Rain, rain, rain. Some climbing. Then rain, rain, rain. That's the short story on our trip to Zion. If you want the long story, read on.

Due to the snowstorm hitting the Front Range, we (Trashy, Hardly, Judy, and I) left for Zion on Saturday morning instead of Friday night. The drive went smoothly and we arrived in Zion 11 hours after leaving Boulder. We were traveling in my 27-foot motorhome and each took a driving shift. The weather upon arrival was not good. It was rainy and had been for the last week. How long could it continue?

We immediately scoped out the location to the routes of interest: Spaceshot, Touchstone Wall, Prodigal Son, and Moonlight Buttress. As it turns out these there the only routes we saw anyone climbing during our week in Zion. All of these routes were put up by Ron Olvesky except for Moonlight Buttress which was put up by Jeff Lowe, et. al. It seems that all the easy classics are Ron Olvesky routes. Especially if he put them up solo like he did with Touchstone and Prodigal Son.

Every party we watched or followed in Zion was incredibly slow! We are by no means fast aid climbers, but these other parties were pitiful. A team trying to free climb Moonlight Buttress was the slowest party of all since they were aiding the pitches first, then working on the free moves. I heard that they were very accommodating and letting others pass, but it seems like beginners who take over a popular route for an entire day of toproping.

Rain all day Sunday. Geared up for Spaceshot on Monday morning. We arrived at 6:30 a.m. and were already third in line. We talked to the second team before they left their car and asked when they'd be down. "Early afternoon," was their vastly overconfident response. We didn't trust them and we knew the chances of both teams being fast enough for us to get up the wall in a day was almost zero. Hence, we headed over to Touchstone Wall where we found no other climbers. Just as we were pulling out the packs another car pulls in and these two already have the first two pitches fixed. It sucks to have someone in front of you, but we figure they have two of only three aid pitches fixed and we shouldn't be able to catch them.

Hardly starts leading at 7:20 a.m. and Trashy starts leading the alternate start at around 8 a.m. I started the second pitch, the crux aid pitch, at 9:20 a.m. This pitch requires a number of stoppers placed sideways in piton scars. These were a bit of work to place, but once seated they were bomber, though looked dicey. The crux move was turning the roof on the first half of the pitch. I did this move by top-stepping in my aid, grabbing some holds over the roof and making a massive reach to the pin over the roof. This was probably equivalent to a 5.10- free move. Trashy, who is a bit taller than my 5'11" height, solved this problem by placing a #2 Lowe Ball (the team in front of us solved it that way also).

Once above the roof it was a long way up to the hanging belay. Even over the roof the wall is vertical or more for the next 20-30 feet. Then the angle lays back a bit and even top-stepping it not that tricky. I placed stoppers until I was out of the medium and large stoppers and then I switched to small camming units (yellow Aliens to #1 Camalot sizes). After an hour and twenty minutes I was at the belay. I almost had to share this belay with the party above us: Patrick, the general manager of the hardware division at the North Face, and Monty, who works for Nike. These guys were very friendly and Monty apparently used to be a damn good climber, but they were extremely slow and seemed a bit inexperienced in the way they handled the descent (more on this later).

Before I left the ground to jug the first pitch, I made a command decision to leave two liters of water behind. We only hauled four liters total - one liter per person for the day. This barely made it and I was a target of derision from my other team members. Rightfully so. I should have consulted with them before making this call. I was just trying to lighten the load in the haulbag and it was so overcast that I didn't think we'd need it. Of course, it got a lot sunnier.

 We were climbing as two teams of two, but planned on trailing a line below so that the first team could jug up it whenever they got too far behind. Hardly and I were climbing together because we needed to practice up for an upcoming Yosemite trip. That left Trashy with non-leading Judy.

<touchstone wall>

Down at 9 p.m. and meet Trashy's parents at the RV. Don't get to bed until after midnight. Get up late (7:30) the next morning and move slowly. Trashy goes off to hike to Observation Point with his parents and Hardly and I eventually decide that we'll fix the first four pitches of Spaceshot - more to reserve the route than anything else, but also to give us a jump on the route in order to get down earlier.

Hardly led the first 5.5/6 pitch and anchors the rope at a sturdy tree. This first pitch is a sequence of steep steps up to ledges covered in debris. We leave that rope in place and I led up the long second pitch. This pitch is rated 5.6, but like all the free pitches in Zion, seems harder. The top section was a bit dicey as I struggled to avoid a large cactus.

The third pitch is supposed to traverse well to the right and then back up to the left. This looked like an ugly option and the climbing directly above looked interesting and reasonable. Hardly led this pitch without much trouble straight up to the belay ledge at the beginning of the aid climbing. This last free pitch is probably 5.8.

Hardly got to endure a long belay session as I worked my way up the very long fourth pitch. This pitch starts out with a tough move. Top stepping and even hero-loop stepping were not sufficient to reach the next bolt. Finally, but hanging onto a four inch square cut ledge, I was able to step directly onto the drilled piton where my aiders were clipped and stretch for the next bolt. Beware of this move if you are much shorter than I am (5'11").

Half of this pitch is a easy, but reachy, bolt ladder. The bolts alternate between ancient, brand new, and drilled angles. The second half of the pitch follows a shallow, crumbly crack. I was still getting used to trusting sandstone placements and moved slowly up this section. I even back cleaning quite a bit, I found myself running low on gear by the time I arrived at the belay. The belay is from bolts on a dead vertical wall. Just fifteen feet down is a small stance. I wonder why they put the belay there. Maybe because the rock was better for drilling.

I fixed the rope and cleaned the pitch on belay. We packed up all the hardware and left it in our mini-haulbag. We zipped down the fix lines, content with our progress and not realizing we'd go no higher on this route. We headed down to Trashy's parent's cabin where they graciously let us all take a shower. Then it was off to dinner in Springdale.

Rain.

Run Angels Landing. Bill: 29:37, Hardly 32:00, Trashy, 37:35, Judy - too smart to continue to summit with lightning in the sky. I'll confess that I didn't see any lightning and wanted to top out. Hardly saw the lightning but was too macho to let me go on without him. Trashy assessed the danger and thought it was a lot less scary than climbing Spaceshot and hence continued. We descended shortly after Trashy got up and ran most of the way down. Hardly far out paced us on the way down.

The photo above shows Wally's Wiggles - the 21 short, steep switchbacks. This section is the crux of the run - the running part of this hike anyway. None of us could run the upper section of Angels Landing. The upper part is very steep and exposed and protected by railings and chains. This section would be 3^rd/4^th class climbing without these improvements.

We met Judy at the bridge and decided to hike the Emerald Pools trail. This is a one mile hike (we made it a three mile loop) to the very base of Lady Mountain. This mountain has an incredibly smooth northeast face and there doesn't seem to be any climbing lines on it that don’t require a tremendous amount of drilling. We noticed one single pitch route that was above and north of the higher Emerald Pool. This looked like a considerable amount of offwidth climbing.

Rain again the next day and this time I wanted to try and climb the Great White Throne. This is the El Capitan of Zion, but is rarely climbed because the rock is apparently like the consistency of brown sugar. Becky put up the first big wall route in Zion on this structure in 196?. I wasn't interested in that route (at least not on a rainy day), but I had read that someone had climbed the GWT with only fifteen feet of rope back before technical climbing started in Zion. Unfortunately I didn't know anything else about this guy's route. Looking at a topo map it appears that the easiest line of ascent would be via the south face. To reach the south face was non-trivial, but it looked like we could get close via an eight line hike on trails. Since we started so late in the day I decided to investigate Hidden Canyon as an alternate approach.

The map above shows the major features in Zion. #2 marks the approximate location of Monkeyfinger. #3 marks the approximate location of Moonlight Buttress, #4 marks the approximate location of Spaceshot. #5 marks the approximate location of Prodigal Son. The Touchstone Wall is across the river and road from Prodigal Sun, which lies on the northeast face Angels Landing. By the way, Prodigal Sun gets a lot of sun in the early morning at this time of year. #7 is the Great White Throne and Hidden Canyon, running north-south, is directly east of it.

The Great White Throne! Hidden Canyon is the deep cleft that is directly left of the main face. This canyon is not accessed from the very bottom, which appears possible from this photo because of technical climbing required to ascend this lower section. The canyon is traversed into via a beautiful hiking trail that is cut into the rock and protected with chain handrails.

Friday we stripped the ropes off of Spaceshot. I went to the top of the third pitch to help Tom with the rope stripping, but all I did was bring down the haulbag we stashed up there on our first summit attempt. While Hardly was cleaning the ropes, I led Alpine Start (5.9). This 80-foot route climbs a beautiful, right facing corner via liebacking and thin hand jams. The top move involved some tricky stemming. This pitch was quite sustained for 5.9. It seems that the free ratings in Zion are pretty stiff.

We packed up and headed for home by noon. We pulled into my driveway at 11 p.m. We got pretty unlucky with the weather and arrived home to see the same weather. It happens. We're not that discouraged and are in fact very excited about returning to finish Spaceshot. I think this will be an annual trip…