Tenaya Peak - Off Belay for the Entire Weekend

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.

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Bear Creek Spire Attempt

Bear Creek Spire – Lessons Not According to Plan

September 8-10, 2017

Eventually I’m going to stop noting that things didn’t go according to plan and just leave the general assumption that whatever plan I had for the trip was much more ambitious than I ended up being. After proposing Bear Creek Spire to Joshua as a way to learn more than we wanted to again, we decided to try for a 3-day backpacking trip rather than car-to-car in a day as is the popular way to do it among people who comfortable free solo all or almost all of it. At this point we’ve become fairly aware that we’re so much slower than the people who write guides that their timing guidelines are useless to us. Joshua, Josiah, and I all took Friday off so we could leave Thursday after work and attempt to get a same-day entry permit on Friday morning, thinking that was more likely to be available than a Saturday permit.

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