Tenaya Peak - Off Belay for the Entire Weekend

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Tenaya Peak – Off Belay for the Whole Weekend

September 1-4, 2017

The plan was to leave Friday evening in order to have all of Saturday and Sunday, plus part of Monday for climbing. As usual, nothing goes according to plan. Ryan texted me at 7:45 saying his car battery had died, and he’d have to wait to see if the problem was the alternator or something else. We ended up taking my car after his was towed back to his place, but by that point it was past 10 pm, and way too late to think about a 5-hour drive to Tuolumne that night. We left Saturday morning just before 7 instead, arriving in Tuolumne around noon.

After a quick lunch and a trip to the Visitor Center for a guidebook, we set off to climb the easier Guide Cracks on DAFF Dome. I thought we could warm up on the 5.5 and then move to the 5.7 (then possibly try the 5.8s if we felt like it, but I didn’t want to get too optimistic). When we got there, a guide had set up his ropes monopolizing all 4 cracks, and although they weren't climbing when we walked up, they quickly made themselves look like they’d been just about to all go back over there. We were told they’d been here for a while, but would still be here til 4 (implying that he’d been monopolizing those cracks for a large chunk of the day, for a group of only 3 beginners climbing). As we plus a couple other groups stared at him unimpressed at that, he hesitantly offered “but we’re flexible….” I’m not sure what “flexible” was supposed to mean, as he still refused to let us climb up anything that had his anchors at the top, and since the 4 cracks share 2 anchors, that meant we couldn’t actually do any of them. He kept telling people “But there’s plenty more cracks over that way” until I got frustrated enough to yell that I didn’t climb 5.8 so no, I couldn’t just go climb those cracks, I was waiting for the 5.5 one.

Eventually they finished up and we started on the 5.5. As anticipated, it took my brain a while to remember how to climb, and I was glad I had waited for the 5.5, as even those moves felt stressful at first. By halfway through the climb I was feeling a lot more comfortable, and the combination of the easier moves and increased confidence made me able to actually lead something without sewing it up for once. We then tried to move to the 5.7 (with some arguing about which the 5.7 was and which was the 5.8, because Ryan didn’t believe me, nor did he believe Mountain Project), only to find that the start was a little more disconcerting than we felt comfortable leading. After some sitting around pondering how to get a bit more climbing in for the day, another pair offered to set up a toprope for us so we could try the climb without having to lead it. I flashed it (having watched some other people’s beta on the first couple moves) and Ryan also sent it just fine. Ryan tried one of the 5.8 cracks, sure it looked perfectly easy, but struggled and backed off of it several times before eventually deciding it was too hard to place gear while climbing it.

We drove out of the park to the first large turnout along Tioga Pass for the night. Dinner was potatoes and broccoli with candy for dessert. Such nutrition. Many balance. Wow. The idea was to wake up early and start the hike to Tenaya Peak by dawn, but apparently I’m incapable of realizing that a person still barely conscious in a sleeping bag is “ready to go” so we didn’t leave the parking lot until well after the sun was up. Communication about details might have helped here. I thought we were going to organize gear and get ready in that parking lot. He seemed to be planning to do it at the trailhead. I didn’t sleep very well and woke up frequently; from 2 am on, I didn’t ever manage to fall back asleep.

Moonrise over Mt Dana, in as much detail as my phone can capture

We started the hike at about 8. The guidebook indicated to use what they really wanted to convince the reader were deer trails (not climbers having an impact on the environment?). The trail wasn’t too hard to find, and apparently deer make really nice cairns. By 9:30 we’d reached the slabs and decided to rope up. We could definitely have skipped the first pitch of climbing that Ryan led, but by the 2nd pitch I was already ruining things. I started up what turned out to be a section of unprotectable slab with a useless crack to the right. I had to downclimb (without anyone to point out holds to me, this time) and try again from halfway up the pitch. Somewhere around the 6th pitch, we started hearing thunder and getting sprinkles of rain. There was no storm right over us, but having read warnings about lightning striking even without rain in that area, I was feeling nervous. I built an anchor at the next place I could – in a tiny crack with not much else around it, after my previous placement had fallen to hang uselessly at the piece under it – and Ryan came up to talk about what we were going to do.

It was around this point that I felt like I’d gotten in completely over my head, potentially risking someone else’s life too (even though I also feel like he should have known that I’m not a guide, I didn’t claim to have any particular skill at this route, and it’s his responsibility to be prepared as well), because although I’d brought my bail webbing with me, I didn’t have a knife (I thought I’d brought one, but it turned out to have gotten left at home), and therefore only had one piece to use. With just one 70m rope and much more than 35m of slab below us, bailing didn’t seem like a feasible option. We decided to keep going up. Ryan led most of the climb after that, including the harder pitches at the top. Largely, I think, because he wasn’t as unnerved by the distant thunder as I was. I have the memory of struggling up slick, wet cracks on top of Cathedral Peak, terrified as all the metal we had hummed like high voltage powerlines. Maybe he’s just a lot better at performing under pressure than I am, though. Just before the “real class 5” pitches at the top, we tried to figure out how to go the easier class 4 traverse route to the left. It turned out that we were about one belay ledge too high for that, and it seemed better to just continue up than try to downclimb to what looked like relatively loose, unstable rocks. We reached the top, and it seemed like tempting fate a bit too much to have a photoshoot on the very highest blocks, but we took a few pictures a bit lower (much safer, I’m sure...) and then retreated off.

Summit-ish shot (there’s a slightly higher pile of rocks off to my left)
Such fun. Many thunder. Wow.
Quick selfie before a hasty retreat

At this point, the guide-client dynamic became increasingly problematic, as I was both solely responsible for our trip, and also being blatantly ignored as Ryan insisted on trying to find a way to jump down the steeper front side of the peak (described in the guidebook as dangerous slab/cliff downclimbing) and refused my suggestion that we just do the walkoff that, yes, really, truly, seriously, went a ways around the mountain before joining a trail. I was actually pretty proud of how I’d managed to navigate us to the base of the climb and read the guidebook to find an easy-ish line up for us to take, and was certain I knew what I was doing for the descent, too. No matter how confidently I pointed out easier terrain angling toward the intended walkoff, he continued to try to find a shorter route down the steeper side of the mountain, and I followed him since I tend to believe for the most part it’s better to be lost and get stuck together than split up where one person is probably wrong.

Eventually we’d scrambled and fallen our way to the large ledge of cliffs that wraps around most of the side toward Tenaya Lake. At this point, Ryan started running out of obstinacy for his short route down and was a little more willing to take my suggestions. I found a path of broken rocks with trees and dirt that went down a slab, and from there had a clear descent to the forest. I wasn’t expecting the trail to be right there, as I’d seen a topo map of someone’s GPS track that looked like it just went straight through the forest to a trail on the rim of Tenaya Lake, but Ryan seemed to think that every step in the woods without sight of a trail was a personal failure on my part, and proof that he was right. Maybe I should have tried harder to communicate more explicitly about the approach/descent conditions before the trip. Knowing Ryan isn’t really big on minute details of planning, I had left it at “Tenaya Peak and Dozier Dome have walkoff descents” which probably implied something a lot different than the reality, especially for someone who hadn’t done many long approaches off a trail. I’m not really sure what was going on, because he seemed to not really be comprehending my reasoning for our path (based on the guidebook beta and pictures), and even after we got down, insisted that essentially he’d been successful and I’d failed in my intended descent. As near as I can tell he thought I was saying we should go all the way back up to where we left off, and that was never my intent, only to go parallel to the lake for a while in order to skirt the cliffs; he also seemed to be expecting there to be a trail the whole way down, which there wasn’t supposed to be.

I finally pulled out my Garmin GPS unit to demonstrate that we were on course for the lake, and found that as I’d previously stated, the trail was right on the shore of the lake. We reached the trail just as the sky was getting almost dark enough for headlamp territory. From there it was another mile back to the parking lot. We would likely have been back without needing headlamps had I not felt the need to jump in the lake first. What followed was an adventure in routefinding on what should have been a plainly visible trail between a beach and highly-trafficked tourist spots. Instead we wandered around for a while, me in my underwear, before getting a headlamp out and eventually bumbling back to the trail and on to the parking lot.

Dinner was a package of instant potatoes and a beans and rice backpacking meal. I actually slept ok that night, maybe partly due to Ryan moving outside “to sleep on a flat surface” around midnight. Once again, apparently lying in a sleeping bag means “ready to go” and I should have known that Ryan was ready long before 6:15 when he rolled over and looked up at me as I walked back from the bathrooms. I hadn’t felt like pushing the wakeup time since everything felt like I was starting a fight, and I thought this would just be a half day of easy, relatively short multi-pitch climbing. My original plan was to climb Hermaphrodite Flake on Stately Pleasure Dome, but the cumulative errors of the day made me rethink that. The two climbs we amended our plan to were what I’d followed on Dozier Dome when Henrique taught me trad climbing last summer, and even taking extra time to learn how to place pro we’d only taken half a day; Henrique’s preferred method of climbing is to be efficient enough that you can afford to not wake up til 10, and not leave the campsite til almost noon. After some confusion about the trail leading to Dozier Dome, we found it – and relatively uncrowded, too – and decided to start with Holdless Horror (5.6) and then do Bull Dozier (5.7). I’m not quite sure how I manage to do everything so absurdly slowly. The group ahead of us had run up the route in maybe half an hour, and somehow it took us from around 9 am until well after noon to do it.

Ryan led the first pitch, initially proclaimed “not even 5th class” and quickly revised to “Well I might have underestimated this.” I had every intention of proving my ability as a climber by making the next pitch most of a rope length, but ended up running out of draws (Ryan seems to like disassembling alpine draws to make anchors, but I was also sewing it up a little and had forgotten my half draws) and building a slightly awkward anchor for a hanging belay. Ryan took the next pitch, but stopped right below the crux, building his anchor in all the good crack holds there. I started out terrified I’d fall on him, clipped to nothing but the anchor, but made it through that part with some struggling but no falls. I had thought that would be the last pitch, and maybe I could have made it to the 3rd class terrain on top with what rope I had left, but when I came to a spot where all I could see were dirty, grassy, unprotectable-looking cracks, I decided to just stop and anchor. For the last pitch, Ryan went mostly over 3rd/4th class terrain, up higher than I remembered us going last year, and we had a bit of an issue hearing, as I wasn’t sure whether he was trying to take up the rope and put me on belay after I repeatedly shouted “That’s me!” or if he thought I was shorting him and was trying to keep moving. Eventually I decided to try climbing up a bit and see if he started taking rope in a manner more consistent with belaying than climbing. That worked, and I had no trouble climbing the remaining section of 4th class climbing, 3rd class walking, and maybe one 5.easy move that Ryan had made look much more difficult than it really was (he doesn’t really believe in climbing with feet when you can do pull ups, I think).

View toward Tenaya Peak from the top of Dozier Dome
View toward the Cathedral Range from the top of Dozier Dome
View toward Tioga Pass from the top
Us trying to look like we were confident accomplished climbers who competently climbed that peak behind us
Me making questionable fashion choices, since crack gloves and Fitbits usually don’t mix.

At that point, it was 12:50 and we were sitting on a boulder on top of Dozier Dome. This was exciting, since I’d wanted to walk up to the top of it last year, but first we were hurrying down to climb a second route, and then we took longer than expected to start the second route and ended up topping out just as the sun set, so we hurried down to beat the dark back to the car. The walkoff had no chance of being an epic, but it would take some time, and we both wanted to be home at a reasonable hour. More debate ensued about the walkoff. I guess I prefer more positive slabs than he does, but I also remembered doing it last year and having to traverse almost to the trees before a short section you could easily slide/jump down. We got back to the car at around 1:45 and were driving away just before 2 in search of “normal people food.” Despite our initial plans to stop at Chipotle once we reached civilization, we stopped at a Pizza Factory in Big Oak Flat.

It seemed like it should have been a straightforward drive home from there. I pointed out that Ryan was driving about 60 in a 30, and he laughed, braked a little, then proceeded to get pulled over and ticketed by an officer parked behind a hedge/fence. I dropped him off at home around 8 and was back home in Sunnyvale by 9, coming to the realization that I only had 2 full days to prepare to do this all over again for Bear Creek Spire.