Yosemite 2005
June 19-26, 2005
After the award ceremony at the San Juan Summer Solstice
50-mile trail race in
With only the clothes on my body, my good friend Steve
Provazek (aka Steve Eater) picked me up at 11:30 p.m. and we headed back to his
house. We talked until nearly 1 a.m. and then I slept until 6 a.m. Damon and
his family, wife Cheryl, Phil (12), and Sara (7). They’d drive me to
But back to climbing. Cheryl once tagged along on one of
Damon’s early climbing trips, gave it a try and found out she loved it and had
a knack for it. Despite being less than five feet tall and not particularly
lean, she proved to be an adept climber and much better than Damon. She had
absolutely no fear of exposure and learned techniques quickly. Damon had asked
me to climb with Cheryl for three days in
We drove out the southern route that was so familiar to me
during my nine years living in
Cheryl’s climbing topped out at 5.8, but thought the 5.9 direct start to Nutcracker looked so benign that she’d manage it. Leading this pitch, I found it more challenging than I expected. The pitch follows a finger and hand crack up a fairly low angled slab, but the crux section had little for your hands and only very slick smears for your feet. Half way up the pitch I was regretting the choice and calling down to Loobster with advice on how to get Cheryl up it. I needn’t have worried though, because Cheryl onsighted the pitch.
Back to the climbing store, where I’d shop daily for additional items. This time I needed to buy my own belay device. I had borrowed Cheryl’s device for Nutcracker, but the next day we were headed to Royal Arches and would rappel back to the ground so we’d all need our own rappel devices. I bought a Gi-Gi on the advice of the store salesman when I asked for the best device for simultaneously belaying two seconds with auto-lockoff capability. In order to work well, this device requires that you put in a piece above you and clip the Gi-Gi into it. In this configuration, which is also required to use a Gri-Gri to belay a second, the Gi-Gi worked like a charm and was much easier to use than an ATC, at least when belaying two seconds.
Loobster and I headed over to the Deli to get a sandwich for
dinner and when we found it closed, headed upstairs to Degnan’s where we ran
into the Leases. Damon invited us to join them for a pizza dinner and even
picked up the tab. While the pizza was cooking we dashed over to the grocery
store and bought food for the week. Loobster and I would be staying up in Hans’
house in Yosemite West. After dinner we headed up there where Hans introduced
us to Lynn Hill, Katie Brown, Brad (
Lynn Hill is by far the most famous female rock climber in
the world and certainly one of the most famous rock climbers, male or female.
For a long time she was by far the strongest female climber in the world and
when the World Cup climbing competitions started, she dominated them. She was the
first woman to climb 5.14. But by far her greatest legacy was doing the first
free ascent of the Free Nose[1] on
photo by Marco Togni
Katie Brown was a phenom as a teenager – another Lynn Hill. She is still the only woman in the world to onsight 5.14 and she has onsighted 5.13d as well. She was the darling of the sport-climbing world, winning World Cup competitions before she was 20 years old, before quitting climbing completely and dropped out of sight to go to college. She has recently re-entered the climbing world, albeit at a somewhat lower level and with a new direction. She had been up on the Leaning Tower with Adam Stack and found the free climbing captivating. She asked Lynn to join her in a “free” attempt. The Leaning Tower is 11 pitches long, a thousand feet high at an average angle of 100 degrees. The first 200 feet is a bolt ladder up mostly flawless overhanging granite and this has not been freed and Leo Houlding, the Brit who first freed the rest of the route at 5.13b, claims it will never go free. The remaining nine pitches of stellar, sustained, crack and face climbing with multiple pitches of 5.12 and one 5.13 crux boulder move. The Tower has now been free climbed by many males including a flash ascent by Tommy Caldwell, but no woman had freed it as yet. Brad and Jim were there to shoot video and stills of the ascent and were setting fixed ropes on every pitch to aid this effort.
The house was crowded but Loobster and I had the upstairs office all to ourselves. We hit the sack around 10 p.m. with our alarms set for 5 a.m. We had plans to pick up Cheryl at 6 a.m. at Curry Village. The next morning we scooped up Cheryl, drove over to the Awahnee parking and hiked the short approach to Royal Arches, where we found a party of two guys, Dave and Graham, struggling with the first pitch 5.6 chimney. I led our group around the corner to see if we could pass via the 5.7 direct start (easier than the chimney despite the rating, at least for Yosemite neophytes). Here we found two more parties of two: Jeff and Andie (husband and wife), and our friends from Nutcracker: Jason and Traci. Dang. They were supposed to be climbing at 4:30 a.m.
We headed back to the chimney start and made friends with Dave, the guy belaying. I asked if we might pass, if it turned out we were faster. I wasn’t sure how quickly Cheryl would be able to move. Most people will assume that our party of three would be slower than their party of two, but the Loobster would follow most of this route on the same rope as Cheryl and even when on a second rope, both of them climbed at the same time. Hence, we moved as quick as a party of two. Dave and Graham were both wearing packs and Dave was carrying an extra rope for the rappel descent. They were loaded down. We had a single pack that the Loobster was wearing. The pack contained out shoes, food and water. I offered to haul up Dave’s pack and extra rope so that he could climb the chimney in a more enjoyable fashion and he readily agreed. Instantly, I had a friend.
Royal Arches: Jason, Traci, Jeff, Andie, Dave, and Graham. Total cluster. Raps.
Church Bowl Lieback (5.8), Black is Brown (10a/b for direct route, 5.8 for regular route), Bishop’s Terrace (5.8, two pitches), lunch, Munginella (5.6, 3 pitches).
Rest Day
Scoping out the approach to the
Checking out the sport climbs that are accessed via the debris tunnels that come out of the highway 41 tunnel leading to the Valley.
Leaning Tower
The next morning we were up early and out the door, headed for the tower. We carried the gear up in two packs, one that the Loobster would wear on the climb. The hike up went easily, having done it the day before. We took with us a small rack of gear, but tons of quickdraws. We brought only one rope, a 70-meter, two-color, 10mm line. I had yet to use this rope because it was so long, but we hoped to do the rappels down the gully with this rope. Others had told us that you couldn’t do this, but our guides indicated it was possible to descend with a single 60-meter line and some downclimbing.
The West Face of the Tower consists of 11 pitches in the SuperTopo
guidebook, including the last 4th class pitch. Based on that, I
hoped to do the route in 11 hours – one hour a pitch, with some slack built in
because the last pitch should take me less than 5 minutes. After gearing up, we
scrambled out along the exposed 4th class traverse to the base of
the route. We were able to clip into the fixed line that ran across this
section to safeguard our crossing. In fact, the entire route was festooned with
fixed ropes to support
I was going to lead the entire route and the Loobster would clean it. The Loobster had actually climbed this route once before, a couple decades before. It was his first aid route. We actually tried it as a team about a decade ago, but gave up after a pitch and a half because we felt we were too slow to do it in a weekend. Now we were back trying to do the route in a day. This is the one aid route that I’ve done where it is probably harder to clean the route than it is to lead the route. This is due to the massively overhanging nature of the route, the backcleaning I did, and the traversing pitches.
I started up the initial bolt ladder, leaving only every 3rd
or 4th bolt clipped. This allowed me to save my gear so that I could
link the second pitch, but it made it a bitch for the Loobster to clean. The
first 200+ feet of this route have not been free climbed and when someone says
they “freed the
I had no trouble with the easy bolt ladder on the second pitch, which isn’t as steep as the first, and arrived at the end of the pitch before Loobster got to the end of the first pitch. He was having a horrible time on the massively overhanging pitch and my backcleaning just made things that much more difficult. His arms were cramping up a bit and based on his attitude and comments, I was sure we’d be going down from the top of the second pitch. I couldn’t continue the leading since I was now out of gear. This is one of the drawbacks of short-fixing without a tag line to haul up the cleaned gear. You can solve this problem by dropping a loop to haul up the gear, but I was now too far above the Loobster for this and the loop would have hung too far out from the wall. It didn’t seem to matter at the time, though, since I figured we were going down.
I had led the first pitch in around 35 minutes and the second pitch in the same amount of time, but I had to wait another 45 minutes for the Loobster to join me at the second belay. I asked, knowing the answer, “What do you think, Loobster?” “I’ll continue,” he said and then grabbing the fixed line, “but only because these are here.” He knew he could bail at any time and it gave me the confidence to at least go one pitch further. We were now at the start of the free climbing, at least for the superhuman. Not for me, though, as I continued aiding, up a nice crack system now.
I’d like to say that we eschewed the fixed lines as a descent option based upon our purity and that using these ropes would taint our ascent. But the facts of the matter are different. At the summit I asked the Loobster which way he wanted to descend and he didn’t hesitate even a moment. “The gulley,” he said. I knew why and I agreed. We’d had enough of that massive exposure and relished the gentler descent down the gully, which we knew went well from a previous ascent of the cool and unusual Tower Traverse (5.8), that we had done many years ago.
The descent went easily. We did two or three rappels to gain the top of the gully and then many more down the gully. We never had to coil the rope between rappels and didn’t have to scramble down far between each rappel. The scrambling never was harder than 4th class and mostly easier than that. The final rappel down a steep, blank wall gave us pause, as we didn’t think our rope would reach the ground and we couldn’t see any other anchors. I figured they must be there, though. Nevertheless, I descended on a single line to be sure. I located the hanging intermediate belay anchors, but continued to the ground and left Loobster to deal with that problem. This made for less crowding at the hanging stance and allowed me to head down to the base of our route to retrieve the Loobster shoes and a pack for the gear.
We did the route in just under 11 hours, as predicted and
went base to base in 12 hours, and house to house in under 14 hours. This is
certainly no blazing ascent, but it was a reasonable ascent and one that was
good for us. Onsighting (pretty much) a Grade V Yosemite Wall, even an easy
one, in a single day was a good accomplishment for us. I loved this route and
was surprised at how nice the free climbing looked. Like Moonlight Buttress in
Rest Day
I’ve never taken so many rest days in
We hiked up to Sierra Point where we could see five
world-class waterfalls: Upper and
Strife in the Hans household.
Elaine Matthews
South by Southwest
Lower pitches are indistinct, runout, a bit intimidating for the grade.
Balking at the route, but then firing it.
Seeing Dean Potter and the crew from
Heading Home
Drove over