Yosemite Climbing

[lizolas]

Yosemite Climbing April 21-22

I was recently patting myself on the back for having my trips go so perfectly according to plan. Naturally the only way to maintain order in the universe was to have my Whitney/Langley solo weekend turn into a Yosemite climbing trip. Eric – someone I’d met through Brett and seen a couple times at the gym – asked if I wanted to go climbing that weekend. I told him what my plans were, and he sounded interested in an attempt at dayhiking the Mountaineer’s Route on Whitney. My initial thought was that it would be preferable to only get one peak in but also only have to pay for half the gas, as I’ve been trying to cut down on my weekend trip spending. The more we talked, the more hesitant he got to try the mountaineer’s route, and the more hesitant I got to drive 7 hours each way for what was starting to seem likely to be an overnight on the trail with no summit. Not that summits are everything, but his attitude seemed to be that he didn’t plan to summit, and just kind of wanted the experience of being outside. Lately I've been trying to push myself to do uncomfortable things, and this sounded like not that. If the main objective was just to be outside for the weekend, there were plenty of places we could go with about half the driving.

We decided on a climbing trip to Yosemite instead. He wanted to lead some 5.7s, one of which was After Six. At first I wasn’t terribly excited about that prospect, because the other two routes he’d mentioned were single pitch, but we talked a bit and decided to come up with some other multi-pitch ideas. It was also only about half the driving as getting to the Eastern Sierra, which was a huge plus for just a 2-day weekend. We left Friday around 8 and didn’t hit too much traffic on the way to Hardin Flat Road, arriving about midnight.

Saturday our first objective was The Grack (Center), intended as a warm-up climb before we moved on to something harder. After doing the awkward arete “completely wrong,” I led the 2nd pitch. I’d done the 2nd pitch on it 2 years ago on my second ever trad climbing trip with Henrique, but I think he either finished the 1st pitch higher, or I was more fearless then. This time it took me a solid 5 minutes to figure out and convince myself to do the first move with the anchor partly in the best foothold. From there it was pretty smooth sailing, although it turned out that I didn’t go far enough up to accommodate Eric’s half 50s on the remaining portion. This led to him downclimbing and building a 2-piece anchor for himself. While I didn’t fall at all, most of the 3rd pitch felt extremely uncertain to me, and I don’t think I could have led it even though it’s only 5.6. I got to a small ledge just below him, where he asked me to add a couple more pieces and build an anchor to belay him the final 30-50 feet to the bolts.

Attempting to navigate the P1 “crux” (the pitch is only 5.5, but the move is awkward). I solved it by ungracefully scooting up the arete rather than doing whatever the move usually is.

Here’s where it became evident that our climbing risk thresholds diverged significantly. First, he insisted I get down from “above the anchor.” Fair enough, but above the anchor where I was, there was a flat ledge with good holds to get down in a controlled fashion when it was my turn to rappel. Not textbook safety, but I don’t think it was actually arguably dangerous. I know how to lower myself to rappel rather than jumping down. Next I was scolded for using a dyneema sling as a personal anchor. Again, not best practice, but realistically a fall onto it would have been extremely unlikely.

View from some belay station on The Grack

Four rappels later (why are we climbing with 50m ropes? Because it’s cool when the Europeans do it?), we got back to our stuff on the ground. We decided if that last pitch had been 5.6, maybe we didn’t want to try the 5.7 Left variation, and headed back to the car for lunch. I was experimenting with bringing actual food instead of clif bars and fruit snacks, and the wraps seemed like a decidedly better idea than I usually have.

After lunch we headed off to look for Monday Morning Slab – a route that Eric had tried on his first trip to the valley but failed to find. We found it this time with no difficulty, and Eric started up the first pitch, a 5.2 up some low-angle slabs. Here things got confusing. This guy with twice as many years of climbing experience as I have, who last season was confidently leading 5.9, was suddenly terrified with a “run out” start on a 5.2 pitch. He called it run out and said he was 25 feet above the ground. I think it was more like 15 feet, and none of the moves up to that point had looked that bad (although I wasn’t leading them).

It turns out that the pitch lengths listed in the topo are: 1. a bit short for 50m ropes anyway, and 2. a bit off. According to a Mountain Project comment, the first takes at least a 60m rope, and the second takes 67m of rope. Eric passed an old rusty rappel station to the right that he thought was the intended anchor and skipped, but had to build his anchor off an old piton and two cams in cracks he scooped mud and moss out of. This is not a seemingly well-traveled route. On my way up the pitch, I was feeling like if this was 5.2, maybe I had no business trying to lead 5.4 on the next pitch. Eric told me to just go, try to go until I’d used at least half the rope so he could finish it in one rope length, and build an anchor whenever I got uncomfortable with leading. I set off and quickly found the actual belay station just over the top of the ledge we’d been on. I started up with some easy scrambling before it turned to more technical – but still easy – climbing. While easy, it was fairly unprotectable. A low-angle ramp that gradually steepened ended up having an exciting arête move with a mantle/hand-foot match – with my last piece 20+ feet below me, and a ledge to catch me well before the piece would. I decided I was running out of will to lead, and built an anchor.

The anchor in question

Again, opinions differed. I was well aware that the anchor was built in rock that sounded hollow, with cam placements that weren’t entirely ideal. Eric’s opinion was that it was a “death flake” and any weight on it would have dislodged it and killed us both. In hindsight, I should have continued up onto the next ledge to see if I could clear a space in any cracks there for an anchor. But at the time, it looked to me like there was nothing more protectable than the crack I was at, and I’d already weighted it with almost my entire body weight climbing up and it hadn’t budged. I tried pushing and pulling on it again, then built an anchor as well as I could there. I think my belief that Eric’s reaction was a dramatic overreaction comes partially from knowing that he wants everything to be 110% safe at all times, and partially from the fact that he said he’d never seen a “death flake” before; he seems to have a bit of a flair for the dramatic when it comes to climbing “risks” he’s taken, and I think he immediately decided it was this super dangerous phenomenon he’d read about, without actually assessing what he was looking at. Automatic caution is a better response than automatic trust, but I did test the rock by pulling on it several times before I used it as an anchor. Yes, he’s right, if you don’t even want to lean back against the anchor, it’s not an anchor you should use, and you need to keep going. But I’m somewhat irritated at his repeated statements about how assuredly we would have died had he taken the smallest toprope fall. Probably the most irritating thing was that at the time, he seemed to agree that there weren’t much better options where I was. He ended up moving the belay a few feet, but the next anchor – which he repeatedly stated wasn’t much better than mine – was a cam in a dirty, mossy crack and a slung chockstone.

The next day in the car, he vehemently repeated over and over until I was on the verge of tears again that “there’s always another anchor” and “if you’re not at a good anchor, keep going until you find one.” He also started adding in the statement that ALL of my cams were absolute shit. When I protested he said “Yeah I guess the purple one was ok,” carrying on his trend of appearing to overreact and overstate how bad everything I did was. The problem with this is less that my feelings were hurt and more that I had trouble analyzing what was and wasn’t actually bad. I think the rock the cams were placed in was probably not something I should have built an anchor in. But I don’t think all the placements were objectively bad. There was one that didn’t seem great, but my feeling wasn’t “these are all absolute shit.” This seems like theoretical climbing, especially coming from a guy who ran out of rope multiple times; maybe there’s always another anchor, but you don’t have infinite rope to look for it. There’s not always a fantastic spot to build an anchor within the length of your rope, without sketchy downclimbing. There aren’t always fantastic placements. The next day, his assessment was that I should have continued up the poorly protected slab, which included a move that I almost certainly would have fallen trying to do without having seen Eric do it first, and taken a potentially fatal fall myself rather than “kill both of us with the death flake.” I flat-out disagree with that. Maybe my assessment was incorrect, but at the time, I believed that my anchor would at least hold a toprope fall, and given the terrain, a fall was extremely unlikely. On the next pitch, a lead fall would probably have landed the climber on the ledge before it weighted the anchor. His armchair instruction seems to not reflect reality all that well. I’m very aware that I still have a lot to learn, but for all his superior experience, I don’t think I’ll ever go climbing with him again.

He called Henrique’s method of climbing “very mature” and implied it was essentially too advanced for me. I don’t recall every detail of everything Henrique taught me, but I think the main thing that Eric thought was unacceptable was the dyneema slings as personal anchors; his only climbing with Henrique was one instance of single pitch climbing. Henrique never did anything that was objectively unsafe - aside from climbing being an inherently risky activity. His “running it out” was just him being comfortable enough on easier terrain to not need to place much gear (more on “running it out” later). My overwhelming feeling about the weekend was I was confused. I’ve experienced people who are so new they have no idea what they don’t know, as well as people who know a lot and are very confident in their knowledge and skills. It was confusing to interact with someone who acted so sure of his superior experience, but also seemed to have developed very little sense for when there’s no way for everything to be textbook, and when things are safe for all practical purposes despite not being textbook.

Half Dome from the top of (our climb on) Monday Morning Slab

I was probably more annoyed than I should have been that Eric pretty much flat-out refused to consider riding back to the Bay Area with someone else so Lani and I could climb on Monday. On one hand, I get that you don’t want to end up stranded because another party took longer than they expected, or you couldn’t find each other to meet up. But I’m sure there would have been a way to work out a system of Eric and me staying together in the Valley until some pre-determined time, at which point if we hadn’t heard from his intended ride, I’d go home with him, but if we did hear from them, I could stay. I was also too tired from being berated all afternoon to try and lay out a plan like that, though, so maybe it’s my own fault.

Sunday our objective was After Six, which had been quite the adventure at Christmas. We got a late start and didn’t actually begin climbing until 9 or 9:30. I didn’t want to lead the first pitch again yet, but was more than happy to follow it and then try leading the other pitches I hadn’t done the first time. It’s kind of nice doing something and knowing what to expect. While the first pitch seems universal (except for free-soloists scrambling around the side), topos and comments generally disagree on the rest of the route. There are numerous 5.4-5.6 ish ways to the top. Eric finished the first pitch way to the right, to avoid a toprope anchor set up on the tree that’s typically the top of the first pitch. Based on what Brad and I had done before, I thought the way to go from there was walk around the side, but a. the guidebook topo showed a 5.6 finger section starting from where we were, and b. what else would I expect from the World’s Safest Climber except that we were going to never be off belay. Ever. Not even walking across ledges that even a meteor couldn’t knock you off of. I decided I’d come to climb, and if I wanted to scramble I could have gone somewhere alone, so I led the 5.6 “finger” crack. It wasn’t very long, maybe 4 moves of 5.4 hand crack/face with about 3 of finger crack on a pretty low angle rock at the top. Then I walked across the ledge for which unroping would have been safe, and started up what Brad and I had done as P2 in the wide crack.

I remembered regretting that I was too scared to lead it last year, it had maybe somewhat sparse protection, but the climbing resembled scrambling more than technical climbing – at least to me – and all the moves felt extremely certain. I placed 3 pieces for that crack, consisting of a gratuitous “make my body easier to recover” cam near the base of the crack, and two other pieces to protect what felt like somewhat uncertain moves. There was one move that confused me until I remembered that part of the beta included “step out onto the arête” at which point that felt easier, but definitely 5.something climbing. I thought I was going to aim for the trees that had marked the top of P3 the first time I did it, but 10 feet above the wide crack as I’d moved onto lower angle face climbing, Eric yelled that I had 10 of something left. It turned out he’d said meters, but I thought he might have said feet, so I went to a large scooping ledge full of sand just a few feet above me that had a fantastic crack for building an anchor plus standing comfortably. Even with 10 meters I wouldn’t have made it to the trees on the next big ledge. Eric asked why I’d done the wide crack “basically unprotected” and I tried to explain that I did, in fact, protect the moves I believed to actually be 5.5 moves. He told me he thought that was the “psychological crux” of the route, and was supposedly 5.6, which I’m not sure if I believe. At the time I thought he just had it confused with the P4 listed on MP (P5 from last year, with the unprotectable, very exposed traverse at the roof). Later he said something about the psychological crux involving an arete, but that could still be the last pitch, and either way I didn’t think it was anywhere near as scary as the final part.

Someday I’m going to learn that nobody will believe I know things about goats unless I sound like I believe I do. Eric thought that the trees on the ledge were the end of the climb. In my opinion, I clearly stated that that wasn’t true. In hindsight I should have very blatantly said “Look, I just did this route less than 6 months ago. That was the top of our P3, with two more pitches after.” Eric still seemed convinced that he would get to the top in one more pitch. I groaned internally as he went walking across the ledge – concerned that rope drag would start to get unmanageable on the slabs after that pitch. Fortunately he came back to the lip of the ledge and set up an anchor.

Once again with the confusing behavior – he seemed incredibly shaken, on a 5-pitch route, to not have gotten to the top when he expected to. This was also fun, easy climbing, at least to me, with hours of daylight left. It wasn’t something difficult or stressful that I was eager to be done with, and I’m usually very eager to get climbing over with and start snack time. Most of the part he led there was the 5.3 I led last time after I decided I wasn’t just going to follow the whole thing. I wasn’t the least bit concerned about it, but he seemed incredibly nervous about how unprotectable it was. I showed him pictures of what the top looks like, and he was reassured at it being a very obvious stopping point, rather than having to discern which similar ledge to start the walkoff. He still asked if I could find that last pitch, which I would gladly have done without a belay. With a belay I started off somewhat hesitantly. I was determined to actually lead the slab part I’d been scared to follow before, but not sure I’d be able to do it with the rope snaking through the manzanitas covering the ledge below.

Alllllllll the rope drag

I easily recognized the portion of slab we’d used before. I don’t know what the intended route is, but this one had worked for us, and I believe the belay I used was the “alcove” mentioned in the MP description that’s supposed to be the top of the 180’ P3. The slab starts with pretty easy flake climbing, so I was able to place a piece. A bit higher up it transitions to much more delicate face climbing, and I was only able to get one small cam in. To the right of the traverse to the alcove, there’s a flake with one amazing hold in it. I held onto that rather than trying to put a cam in it, then committed to trying to Ashima my way across to a small ledge on the far side of the face. Had my foot missed the ledge, I think I would very likely not have been able to recover and save myself from a cheesegrater-y pendulum fall. Fortunately my foot made it, and I climbed into the alcove to set up the belay. I can’t decide how I feel about that, but I think I’m proud of myself for committing to a move that was a bit difficult and scary for me, although I have a suspicion that if I’d looked, I might have found a gear placement near but not in the good handhold part before the traverse step.

I couldn’t quite make it to the base of P5 with the rope drag that was happening, but directed Eric to head to the big dead pine tree while I kept belaying. Once we’d both gotten there, he started up the right side that I’d previously decided was unprotectable. I’m now confused as to why I thought that. Even at that point when I was a bit newer at leading, I would have known that was protectable. In my head I remember it as sort of a groove in the rock with absolutely no cracks to place gear in. In reality it was very protectable, which meant that I tragically didn’t get to follow the pitch as I led it last time. I really wanted to do that on toprope; it’s supposedly fun. Mountain Project indicates that P5 ends at the tree I stopped at when I led it, and P6 goes from the tree on the ledge up a flake to the top. That’s all of about 25 feet for the final pitch, and if you went up the way we did rather than the corner and traverse right under the roof (which would possibly have problematic rope drag), there’s no reason to stop there rather than just keep going to the top. Soon we were at the top, and while trying to find the walkoff, we learned that the guide Brad and I had followed last year had led us off via a much harder walkoff than is necessary. His way didn’t seem so bad at the time, but this time seemed like it was definite low 5th to get over the rocks to the trail. The actual walkoff is mostly walking with one downclimbing move. Which we had to rappel. Do whatever you feel safe doing, I guess. I’ve started to enjoy the feeling of trying moves I’m not quite sure will work, but I feel like I can control and reverse in case they don’t work.

View from the top of After Six

We got back to the car at 3:30, which Eric didn’t think was too bad of a time. I personally thought 6 hours for 5 pitches of climbing was maybe on the slow side, even including the descent. After jumping in the river to cool off, sorting gear, and eating a quick lunch, we headed out of the park at 4:30, stopped for dinner, and got home before 10.

Lessons Learned:

• Build good anchors. Keep looking if you don’t find something solid. Get creative and try digging out cracks or slinging things.
• Go on shorter routes with new partners rather than trying anything that’s a committed all-day climb.
• Just because someone is an asshole doesn’t mean they’re entirely wrong.
• Just because someone is right doesn’t mean they’re not being way more of an asshole than they need to be to get their point across.
• When you’re sure of something, say so.
• I need to get in the habit of trying to protect risky or uncertain moves. I did well on P2 assessing what had a real possibility of generating a bad fall, but then on P4 I barely stopped to consider placing a piece before I made a move that I knew would end very uncomfortably if I fell.