lizolas

2019 Annual Recap

If I’ve learned nothing else this year, it’s to stop making climbing resolutions. Here’s a brief and embarrassing recap:

• 29 trad pitches 5.9 or harder (make the rope go to the top)
  I did 11 trad pitches that were 5.9


• 10 sport pitches 5.10c or harder (make the rope go to the top)
  I did 0 sport pitches that were 5.10c


• 3 trips where ice tools get used (because owning gear you don’t use is almost as bad as owning gear you don’t know how to use)
  I did 0 (but I am going to use them this coming weekend!)


• 5 trips where snowshoes get used (see above)
  I actually think I definitely exceeded this one, and by this point using snowshoes isn’t unfamiliar to me, so I stopped counting.


• 3 trips with moderately involved routefinding off-trail (climbing or backpacking)
  I’m not sure Lani’s and my collective inability to find the start of routes occasionally counts for this.


• 3 solo backpacking trips
  You guessed it: zero.


• 1 snow camping trip with a summit attempt (or at least an attempt at a summit attempt)
  Besides guiding on Shasta, zero.


• Shasta dayhike
  I did this one my very last trip to Shasta this summer. 12 hours car-to-car and I didn’t summit til 11 am. Not my proudest moment, but it just felt like a long day, not a hard day. I’d started from the Bay Area after work and drove straight to Shasta, arriving at 3 am and starting immediately after throwing some food, water, and a headlamp in a backpack, which meant I basically went from sea level to 14,000’ in less than 12 hours and was slow but fine.


• Haystack w/ haystacks
  Tragically have still not done this despite occasional attempts to find a partner for it.


• Specific Peaks (attempt, not necessarily a summit)
  • Alta Peak (ok this one has to be a summit)
    no
  
  
  • Mt Russel
    no
  
  
  • Mt Whitney Mountaineer’s Route
    Yes, but shadowing a guided trip.
  
  
  • North Palisade
    no
  
  
  • Mt Langley
    no
  • Mt Conness
    Another failed summit attempt
  
  
  • Mt Williamson
    no
  
  
  • Lone Pine Peak
    no
  
  
  • Mt Clark
    no
• Specific Ridges
  • Matthes Crest >br>Yes, 10 hours car-to-car, but Ben basically led the entire thing. I’d like to go back next summer and do most of the leading myself, plus tag both the north and south summits.
  
  
  • Saber Traverse
    Climbed a few feet up and aborted mission.
  • Eagle Lake Buttress
    Never reattempted
  
  
  • Torment-Forbidden Traverse
    Never reattempted
• Mt Dana every time I drive by and it’s not time-prohibited (optional if dark).
  I can’t decide if I failed at this, because every time I drove by, it either was dark or I was driving to a destination with a time constraint, but I didn’t do this a single time this year. I’d envisioned lots of summer Sierra trips and instead made a bunch of Shasta trips.

The 5.9 trad pitches I did in 2019

Despite how few of my goals I met, I’m not disappointed in myself. At the beginning of this year I felt pretty aimless in my outdoor-related pursuits and made a huge variety of goals to cover every possible type of activity. I don’t think there were actually a feasible number for me to have completed in a year. I like to discount things and say, “Yeah but I should have been able to do all the climbing if I just had partners.” That’s a constraint though. I don’t really have partners in my area with the same kinds of outdoor goals as mine. The few I do have are often not available on the same weekends as I am. It’s not some enormous failure on my part as a human. I spent a lot of the summer going to Shasta (or saving money to use for gas for Shasta by not leaving on other weekends), which was a situation I wasn’t anticipating when I made my original goals.

By the end of the year I’d finally started trying hard outside again. I’d practiced the not-perfect-hand cracks in the gym and led pitches outside with thin hands, butterfly stacks, and finger jams. I’d gotten comfortable enough to assess a pitch and protect it with the rack Ben had taken (which he said before I started was probably less than I’d have chosen to take), running it out in the middle where it was safe for me, protecting it adequately at the crux, and then trying until I fell rather than giving up. Instead of insisting on the #nobabysteps approach that seems to work well for Lani but just scares me away from everything, I started just taking any incremental step I could find to take, and I learned that even the easy unimpressive things are fun and rewarding to do.

I hope to develop some climbing goals over the next year and some training routines to help me accomplish those goals, but right now I have no list of boxes to check off by one year from today. Today I’m content to take the next year one baby step at a time.

Red Rock

November 21-27, 2019

Routes Climbed:
Band Camp
Smooth Operator
Quick Draw (The photos on Mountain Project are a bit conflicting. We thought there might be some routes in that section of the wall that haven’t been added, but what we did was around 5.8 in difficulty.)
Black Coral (Secret guide route - no Mountain Project page)
Chocolate Sunday
Topless Twins
Straight Shooter

I don’t think I’m ever going to be completely satisfied with anything I do, but I sure wasn’t expecting to allocate an entire week for a Red Rocks trip only to end up leading 4 pitches of trad and 2 sport. It was largely due to the weather, but also in part due to lack of motivation.

Bishop & Yosemite Valley

October 11-14, 2019

I’d planned to do Mt Humphreys as part of my preparation for Saber Ridge. A flat tire on my way over to Bishop put a hold on that. I ended up not making time to do the route before our Saber deadline. My idea was to take a short rope for the downclimbs, but first to try and solo them. Scrambling in the Cathedral Range the previous summer, my partner had remarked that something we downclimbed was about 5.6, to which I replied that that was impossible, as I barely even up-climbed 5.7! During that conversation, I realized that my idea of my climbing limit is what I feel I could comfortably reverse, on account of I do a lot of getting lost on long, wandering routes. Frequently on that kind of scrambling outing, I come to a short downclimb that occasionally has death-fall potential (looking at you, Matthes) and initially think there’s no way I can safely do it. After Ben patiently points out the footholds to me, I can generally do it just fine. With two short (10-foot) 5.6 or 5.7 downclimbs on blocky granite, this seemed like a good opportunity to see if I could talk myself into figuring out the beta for myself for once.

Eastern Sierra

September 21-22, 2019

Eastern Sierra

August 30 - September 2, 2019

Mt Whitney

August 10-12, 2019

Shadow - Whitney Mountaineer’s Route 3-Day with Neil
Clients: 2 perfectly agreeable guys and the most unagreeable woman I’ve ever been on a trip with.
Summitted with 2 clients; one stayed around camp

Shasta “Guiding”

Summer 2019

In the interest of recording all my outdoor activities so I can remember them later, this is my summer summary of Shasta:

May 25-17 - Shadowed Scott & Alex w/ 6 clients (storm, turned around)
June 15-16 - Shadowed Adrian w/ 4 clients (turned around with 1 client)
June 29-30 - Shadowed Caleb w/ 3 clients (summitted, short-roped 1 client)
July 20-21 - Shadowed Caleb w/ 4 clients (turned around with 2 clients)
July 26 - Solo dayhike Shasta via Avalanche Gulch (summitted)
July 27-29 - Adventure Treks trip w/ 6 kids and 2 counselors (summitted with 4 people from various groups)
July 30-31 - JH Ranch trip w/ 6 kids and 1 counselor (summitted with the entire group)

Yosemite Valley

May 10-12, 2019

I’d like to think I’ve finally learned my lesson about using Tinder to find climbing partners, but I’ll probably do it again at some point. After asking multiple times to make sure he really didn’t have any other partners he could possibly employ for the task, I agreed to attempt Royal Arches and Crest Jewel Direct in a day with Austin - 30 pitches for his 30th birthday. The thing about CJD is it’s 10d slab. I wasn’t sure if he climbed 10d slab, but having failed to get past the crux of a 10a slab (outside of the Valley) on a toprope last summer, I was sure I didn’t.

Zion & Red Rocks

March 29 - April 1, 2019

I’ve decided I’m not bad at plans, my plans just undergo many revisions before their final version. Originally Lani and I had the idea that if I flew into Las Vegas and she picked me up from there, the flights would be cheaper than gas anyway, and I’d save time flying instead of driving. The weekend we decided on was the weekend she was flying back to Salt Lake City from visiting her family on the East Coast and didn’t know exactly what her schedule would be, so my plan changed to flying into SLC. SLC was more expensive, but it would ensure we started from the same place at the same time and allow us to stop in Zion on the way to Red Rocks.

Angels Landing

Tahoe, March 8-11, 2019

The chance to get back to pretending to be an alpeener eventually presented itself when I had a free weekend that coincided with okay weather in the Tahoe area. I of course planned far too ambitiously. There are several hikes I'd like to do that are easily accessed along I-80. Despite the good weather for the weekend, the Donner Summit Sno-Park wasn't plowed (I found out later it stayed unplowed due to a number of buried vehicles), and other access points in the vicinity seemed to be similarly unavailable. I wasn't terribly excited to do a lot of driving on unknown roads in the dark, so, for the first time in my life, I left without an itinerary. I'd spent a few minutes on Thursday writing out a tentative trip schedule, but when I found that Donner parking was inaccessible, I just gave up and decided I couldn't possibly find nothing to do in an area surrounded by snowy peaks.