Lover's Leap

[lizolas]

South Lake Tahoe – June 30-July 1, 2018

How did we make that a cluster? Let me count the ways….

My original idea was to stay home for the weekend. Then it was to make a 5-day weekend with a Monday off, a vacation day, and the 4th of July and go to the Eastern Sierra. Finally I settled on joining Joshua and his partner at Tahoe. After originally planning to be alone Saturday, Joshua told me I was welcome to join them for Surrealistic Pillar and Corrugation Corner. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to follow fun things as well as assess how much I wanted to lead Corrugation. There’s a general theme in my trip reports of “I thought wrong,” but this trip was a whole new level of thinking wrong. I showed up in the parking lot to find that Mike was a guy much older than I expected. I figured if he was training to do Conness, I was about to get thoroughly shown up by an old dude. We racked up and walked to the trailhead, at which point we realized we needed a second nut tool for the party. Eventually we started up the trail.

I’m not one to brag about my routefinding skills, but I did a pretty stellar job of noticing the glaringly obvious, rock-lined climber’s trail off to the right. As Mike expressed uncertainty, I started to think maybe that was wrong, but it looked exactly like the approach I’d taken before, and it did turn out to be the correct trail to the base of the Lower Buttress. There was a pair of climbers on the first pitch of Surrealistic when we arrived, but they were out of our way before we finished racking up and flaking our ropes. It turned out to be a good thing that Lani had returned my 60m rope the night before, since Joshua and I had only discussed me bringing a 35m rope for Sunday, but we needed 2 ropes for 2 followers. Now the “I thought wrong” began in earnest. I assumed, from Joshua mentioning that he’d cleared me coming along with Mike, that they had some sort of plan about how this climbing was to be done. It turned out that they each had an idea, but it was not the same idea. Mike wanted to caterpillar up the route. Joshua said that would take far too long and we needed to have the leader trail one rope and belay two followers. Mike didn’t seem all that convinced, but also didn’t express any hesitation about his ability to belay two followers. I’ve seen enough to never assume the best, though. “Does he…even know how to belay both of us?” “You should definitely not fall.” Confidence inspiring.

Mike took a while to get started on the first pitch, but seemed no slower than I’d expect from someone leading for the first time after not having climbed outside for a while. He also took a while building the anchor and putting us on belay, but that seemed to be at least partly attributable to the group ahead of us occupying the ideal belay spot. Finally we were on our way. The slack was being taken out of my rope somewhat more slowly than I would have liked had I been on anything I was in danger of falling on – and that was even with my frequent long pauses to make sure my rope didn’t get in Joshua’s way on a harder move.

At the base of Surrealistic Pillar

At the first belay, the cluster began in earnest. Mike had no idea how to manage two ropes at once. He quickly came to the conclusion that he was going to have to flake them into separate coils, then very slowly went about flaking. After getting two piles, he told Joshua he was ready to go. I initially expressed meek concern that the tagline rope was flaked upside down from the way it needed to be for smooth feeding. Mike said no, it was fine. I thought about it and decided that I knew things about goats and the rope was definitely upside down. Mike then agreed with me and began the arduous process of re-flaking it. Eventually he had things ready, and Joshua set off. About 12 feet up, progress was halted yet again as the belay rope turned out to not be adequately flaked. Mike couldn’t get any more slack out and had to tell Joshua to stop and wait for him. He tied Joshua off with a figure 8, which I stared at for about 30 seconds before removing my crack gloves carabiner and adding it to the knot as backup just as Joshua was about to call down and ask me to put a locker on it. Irritatingly (perhaps moreso to me than it actually was to Joshua), when Mike gave the all-clear and Joshua asked if he was certain, Mike replied with an exasperated, “Me saying it once should be enough for you to believe me.” I don’t know if he was just feeling defensive or if he truly didn’t see the irony in the fact that he’d told Joshua to climb once before and been wrong about it. He also started paying more attention to what I was doing with my rope than what was going on to his own rope. I was leaving a loop of uncoiled rope that went down about 10 feet to the next large dike below us; it didn’t pass over any flakes, cracks, or other features it could get stuck in. Mike seemed for some reason convinced that the amount of rope I had uncoiled mattered, but at least didn’t argue when I stated my reason for the arrangement as “I don’t want to be the reason he gets shorted.”

An inexplicably awful picture of Joshua arriving at the wide crack part of P2

I sort of regret giving him beta every time he asked rather than telling him I was pretty sure he could figure out how to climb (not-Yosemite) 5.7 on his own. He did just fine at all the moves, and made the “smear and reach for a crystal that you hope is a jug” move a lot less hesitantly than I did when I led it.

Here was where the worst part of the day occurred – or at least the most potentially disastrous. Mike decided to tell Joshua he was at half rope. He did this by saying “Joshua, your rope is half way.” Joshua heard something indistinct that rhymed with “belay.” He thought he’d been taken off belay, and started yelling “ON BELAY!” Mike then thought that Joshua was actually saying “off belay” and took him off. So for a few minutes, Joshua was not on belay and not anchored to anything. Once Mike realized his mistake he was cursing profusely while scrambling to put him back on belay, but seemed annoyed at my pointing out that this likely happened because he said “half way” rather than the usual “half rope.” “Well I haven’t gone through to see what rhymes with what.” Well okay then. Sorry for mistaking you for a competent climber.

There was a long period of the rope going up and coming back down; this turned out to be Joshua routefinding for where to do the traverse, ending up higher than the usual (easiest) way, and eventually going up the most direct “5.7 no pro” way because he was running out of the shorter rope. One thing that, in hindsight, was a good idea was that he was being belayed on the longer rope, so it did all the wandering and the shorter rope could go up more directly. Finally the anchor was built and we started following. This time I did the wide crack as a lieback. It was secure on toprope, but I’m not sure how I would have felt about leading it that way.

Now it was 3:30 and time for Corrugation Corner. I was already feeling pretty unexcited about it due to the heat and the sun beating down on us, but that seemed like a poor excuse. We started up at 4:30 with Mike leading the first pitch. He was still very uncertain and uncomfortable on a route he claimed to have done half a dozen times before. It became increasingly clear that we were not going to finish the route in a timely manner before dark; or, at the very least, we wouldn’t be anywhere near back to the car by dark. On the first pitch of Surrealistic Pillar, I’d said I didn’t need my rope clipped to a directional because I knew I wasn’t likely to fall before I went around the corner. Now, we realized that I very much needed some sort of directional on my rope to avoid getting pulled off as the route went up and through a corner. Joshua kindly helped mitigate this by clipping my rope to himself, attaching it to pieces he passed. It then became clear why each person in a party should have a nut tool. I came to the first nut and discovered that I did not have a nut tool. Fortunately that one came out on its own. I called up to Joshua that the next time he encountered a nut, he should leave me the tool. Unfortunately, between us there was another nut that I couldn’t get out without a tool, but at least I had the tool for the last one (which also came out on its own).

Belaying P1 of Corrugation Corner
PC Joshua Wise

Coming up to the belay, my rope was developing an amount of slack that would have been alarming had I been uncertain about the climbing. I figured I should see if Joshua had told him to leave me slack to make up for the lack of directional before I got mad but later asked Joshua about it and no, Mike was just belaying incredibly incompetently even though at that point he only had one climber to belay. We decided it was time to retreat – nobody was excited to lead the next pitch, and we wanted to get back down to the car before dark. “Do you have bigger nuts?” “If I had bigger nuts, I’d be leading the next pitch!” The joke was utterly lost on Mike, who pondered aloud how larger nuts might protect the next pitch in such a way that the leader felt more confident.

The disaster of an anchor we arrived at

Next came the 2nd most dangerous occurrence of the day. Mike wanted to join the ropes for the rappel using an offset figure 8 – not a retraced figure 8. When Joshua asked him not to do that, he got very defensive and insisted that he’d researched this, and the knot he’d tied was what the AMGA recommended. He for some reason thought that an offset overhand knot was more likely to get stuck than his knot, and asked if Joshua would buy him a new rope if it got stuck, sounding fairly confident that it would get stuck. A new rope seems like a pretty good alternative to “This Knot Can Kill You.” There is exactly no mention we could find of the AMGA recommending any figure 8 for joining ropes, and they seem to generally use the offset overhand. As happy as I was to not be part of this increasingly concerning situation, I was a little sad that I didn’t get to experience the whole route, especially the 2nd pitch which seems the most concerning, before having to lead it. But maybe leading the arête will be character-building.

There was a nearby rock with several slings on it, but we couldn’t safely downclimb to it from our position

While we packed up our gear to head down, another pair of climbers came along wanting to do Corrugation. They asked if we had any water. Joshua and Mike were both out – another reason it was probably just as well that we bailed – but I had a little over a liter left and shared some of it with them so they could do the climb and get the free gear we’d left up there for the next party. By some miracle, I managed to navigate the entire way down on a trail – apparently the boulder field isn’t a necessary part of the descent. One final “wtf” of the day occurred as we exited the climber’s trail back onto the main trail. Mike said we needed some way to memorize this location so we could find it again. I pointed out that it was very obviously lined (not just cairned, but completely lined for about 8 feet) with rocks. This was apparently not sufficient evidence of a trail turnoff for him.

Back at the trailhead, we discovered that the Strawberry Lodge stopped serving dinner at 8:30, and it was currently 8. We hurried over there to get food, then sorted gear in the parking lot so Mike could leave and get back home. I had planned to just camp near Lover’s Leap because I didn’t know exactly where we could go elsewhere, but Joshua directed me to a trailhead that allowed overnight parking much closer to our morning destination. I’m not sure how much that helped, since we didn’t get out of bed until 8, and didn’t start hiking until 11.

We started up the Eagle Lake Trail with no climbing gear, planning to go only as far as we could comfortably free solo. At the lake we continued off the trail, aiming generally for what we assumed was the “rocky brushy gully” that was mentioned as a better approach than the slabs. It probably was a better approach than the slabs, but it was far from easy. For a lot of the gully we could stay on talus, but there were a few portions of thick unavoidable manzanita bushwhacking. “I don’t have a 5-year plan but I have a 5-foot plan.” “What?” “I’m gonna get to that rock and stand on it.”

Our first view of Eagle Ridge. The gully approach we took was out of the frame to the left.

For a lot of the off-trail approach, Joshua didn’t seem very happy. He even said that if we had to descend the way we came, he was going to be mad. I didn’t say anything but was pretty sure that whatever descent we did would end up involving more manzanita and talus rather than a well-groomed trail. I hoped he just meant he didn’t want to retrace exactly the same approach we’d already experienced.

”AHHHH”
-Joshua, every time he applied liquid bandage to his finger.

After that gully it was much flatter and less densely vegetated. We walked toward the Eagle Buttress formation with no particular plan for how to get on top of it. The closest end has several 5th class routes on it, so we obviously weren’t going up that way. We explored a few ways up that looked 3rd-4th class from the ground, but found them either impassable at our skill level or too exposed for comfort. A bit farther along the west wide we came to some lower-angle slabs. Joshua thought they looked like a great way up. I disagreed because I hate slabs. Eventually I was persuaded to just give it a try and found that it was actually pretty secure. Once at the top of the ridge, we found a nearby shaded spot to eat lunch while looking out over Lake Tahoe.

I had to be convinced to walk across this very 2nd class “slab”

From our vantage point we could now see most of the rest of the ridge. We wanted to descend the eastern side, maybe for shade and maybe for something new. We could see a weakness in that face farther ahead, and after that it seemed to steepen and turn into sheer walls that we would have no hope of descending except by rappelling. Since we didn’t think we wanted to finish the entire traverse – or finish part of it and find ourselves at a section we couldn’t get through unroped – we decided to just take the obvious way down once we got there.

Lake Tahoe from the ridge

The section of the ridge that we climbed was fantastic. Probably too easy for most people who wanted actual climbing, but both of us love walking on easy exposed ridges. It would have been nice if it went on longer, but someday I’ll come back with a partner and a rope to do the whole thing. I felt like everything we did was 3rd class or easier. There were no moves where a fall would have been disastrous, just unpleasant. About half an hour later, we were at the notch in the ridge where our intended descent began.

Getting off the ridge was mostly straightforward with one chance to practice my downclimbing skills. A ledge larger than we could easily step or scoot off had to be downclimbed using some footholds that weren’t visible from above. “Are we fucked?” “That’s such a strong word to use for my usual level of not knowing exactly what I’m doing….” I was pretty excited about how easily I decided to go exploring downward and found a way through, since a couple weeks prior, I’d felt kind of reliant on Ben to tell me exactly how to get down the more technical parts of what we were doing.

As I expected, the descent involved more talus and manzanita. We tried to follow the lowest-angle, least dense path we could find, but there was no clear best option. There was one final section of technical downclimbing that I convinced Joshua to do. It was a fairly unconvincing move that involved heel-hooking a sloping arête while reaching for two smallish flakes halfway down the other side of the rock. We both got down it eventually. Things were going pretty well until I decided to ignore common sense and follow what was clearly (to me) a dry drainage bordered by trees. Sure enough, the tree cover got increasingly dense until we could barely move through it. At that point I decided the best course of action would be to both aim for a large pine tree visible even from under the branches currently surrounding us (that way we wouldn’t risk losing each other if we got out of sight). Once we got there the terrain had changed back to rocks and small bushes, and we continued toward the lake, making sure to stay higher and out of the trees.

For a long while, the lake was visible but didn’t seem to get any closer as we walked toward it. Then suddenly we intersected the large flat area we’d passed through on the approach, and were at the lake about 5 minutes later. The lake was at least 15 degrees warmer than either of us had expected an alpine lake to be. We spent a while wading and swimming there which was a nice end to a hot sweaty day. From Eagle Lake it’s less than a mile back to the parking lot, but we had parked the better part of a mile away from the trailhead parking lot and had a bit farther to go.

Lessons Learned:

• Even if you think you know someone, make sure they’re a good partner before doing anything committed. Joshua knew Mike, but had never climbed with him outside. If they’d just gone and tried to do Conness there would probably have been a far bigger mess of a day than this trip was.
• Drainages are not the way to descend something. I should know this. The dry creekbed reminded me very much of a creek from some ecology labs in college.
• It’s kind of nice to balance fun days with big days. Originally I’d planned to try to convince him that on Sunday we should try one of the 5.6-5.8 climbs on Eagle Lake Buttress, but after Saturday was so stressful and the weather wasn’t our favorite, I wanted to do something more relaxing.