Minnie Belle

Minnie Belle is the classic hand crack below the True Grip roof. When Fritz Weissner first led it in 1946, it was the hardest climb in the Gunks, and demands respect even today.

Fritz was joined on the first ascent by Bill Shockley, a respected Gunks local, who at that time had finished his wartime duties at Columbia University, and resumed his electronics research at Bell Labs. In subsequent years, Shockley invented the transistor, shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956 with his Bell Labs co-inventors, and moved to Palo Alto to commercialize his electronics inventions at Shockley Semiconductor.

Though a visionary scientist and a gifted rock climber, Shockley sucked as an entrepreneur, and his entire founding team left to start Fairchild Semiconductor, the original chip company in Silicon Valley.

Minnie Belle is about midway down the south facing part of Skytop right of the Crevice, fifty feet left of Mellow Yellow.

Standard Gunks rack up to 4" The fixed anchor at the top of the pitch was fine as of 10/17