After the basic course was completed, the more advanced students, including Robinson, Glen Dawson, Jules Eichorn, Norman Clyde, and Lewis Clark traveled south to the Palisades, the most rugged and alpine part of the Sierra Nevada.
There, on August 13, 1931, the party completed the first ascent of the last unclimbed 14,000+ foot peak in California, which remained unnamed due to its remote location above the Palisade Glacier.
After a challenging ascent to the summit, the climbers were caught in an intense lightning storm, and Eichorn barely escaped electrocution when "a thunderbolt whizzed right by my ear".
[4] From October 9 to 12, 1939 a Sierra Club climbing team including Robinson, David Brower, Raffi Bedayn, and John Dyer, completed the first ascent of Shiprock, the erosional remnant of the throat of a volcano with nearly vertical walls on the Navajo reservation in northwestern New Mexico.
He joined a skilled wartime team led by Robert Bates that included mountaineers William P. House, H. Adams Carter, Terris Moore, Bradford Washburn and Australian arctic explorer Hubert Wilkins.
[9] His invention was used in combat by members of the 10th Mountain Division, and was described as an "ingenious little gasoline-powered stove that Bestor Robinson and the Quartermaster General's office had developed".