Eastern Sierra - April 19-21, 2019

[lizolas]

Eastern Sierra

April 19-21, 2019

Last year I posted a photo of myself standing triumphantly atop Mt San Jacinto with the caption, “Every now and then, bite off more than you can chew.” At the time I was sure that’s what I’d done. On Sunday as I turned around on Mt Tom, completely defeated, I realized I’d had no idea what biting off more than you can chew meant.

I don’t generally regret things, but the sequence of events that happened did leave me wondering why I was so committed to spending so much on gas for so little climbing. My original plan was to try and get Whitney and Tom in the same weekend (before permit season started on Whitney). I was also supposed to be climbing with someone on Monday, although I forgot to confirm that and their plans changed so it ended up just being gym climbing.

On Thursday, I forgot that I was supposed to be leaving after work and made gym plans. On my way to the gym, I confirmed some debit card charges that had gotten my card frozen. When I tried to use the card over 2 hours later, it still didn’t work. I called the fraud line and was told they could see where the charge had just been declined, but weren’t sure why since the hold had been taken off my card. I’d have to call my credit union - which was of course closed at 9:30 pm. I eventually decided to try the card again an hour later. It worked that time, but this had me now leaving the bay area at almost 11 with no solid plan for the next day. I’d originally intended to drive from work and have enough time for an attempt up Dana via Lee Vining Canyon. With my arrival now looking like noon or later if I stopped to sleep, I changed my plan to just hiking as far as I could get up Lee Vining Canyon and then practicing self-arrest on the way down. It was mostly supposed to be an acclimation hike for the bigger objectives.

I also got stopped on the way the next morning while Caltrans triggered and cleared an avalanche on the road.

The hike up Lee Vining Canyon went fine. There was some deep postholing near the parking lot, and the snow was too soft to actually practice self-arrest, since I could stop myself with my hands at any time, but maybe it helped anyway. I didn’t need to use crampons for any of it; I might have needed them to get up out of the canyon to Ellery Lake, but I could see and hear snow removal equipment on the highway right above the canyon and decided to stay out of their way. On the way back a large piece of ice fell off one of the walls commonly used for ice climbing (nowhere near me, as I’d already been intentionally walking away from where I knew ice had been falling the previous week).

I drove to a hot spring in Mammoth where I spent the night, successfully got my 3 am start to Pine Creek Canyon for Mt Tom, and that’s about where my plans fell apart. I hoped to get started by 4. It was more like 4:30 by the time I started hiking. The full moon was probably really nicely illuminating the opposite side of the mountain from the ridge I needed to ascend. It was hard to see anything outside headlamp range. I’m not sure if there’s a better place than I chose, but right off the bat I failed pretty badly at crossing the creek. I tried to stand on a rock an inch or so underwater while holding onto a tree branch almost spanning the width of the channel. Instead my foot slipped, and I ended up with both legs soaked up to the knees. This works fine in running shoes. They dry out in no time (and are usually being used in warm weather). Instead my feet would remain soggy for the rest of the activity. After wringing out my socks I continued up the hill, hopeful that the difficult part was behind me and now it was just a matter of persistence. That was likely true, and I simply didn’t have the requisite persistence. There’s a wide, gentle ridge that joins a steep, sharp ridge coming up from Pine Creek Canyon. I was walking up the wide ridge; just before I joined the other ridge, I came to some climbing that was 4th to easy 5th - not the 2nd that had been promised by SummitPost. I had little difficulty with it (it was really fun), but started having doubts about the pace I’d be able to keep on the route.

The creek crossing (photo taken in daylight on the way back)

The person who wrote the SummitPost page indicates that they recommend doing it in a day because it’s “only” 5 miles each way, and if you can keep a pace of “only” .6 mph on the way up and 1 mph on the way down, you’ll be car-to-car in 13 hours. I had 13 hours of daylight. The way the comment was written sounded like they believed even a novice mountaineer could manage those paces. Maybe a novice mountaineer can, and I’m less experienced than I want to believe, but I think the route is a. More difficult than second class unless you have the best possible routefinding (and aren’t trying to navigate between snow and rock), and b. More difficult to keep that pace on than indicated. When I finally turned around, I wasn’t meeting that pace. Even with snowshoes, I was postholing past my knees every other step. Before the sun should have had a chance to soften the snow, it was already slushy because it hadn’t actually refrozen overnight.

Sunrise over Bishop

I could possibly have made it to the summit - hours behind schedule - if I’d persisted. I didn’t really want to, though. Ian can insist I made the wrong decision all he wants, but I don’t feel like I would have been happier pushing on and likely still not summitting if things got sketchier farther up. There was a couple hours of high wind down in Bishop around 2 pm, and I can’t imagine it wouldn’t have been gale-force winds up on the ridge. The section I was on had a really safe runout on the climber’s left side of the ridge. Up higher, the ridge narrows and gets steep on both sides. I’m not sure I would have enjoyed climbing that in the conditions I was finding, although it’s possible the snow would have been firmer there. I’ll just have to live with not knowing. Most ski descent trip reports I saw indicate that the conditions for this are better in January or February. Late spring attempts seem to universally end with postholing with snowshoes and turning around because it’s not worth it.

The start of the snow

The way down wasn’t any better. I can’t imagine the route is much more enjoyable in the summer, because in addition to the heat of the Owens Valley, the entire route is scree, gravel, and sand. Again, maybe the angle lessens more than it looks like it does from the valley floor, but at almost no point was I comfortably walking. Maybe I don’t have any idea what 2nd class is. In my mind 2nd class means there’s no trail, but you’re mostly walking and maybe occasionally using your hands for balance. What I kept encountering was almost constant use of my hands not just for balance but for climbing. And the climbing might have been fun if everything weren’t covered in sandy gravel. Overall not what I enjoy or expect from a route with “ridge” in the name, but that might be my fault for overestimating the rock quality. Descending involved a lot of sliding on snow, slipping on sand, and one terrifying downclimb where I evidently got off-route from the way I’d come up on somewhat rotten rock. On the way down, I circumvented the 4th class formation I’d come up, taking easy scree down to skiers right. I’m not sure that path would actually be easier on the ascent, though.

I turned around at the top of the closer hill. In hindsight this looks like incredibly easy terrain and I have no idea why I couldn’t make it any farther.

After a brief moment of conviction that I should go try Mt Whitney anyway, because damnit, that’s what I came here to do, I decided I might want to try the route up the south side of Mt Tom. It starts over 1000’ higher and the trail is an old mining road - presumably well-graded and easily passable if free of snow. I wasn’t sure how free of snow the switchbacks up the steep incline would be, though, nor was I sure how free of snow the chute on the west side just before the summit would be. I’d have tried it anyway - and likely regretted it when I had to drive home later that night - but was instead offered a suggestion to climb Grouse Mountain. A mere 7,995’ at the summit, it’s just across the creek from the Buttermilks. I had looked at it earlier, but wasn’t sure I would encounter anything better than the steep scree I’d just been in on Tom. Knowing that it should be possible to make it an enjoyable hike/scramble to the top, I decided I was done doing things to try and have something impressive to claim I accomplished. I wanted to go have fun. And by fun I maybe mean be a little bit lazy. It’s sort of exhausting suffering for no summit, even if the suffering only lasted 4 hours up and 3 hours down.

Grouse Mountain was every bit as enjoyable as promised, although my creek crossings seem to need work. I didn’t fall in this time, but after being told to park at the main parking lot for bouldering, I instead drove farther down a side road. I would have thought that if the creek crossing at the parking lot is trivial, a crossing farther upstream should be even smaller. I don’t know exactly how it works, but I encountered the opposite. After descending the bank to the creek, I had to find a place to fight through the trees. I found an accessible spot with a rock that looked like it would make it possible to step - since the trees were preventing the possibility of a clear jump - across. I just barely made it, and wasn’t convinced I could repeat the move from the other side back. Well at worst, I’d be about a thousand feet from my car if I did fall in on the way back.

The start of my route up Grouse Mountain

Once across, it wasn’t hard to walk through the scrub to what looked like the start of a ridge on the eastern side of the formation. Afterward I realized I hadn’t walked quite as far as I thought, but looking at the prominent ridge farther left I’m not sure that was something I could have comfortably or efficiently climbed, either. A fair amount of the climbing was loose sandy scree, but it was interspersed with just enough solid rocks and trees to keep it fun. It was indeed very “choose your own adventure.” For most of the climb I didn’t have to think very hard about which way to go to keep it 3rd or easier. Toward the top, I started having to make decisions a bit more thoughtfully. There was some backtracking while I looked for lines that seemed to promise more than just a few moves before an insurmountable obstacle. I encountered some mandatory 4th class in a few spots and found that my running shoes were fine; I wasn’t missing my approach shoes at all. Finally I came to two options a few feet apart, both definitely 5th class, at the top of a chimney I wasn’t sure I wanted to downclimb. One was an offwidth, probably very easily climbable and quite secure if you have any idea how to climb an offwidth. I didn’t, so I tried the other one. It looked like it was going to have solid foot jams if slightly loose hands and only went a few moves before you could grab a flake and pull yourself up easily. It turned out that the foot jams weren’t great, and my shoes did very little to grip the rock. I slid back down to the ground.

Turning by attention back to option 1, I noticed a small flake-ledge running parallel and about chest-height above the offwidth. With my foot in an indentation in the rock I stepped up to grab it. I found that I could easily make several moves using the flake for handholds, with one foot on one side of the crack and one foot on the face underneath my hands. Then I got to a move that required more precise footwork than I could confidently execute in my Altras. I downclimbed and switched to climbing shoes, then tried again and got my feet to stay exactly where I wanted them. Just after that there was another short section of maybe 5.4-5.5 face climbing. On a rope I would have thought nothing of it, but with a slick icy patch below me, leading to a rather large fall down a chute, I tried starting it a couple times before I was confident enough to move all the way up. The holds were all good slopers, but still slopers, which didn’t feel secure as handholds to me. Fortunately the feet were very confidence-inspiring.

The Buttermilks with the White Mountains in the distance

After that it was easy scrambling to the top. I felt like I finally remembered why I did this. After months of mostly snow hiking I finally felt like I was enjoying myself, not doing something just to tag a summit. There’s nothing to brag about. There’s no challenge I can proudly claim to have overcome. It was a fun, easy day and I liked it.

Shit it’s good to be alive

The estimate I’d been given of a 3-hour adventure was spot-on, despite my concern on the way up that I was going way too slowly, agonizing over routefinding. From the car to the summit had taken me just under 2 hours. After a quick snack I started heading down. I wanted a descent route that didn’t have scary downclimbing; I wasn’t really after character building right now. Below the summit is another smaller hill. If I’d wanted an adventure I would have gone up and over that, descending another ridge that looked similar to the route I came up. Instead I took the saddle between the two points. My assessment from the car had been correct - it was scree and gravel that would have been terrible to hike up. Going down was a breeze, and in no time I was back on the flat desert floor. Rather than cross the creek the same way I’d come in, I decided to do some more walking and head out toward the area I was supposed to come in. After a while I got to an area with less dense trees and an easy hop across. From there I followed the unpaved road back to my car for a total time of almost exactly 3 hours.

Grouse Mountain from near the road

It feels like most of what I’ve done in 2019 is fail. Failed summit after failed summit. Failed attempts to go outdoor climbing. Failed resolutions to practice rescue skills more frequently. In 7 months I’m supposed to have climbed 29 pitches 5.9 or harder. So far I’ve climbed 2. I had 10 potential snow climbing/hiking weekends planned out for this winter/spring. So far I’ve gone out for only 4 prior to this one, and most of those included plans changing from being far too optimistic to something that was realistic, but seemed pathetically minor. It felt the same this weekend. I’d set out to climb real mountains. Instead all I could manage to do was climb a little hill. It was fun, but I keep expecting that at some point I’ll be more capable, and it never happens. I’d really like to think everything will work out well and surprise me, but at this point I’m almost convinced that I’m going to waste money driving to and from Shasta only to be met with confusion as to how anyone could have recommended I apply for a job I’m miserably unqualified for. If I keep going at my current rate of ruining three planned climbing trips in the same weekend, I’ll never get any of my goals accomplished. They never seem unrealistic. But now the season for any of the snow or ice things I’d planned to do is fleeting if not gone already. I don’t know how I still convince myself that this is a serious interest of mine.

Maybe the living situation is the problem. If I were halfway across the country I wouldn’t have the family obligations that seem to occupy at least half my weekends. Maybe it’s my perception. Of course the people I see as examples of “outdoorsy” are the ones who do nothing but obsessively ski every weekend at any cost, posting copious updates on Instagram. But there has to be something to getting outside more frequently and regularly than I do. Nobody gets to climbing hard outside with one trip every month or two. At the same time, I’m not sure how to make that feasible for me. It seems like nobody who lives near me is actually interested in really planning - not just hypothetically planning - climbing trips with me. Maybe it will at least partially work itself out after next weekend, when I’ll know whether or not most of my weekends this summer are occupied gaining no specific climbing-harder skills, or if I’ll actually have as much free time as I can find gas money for to go climbing all over the Sierra.

I want to think it would all get better if I quit my job and climbed full-time for a while, but I can’t pretend that I’m social enough to meet a lot of partners that way. I’d be unwilling to try something difficult and/or committing with a partner I’d never climbed with, and most people probably don’t want to go climbing with a stranger who struggles on 5.8-5.9 anyway. I want to think at the end of this season I’ll have confidently climbed several real 5.9s (not one-move cruxes in softer areas) and maybe done some 10s, but I can’t believe that my luck with willing partners will drastically improve in the next 4 months.

Lessons Learned:

• There is such a thing as non-character-building suffering.