder across the gap. He threw his arms forward, wrapping them around the rock rib, his fingernails digging into tiny crystalline edges as his momentum threatened to tip him backward.

He held on. He had bridged Wall Street. The legendary Step-Across had been born.

Scaling the Golden Stair to the Summit

Safely perched on the south ridgecrest, Exum found himself on immaculate, solid rock. Directly above rose the Golden Stair, a ninety-foot buttress of yellow-gold quartzite split by clean vertical cracks and generous jugs. Moving with fluid grace, Exum climbed through the golden rock, feeling the crisp morning breeze on his face.

Above lay the Friction Pitch, a fifty-foot slab inclined at forty-five degrees where the holds dissolved into coarse feldspar crystals. Trusting the worn leather soles of his football shoes, Exum smeared upward, relying purely on friction and balance. Next came the V-Pitch, an airy, open corner perched directly on the crest of the ridge, offering breathtaking views into Idaho and across the Cathedral Group.

Scrambling past the West Chimney, Exum pulled over the final granite ledge onto the summit of the Grand Teton at 4,199 metres. He was entirely alone on the rooftop of Wyoming, having soloed the entire 1,500 vertical feet of the Upper Exum Ridge in just under two hours.

When Exum returned to the Lower Saddle and described his leap across Wall Street, Petzoldt was awestruck. In 1936, the two men linked the lower ridge from the saddle, completing the Complete Exum Ridge (5.7, Grade III). Today, the route is recognized worldwide as the supreme crown jewel of North American alpine rock climbing—the immortal legacy of a twenty-year-old boy in football shoes.