Gary Snyder had a profound influence on the Beat aesthetic with his devotion to Zen Buddhism and his adherence to a simple Spartan lifestyle. He attended Reed College with Philip Whalen and fell in with the Beat crowd through his association with Kenneth Rexroth. Snyder so impressed Ginsberg and Kerouac with his Thoreau-like existence that both became devotees of Buddhism. He and Kerouac climbed Yosemite's 12,000-foot Matterhorn mountain, and Kerouac always remembered the experience as one of the most memorable of his life—so much so that he wrote Dharma Bums about Gary Snyder. Snyder left the San Francisco Beat scene in 1956 to pursue his study of Zen Buddhism in Japan. He returned twelve years later to find himself already established as a seminal figure in the new hippie scene. Rip Rap is Snyder's first published book of poetry.