Snake Dike Fiasco

[lizolas]

Snake Dike Fiasco

September 23, 2018

The main F5 annual event this year was in Yosemite which meant I could easily get there, unlike the previous year in the Tetons which wasn’t financially feasible for me. The Level 5 activity was a Snake Dike climb, which I signed up for, imagining that we’d be climbing in pairs of competent partners. Over the next few months, the plan morphed into one lead climber in each group with multiple followers. To cut a long story short, what ended up happening was that there were 6 groups of 4, each with 1 leader and 3 followers. Some of the leaders weren’t even all that experienced outside. Many of the followers had never climbed outside, or only done casual single pitch cragging; many also weren’t experienced hikers. Everyone had been assured - even despite my informed, factual protests to the main organizer - that this climb would be very easy and way below our limit.

I could have, and possibly should have, backed out once I knew how different this was going to be from what I had originally signed up for. Having spent the summer working on slab climbing and becoming more confident and efficient overall, I decided to continue with it anyway. I was told that I had a very experienced climber in my group as a belayer, and it was someone I’d met at Joshua Tree who seemed a little rusty, but he’d told me that he used to climb a lot. Again expectations didn’t align with reality, and it turned out that he’d led one pitch of 5.8 trad, but mostly did 5.10-low 11 sport climbing, and “preferred toproping”. It also seemed like he hadn’t really been climbing as much in recent years as he was previously. His experience was largely as a climbing director at a summer camp. He was very upfront about his minimal experience when we started talking, but I felt like the organizers had overstated his qualifications. During our Facebook group chat planning phase, he offered that he “would be willing to lead some of the upper bolted sport pitches.” This indicated a. A lack of understanding that swapping ropes around with multiple followers would be more hassle than it was worth, and b. A complete lack of knowledge about the route, since he thought the “bolted” pitches were safely bolted sport climbs.

Me, most of the weekend

We decided to go to Swan Slab for a little practice multi-pitch and slab climbing. After taking a while to do the awkward start of Hanging Flake, we continued to the upper pitches of Swan Slab Gully. Here it became evident that I didn’t have a partner who was experienced at what we were going to be doing. He had no sense of the common climbing terms, and would use rambling sentences rather than the universal “on/off belay” or “that’s me.” Several times both Friday and Sunday I had to tell him he couldn’t climb yet when I’d not yet said he was on belay (and he should have been able to see me still setting up the anchor/belay; he hadn’t been waiting for 5 minutes with no contact), even though I explained before I left the ground that he needed to wait to hear that he was on belay. Overall that climb went fine, though.

Next we set up a toprope on the West Slabs area. I felt a bit #sorrynotsorry about telling Nick that we couldn’t use the existing tree for an anchor. Someone was right there switching their anchor over to a rappel, but it’s a tiny dead tree and I wasn’t about to hem and haw and pretend that it might be fine but I was going to use something else just to spare their feelings, if they cared. Nick was easily convinced that we should build our own anchor with gear, but I had to point out that some of his ideas completely ignored the direction our climbers were going to be pulling the anchor - which is the same issue he had at Joshua Tree where he set up a nice very directional anchor...about 90 degrees off from the direction it actually needed to be. We got the rope set up and were joined by Nathan, who had been bouldering nearby. Although it was just toproping, it was good practice for Nick and Nathan, who were going to be following Snake Dike. It was also better than no practice for me, but my uncertainty even on toprope moves made me question how ready I was to be leading slabs.

Barely 5 and definitely not alive.

We nearly missed dinner. I had to go ask the kitchen volunteers to let me scrape out what was left in the pots in the back, but I got my haystack. After check-in, the evening worship service commenced. Saturday morning was an unexpectedly similar experience; I arrived 20 minutes after breakfast started to find that the only food left was a handful of tater tot crumbs and lots of toasted plain bagels. After that was time for the church services and a group photo. There were numerous options for afternoon activities, but I opted to take a nap until dinner time since we weren’t going to get a chance to sleep that night before beginning the approach hike. I only got about 2.5 hours of light, interrupted sleep, but I’m sure whatever I got helped over the next 35 hours.

I expected there to be more of a briefing for the Snake Dike group as we gathered that evening to divide into our respective levels and figure out logistics. For the F1-3 groups, it was just a matter of coordinating rides to the trailhead. F4 had to figure out Half Dome permits and who was doing Clouds Rest instead. I wasn’t quite clear on what happened here, because we were told that with the additional lottery permits acquired, we had enough permits for everyone who was originally promised one - and then some - yet the Snake Dike group had a few people who had been bumped from the permits list due to lost permits (permit holders not attending) and they didn’t go back to just doing the hike. The Snake Dike meeting seemed rather rushed. I don’t know why I’d expected a thorough discussion of what we were doing, but instead what happened was a quick review of who was on what climbing team and who was in which car, then everyone left to pack and head out about 9:45 pm.

Nick had printed out maps and put them in transparent covers. We ended up taking the “summer shortcut” route

Shortly after 10, the cars headed out toward the park and arrived at the trail parking lot at about 11:30. When we got there we found that one group was missing. Unsure of whether they’d gone ahead or were still behind us - or lost somewhere on the road - one of the groups took an extra rope, we left a note on Corneliu’s truck, and decided not to waste any time standing around. Just before the Happy Isles trailhead, we received confirmation that they had already arrived and started on the approach. Calvin ran back to drop the extra rope off. It was my rope, and I ended up forgetting about it and leaving it at the camp the next morning. Fortunately someone from my church was able to bring it back with her.

At 12:30, we left the trailhead proper and began the approach. I was fully mentally prepared for having to navigate with my group in the dark, as I thought the plan was to have faster groups pull ahead, arrive sooner, and start climbing before everyone else arrived. What we ended up doing was continually halting the group so we could all keep up with Corneliu, who was somewhat familiar with the approach. In hindsight, the splitting up by hiking speed plan wouldn’t have worked anyway. Corneliu - the fastest hiker in the bunch, had two of the slowest, least athletic/experienced people with him, and would have had to wait for them anyway.

When I was on Shasta with Joshua, we’d quickly given up on the idea - originally presented to him by a climbing guide - that a group should keep moving steadily for 50 minutes, then take a 10 minute break. With just two of us who were at least mildly experienced and aware that we needed to keep moving, stopping for a quick break whenever one of us needed it had worked ok. With this group of two dozen people, it quickly became evident to me why that was a necessary strategy to manage progress efficiently. By the time the slower people would catch up, sit down, take their packs off and start digging for snacks, the first people to arrive would have already eaten a snack and gotten up to start hiking again. Of course, ideally, we would have been a much smaller group, hopefully with a smaller range of hiking fitness levels, but the general principle applies to more reasonable groups as well.

This might be one of those things where I need to develop a balance between what I’d like to do and what’s feasible for people of a lower skill level. When we stopped and people were telling each other that we should feel free to take our time and relax, I couldn’t help feeling a bit panicked. No! What do you mean relax and take a break? We’re already going so slowly, you can’t possibly need to sit down for 10 minutes when we’re so behind schedule!” Almost nobody seemed to feel any sort of urgency. I made a few comments about how we should try to make breaks more efficient, but nobody took me seriously.

Sunrise from the base of the climb.

We turned off the Mist Trail at 2:30 - about 2 hours into the hike, and only half an hour before we were supposed to be at the start of the climb. Routefinding on the off-trail portion is probably substantially easier during daylight. We had several stretches of backtracking to find a better way, not to mention more extended breaks to let everyone catch up. During this section, several people were rather nervous about the exposure and fall potential off the slabs we crossed. Having read about the approach, there was actually far less sketchy ledge traversing than I’d expected. The one thing that made me really nervous was the kids, though. At one point I had the younger one stand on my knee to reach up to another ledge that his brother and chaperones had already crossed (and weren’t looking back to check on him, although for most of the hike they were very concerned with the kids). From the trail it took another 4+ hours to arrive at the base, with the first group starting after 7 (the time, not the route). At this point I became downright horrified at the lack of preparation for the group as a whole. Only some of the leaders knew how to tie an alpine butterfly. Corneliu had to teach one person how to put on a harness.

Yeah, this is a normal size group to go multi-pitching with….

When we arrived, the first group that had left earlier was lowering one of their climbers. It someone who’d said back at camp that she hadn’t climbed since the Joshua Tree trip in February, but was sure it would be fine. She explained that she’d gotten a charlie horse and her leader thought it would be best if she turned back. The organizers understandably didn’t want her to head back alone, so they added her to Corneliu’s group. On the very first pitch, it became obvious that some of the “experienced climbers” had no idea what they were doing. Both the woman who’d lowered from the first group and another guy were flopping around like fish out of water on 5.easy featured slab. With multiple people now an obvious impediment to progress, they both came down and prepared to reverse the approach together. While they were waiting around to make sure nobody from the next groups was going to need to go back with them, my 3rd follower - re-added at the last minute the day before - decided he might be in over his head and also backed out. As much as I’d have liked for everyone to get a chance at climbing, I was incredibly relieved. He’d done one outdoor climb in his life, and it was a crack, whereas Snake Dike is barely any crack.

Yeah, this is a normal size climbing party….
The 1st group comes to the realization that the 2 members flopping around like fish out of water aren’t likely to make it up the rest of the climb, so they lower and jettison half their members.

It was after 8 by the time my group - 4th in line of our 6 groups - got on the route. Toward the top of the first pitch, I had to stand on a ledge for almost half an hour waiting for the group in front of us (the one with the two kids) to clear from the belay station. The kids weren’t doing very well on the traverse. By that point, my rope drag was horrendous and I was regretting my insistence on having two ropes for the followers. At this point I shouldn’t have been shocked that I was leading two beginners, but I had trouble keeping the disdain out of my voice after Nick seemed to not know even common single pitch/gym climbing commands. “Nick, you’re on belay!” “Ok!” *A minute or two later* “So can I climb now?” “That’s…..literally what On Belay means…..”

From left to right: F1 group #1, F5 group #2, another party that passed us without asking (but I don’t exactly fault them for that)

While we were at the belay, we decided to switch to just one rope since we were waiting for the next belays to clear anyway. Oh yeah, and my super experienced belayer forgot his fucking backpack at the base of the climb. We dropped an end of our now-extra rope to Ryan, who tied the pack on so we could haul it up. After waiting at the first belay for close to 3 hours, we finally got to move again.

The forgotten backpack being hauled up.
Next up was a mildly nerve-wracking traverse on which I placed both my .5 cams that was really probably just 5.5 with about 1 move of 5.7 up to a dike feature. There was a bolt near the crux move. And by “near” I mean “a couple 5.5 moves above.” Carlos asked if it was ok for my followers to leave the gear and quickdraw I’d placed so they could just use those. I said sure, since I still had several quickdraws on me and wouldn’t be using more than 2 or 3 on any of the subsequent pitches. Then I was asked if it was ok to leave the gear for Brittany too. Around this point I think I started getting the idea that the leaders for the other groups were not the intrepid adventurers I’d assumed they were. I thought I was the only person who felt in over my head, but it turned out everyone else behind me did, too.

The “hero photo” stance on the beginning of P2

The next pitch was the crux: a 30-foot 5.7 friction slab traverse with only one bolt about halfway across. The bolt is placed to protect the most difficult part, but at my height I still had to step up one move that felt a bit tenuous before I could reach it. After that I downclimbed and changed my mind several times before finally making it across. It was a lot less scary than I’d imagined it would be. A fall wouldn’t have been fun, but it also wouldn’t have been too bad. This was the only part of the climb where it was kind of iffy having both followers on one rope. Nick was prepared to hop sideways if Rolando fell, but fortunately they both made it across without falling. I stopped at the first anchor bolts I came across, but the 3rd pitch technically ends at the next bolts, so I added a pitch to our climb.

Looking across the P3 traverse to Nick and Rolando.

The climbing is supposed to essentially get mindlessly easy after this, but I don’t think it’s possible to really climb anything mindlessly when you’re aware that a slip will likely kill you. The remaining pitches all have 50-100+ foot runouts, and although they’re supposed to be just 5.2-5.4R, some of the moves felt more like 5.5 or 5.6. A couple belays later, I consulted the topo and discovered that there was a finger crack coming up. After going to all the trouble of getting a replacement .5 cam from Carlos below me, it turned out that the crack was hard to protect, so I didn’t place any gear anyway. I was still proud of myself for having the foresight to think of that before I continued, although it ultimately just slowed us down some. The supposed finger crack wasn’t what I actually used to climb that section - it was another step sideways and onto a dike from some 5.6 friction climbing with one bolt.

Nick and Rolando cleaning an anchor on the dike; Carlos’s group is below them

Of all the places you could get stuck, this is a pretty nice one.

Looking down toward the Valley.

While I was leading that pitch, Calvin came down from above trying to fix a line for us. He’d gotten so sketched out by the last pitch that he decided we should just fix lines to allow everyone to toprope/ascend rather than risking more runout leads. Unfortunately the rope didn’t quite reach the next anchor above me, so I had to finish that pitch and then lead another before we arrived at the line that was fixed from the top. After I got too frustrated with Ryan heckling us over the walkie-talkies to want to help fix their lines anymore, we left Carlos’s group with a line fixed at their belay and made them deal with throwing a line down for Brittany’s group to ascend. The main problem was just that the rope wasn’t falling straight down the rock to the previous belay station because of the wind blowing it over a dike. While I’m certainly not complaining about the fixed line, I think they likely went a bit off route at the top. The topo says something about “wander” up 5.2 slabs, whereas their line went directly up. It looked to me like going a bit to the left would have gotten you onto lower-angle, easier terrain.

The last pitch I led was actually 5.4-feeling and very fun, aside from how ready I was for the day to be over.

Finally at the fixed line that marked the end of my enormously runout leading.

Although I think he was less trying to heckle at that point and more trying to understand what went wrong and how it should have been done better, I was rather irritated with Ryan asking me the next morning why I was going so slowly and they kept having to wait for me. It was like he’d forgotten entirely that it took their group a couple hours longer than it took us to get to the top of the roped part. I also think he was overestimating the amount of time Carlos spent waiting for us, but I wasn’t exactly keeping track either. I found out later that Nick was telling Carlos that he could never come up and be at the same belay as my followers were, according to him due to logistical reasons, but I think he just has no idea how uncomfortable hanging belays are and he should maybe not have been so determined to make them as comfortable as possible at the expense of time for other groups. I finished the roped portion at 3:45 pm, with Rolando and Nick coming up shortly after me. I told them I didn’t think we should leave until the rest of the groups got up, because they’d have all the extra gear from the fixed lines, and especially with how much they were struggling, we couldn’t in good conscience leave them and take off for the summit. I think Rolando misunderstood something - either how far away the summit was, or that I wanted to wait right there at the last anchor - because he left for the summit anyway even though I know he had every intention of helping the other groups.

Terrible picture of the slabs going on forever to the summit.

Putting away the ropes with the sun almost down from the top of the sky.
PC: Nathan Towns

Over two hours later at almost 6, we finally saw one of the women from Carlos’s group come up, then Carlos appeared a few minutes before 6, and Brittany’s group eventually got up a few minutes after 7. At that point I’d been sitting by the anchor for over 3 hours, which was why I was a bit indignant at Ryan asking me why I was so slow. I probably was slower than they were for a couple pitches, and it was essentially due to me having to guide two beginners. When they’d get to the anchor, I’d have to remind them to clip their PAs in, and then I’d almost always have to remind them to lock their carabiners, too. They had no idea how to go about rope management, and Nick kept doing things to keep himself busy, but they often weren’t actually contributing to making speedy progress up the wall. He also got a bit frustrating to deal with at one point when we were trying to send a rope down and he kept insisting I not pull it up and re-throw it, saying we just needed to flip it over the dike and the group below could reach it. It somehow wasn’t getting through to him that we’d just been trying to flip it over for a few minutes, and the rope drag plus the wind blowing wasn’t going to allow that to work. I think patience with newer climbers is something I really need to work on, but I also imagine it’s easier to be patient when you know you’re climbing with beginners, and you’re doing something far less committed.

We reached the summit at 7:40, completely in the dark. The full moon softly illuminated most of the landscape, but it would have been nice to descend in daylight. After a joyful reunion of the last 3 groups on the summit, we made our way to the cables (easier to find if you’ve been there before). It was so dark that we took a couple quick group selfies but didn’t bother trying to get a nice staged group shot. Some of the inexperienced climbers needed help getting two personal anchors on them for the way down.

The last vestiges of light fading from the summit.

Clipping and unclipping at every post took longer than I expected - having previously done it untethered when the cables were up and with a prusik when they were down. Maybe I was just tired - or maybe it was the belay gloves rather than rubber-palmed gloves - but going down the cables was more strenuous than I remembered. Several people around me were incredulous that droves of people do this without incident every season; one person toward the end of our group was repeatedly slipping and sliding down to the next pole.

Indistinguishable members of our group descending the cables

From the bottom of the cables, it’s a pretty straightforward, if long, hike out. There are really only two junctions: go right from the Half Dome Trail to the JMT, and continue on the JMT rather than the Mist Trail at Nevada Falls. About half a mile after we finished the subdome section and were back on an unmistakable trail we met up with Calvin and Corneliu, who had come back up with as much water as they could carry. Once it was distributed among the group it worked out to only about half a liter per person, but most of the group had run out of water hours before and that little bit to hold them over until we reached a water source was very welcome. I had finished my water at the base of the cables and wasn’t feeling terribly dehydrated yet.

Now that we had Corneliu and Calvin, I felt ok with leaving the main group to get down faster. As Rolando and I pulled ahead, Corneliu called to us to make sure we turned right onto the JMT, and took the JMT down from Nevada. I assured him I’d done this before in the dark and wouldn’t get lost, and we were off. It’s funny how familiar I am with these trails, especially in the dark. There’s a turn in the trail that I miss every single time and walk about 10 feet farther on what sort of looks like a trail, then realize I was supposed to make a sharp turn back instead. There’s a tiny section right around the Liberty Cap gully turnoff (climber’s trail and alternate approach for Snake Dike) where the trail goes gently uphill; every time I encounter it, I think that’s the most arduous grade I’ve ever had to endure when I just want to go downhill until I get back to the car.

Terrible picture of the very bright moon that night

Despite being about a mile longer, the JMT is definitely the more efficient way to get down, especially in the dark. The Mist Trail is predominately steep, narrow stone steps, so going up is strenuous, but going down is both joint-destroying and time-consuming. It takes so much longer to carefully place your feet on each step than it does to walk along a trail. Now that any real danger from climbing or from getting lost was gone, I started to wonder how I planned to drive over an hour back to the camp completely exhausted. Alone I’d just get right outside the park and take a nap - or possibly even park at the turnoff for Glacier Point and hope no Rangers were checking the lot after midnight - but with 2 other people that wasn’t a good option. They wouldn’t be any more awake and capable of driving than I would, either. If anything, I tend to be the most awake, alert, and functional member of a group after a long day.

After we crossed the bridge above Nevada Fall, I started hiking with the familiar autopilot feeling that comes from being on a trail after having been awake for too long. I still felt like I was doing fine, but Rolando started slowing down as well as having some knee pain. We stopped for a few breaks, which thankfully only lasted a handful of minutes each. Along the switchbacking portion of the trail shortly before it meets up with the Mist Trail near Vernal Falls, we heard a commotion on the trail in front of us. We froze as our headlamps illuminated a small skunk. It bumbled around on the trail for what seemed like eternity before exiting on the other side of the trail and crashing through the vegetation there. I joked that it had probably gone to wait for us on the next switchback. It turned out that I wasn’t joking, and again we had to wait a bit for it to wander off the trail. There it evidently met an attractive second skunk, because according to the backpackers we met there, there were two mating skunks just above them. We got down to the Vernal Fall bridge crossing at about 12:45. From there it’s less than a mile on a paved trail back to the trailhead, then about half a mile back to the parking lot. Our pace increased with the prospect of sitting down and resting in the car while we waited for the remainder of the group to arrive.

About a third of a mile from the trailhead, we encountered a couple sauntering by who failed to even acknowledge our “Hello!” They were immediately followed by a young man walking very intently up the trail, who stopped to ask if we were F5. We replied that we were, and he said he was part of the relief team sent to meet us and bring food and water. I was doing fine on both fronts; Rolando took a water bottle and some snacks. A few hundred feet from the trailhead, we were met by Katie and another guy, who seemed very concerned. They insisted on taking our packs and walking them the last minuscule portion to the trailhead. When we arrived at the trailhead, to our surprise there was a large assembly of F5 members who had all come as the “relief team” when they heard the Snake Dike group was still on the rock and nowhere near finishing. It had taken us 24.5 hours trailhead-to-trailhead, and the rest of the group would turn out to be a bit over an hour behind us, finishing at 2:30 am.

In addition to the snacks and water carried up the trail, they’d brought all of the leftovers from dinner with them. In a sleepy blur, we accepted most of what was enthusiastically shoved at us, including baked potatoes, apple and pumpkin pie, and miscellaneous snacks and water bottles. Most relieving of all, their plan for assisting us included bringing along extra people to drive the climbers’ cars back to camp for us. Both the drive to our car in the parking lot and the drive back to the camp were mostly filled with discussions of what had gone so wrong and how to prevent it from happening in the future. Kimmy had a lot of experience working with horses and was astounded that the organizers just took people’s word on their climbing experience, rather than making them demonstrate their skill level in person. She said she always had kids at summer camps who claimed they could do far more advanced things than they really could, which seems very similar to people’s claims about climbing.

Kimmy took Rolando to his AirBnB near the camp, then we arrived at the camp just before 3. Despite thinking that I’d be able to sleep forever, I woke up again at 8. I went to take a shower and find breakfast, which turned out to be mostly leftovers from the night before, but who doesn’t want pumpkin pie and ice cream for breakfast? In the cafeteria I found Michael, who - inexplicably, since his group had finished at a perfectly reasonable 6 pm - didn’t want to climb Nutcracker with me after the previous day’s misadventures. I agreed that was probably for the best. The climbers sorted and returned gear that had gotten mixed up during the climb. I was surprised how many people had already left the camp, although I suppose a lot probably left Sunday after dinner, while we were still up on Half Dome. After one thwarted attempt at leaving when I got into Oakhurst and received a text that I’d forgotten my food box (with my JetBoil), I successfully managed to leave again, this time forgetting my 70m rope and Hydroflask bottle. Fortunately Rhona brought my rope with her to return when we’re next at church on the same weekend. The Hydroflask ended up still needing to be retrieved at the time of this writing, as a lesson in packing on 3 hours of sleep.

What Went Right (not much):

• Foresight to ask for cams back before P6 (even if they ended up not being useful)


• The group stayed together for the descent, making sure nobody got left behind or missed a turn.


• Calvin and Corneliu came back - morale boost as well as technical assistance


• Relief team to make sure everyone got fed and taken back to camp safely, however this was only necessary because everything else went so wrong.


• Nobody ded.

Ideally we would have:

• Breaks with the large group were very inefficient. There should have been a group leader coordinating breaks, letting people know whether this was a “packs-off-snacks-out” break or just a stop to let the whole group catch up. We should have tried to pace ourselves to allow a longer time between breaks. I think it also would have been ideal to have at least two groups, e.g. faster and slower, so we didn’t have to match our pace to the slowest members of the group. This would also have allowed us to get some groups on the climb before everyone was there waiting. In this case it seemed like we were all following Corneliu because he was most familiar with the approach, but in the future I think there shouldn’t be a trip planned where only one person is confident that they can find the climb.


• I should have more thoroughly gone over the basics of multi-pitch climbing with my followers once I realized they were way less experienced than was conveyed to me. I’d probably still have had to essentially guide them for Snake Dike, but it might have lessened the frustration of having to explain things mid-route, such as rope management, personal anchors, and using simple commands rather than rambling sentences for things like “On/off Belay” and “That’s Me”. In the future I’ll also stress to beginners that we get 100% ready before I leave the ground, to prevent a repeat of the forgotten backpack incident.


• Having a vetting process and requiring each person to be a climber capable of this trip would have helped in several ways. First, the group would have been smaller and able to move more efficiently because there would have been fewer climbers going. Second, the climbers would have been able to swap leads, sharing the stress rather than having it all on one person, plus the added stress of watching out for the inexperienced followers’ safety. Finally, all of the leaders would have been more comfortable; I got the impression that at least a couple leaders in our group weren’t even up to this level of leading so many pitches plus hiking for such an extended time. I think the idea of eliminating the climbing events from F5 might be a good one. F5 is about fellowship, and for these events I might enjoy a hike with friends more than an exclusive group of climbers - I can always find climbing partners, but the F5 group dynamic is unique. If I were going to make a screening process for a climbing event, I would ask what people’s outdoor experience is within the past year (i.e. not whether they were into climbing a decade ago or go to the gym twice a month), maybe requesting a whole “resume” of what they’ve done, or maybe just “What are the 3 biggest objectives you’ve tackled in the past year?”


• I don’t think this is really on the leadership team, because they provided us with good resources and we should all have been competent enough to utilize them, but at least two of the leaders didn’t seem to actually know how many pitches the route entailed and were surprised when I told them there were 8 pitches total, not just the 4 on the left side of the topo drawing Corneliu shared. Several of the followers also didn’t know that there was a bunch of walking up slabs, and the roped portion of the route didn’t top out at the summit. In the future/if I were planning this type of event, I’d have a meeting the day before where everyone got verbally informed of what we expected to encounter on the climb.

What went wrong:

• Too many people on one route, plain and simple. An ultra-popular route is a terrible idea for any type of largeish group, even if it were a more reasonable 6-10 people in 2-4 teams or something. Momentarily ignoring the effect on other groups, even at a moderate pace of 1 hour per pitch (yes, experienced climbers can go twice that fast, but that wouldn’t be a reasonable expectation for our group), since we all showed up at the same time it would have taken the last team 12+ hours just to complete the roped part. The idea that we’d all be back at the car by 5 was unrealistically optimistic from the get-go; it was absurd once we hadn’t arrived at the base until 6 am, the first couple groups took almost 4 hours on the beginning pitches, etc. At the point where it was 10 am and I’d not left the first belay yet, just summiting by 5 pm was optimistic, although we did finish the roped part by 3:45 and the late summit for my group was due to waiting over 3 hours for the remaining 2 groups. Back to the non-F5 climbers, it’s selfish and rude to take over a climb like we did, especially one with such a long approach. There’s no good option for all those people who hiked all that way in, besides doing a way, way harder route (which they probably wouldn’t have even brought the gear for even if they were capable of the climb), or just turning around and walking back to the Valley. When you go climbing, you expect that you might have to wait in line behind a couple groups. It’s not reasonable to expect people to calmly accept waiting behind two dozen people in half a dozen groups.


• The most competent climbers in the group left the struggling groups to their own devices. Understandable since they had to get the kids back and probably didn’t know how slowly we were going, but I felt just barely competent enough to have helped coordinate the fixed lines for the remaining groups, and while the leaders came back eventually to meet us, it felt like we’d been abandoned for all of the most difficult, stressful portion.


• In my opinion, I’m not sure the kids should have been there. Maybe they enjoyed it; maybe their group didn’t find it as stressful as ours did, finishing so slowly in the dark, but what I saw was two terrified children way, way over their skill level (shakily calling “Tension!” every few seconds for a lot of the climbing), almost totally inexperienced, without the correct gear. Maybe there were some private conversations that occurred, but from Facebook comments, it doesn’t seem like the boys’ mom was even accurately informed of what transpired.


• Additionally, the super inexperienced climbers shouldn’t have been there. The approach definitely had fatal fall potential, but there also weren’t any parts that were so hard that a competent climber would have been in danger. The people who were scared of the approach moves shouldn’t have been introduced to climbing with this route. Everything turned out ok, but I don’t like that so many people were so upset. The followers shouldn’t be crying or near tears. Crying is what I do when I intentionally decide I’m going to try something hard. I’ve never gotten in so far over my head that I cried on a toprope following a route. I love introducing people to climbing, but this was not the route for that.


• As many of the leadership team now recognize, there’s an indisputable need for a stringent vetting process. People don’t know enough to know what they don’t know, and you need to make sure to clarify what their “experience” is, because they might be a gym climber who actually isn’t at all experienced but thinks they’re above average, or a strong sport climber who doesn’t know much about multi-pitch. I was told that Nick was experienced, and he is, but he’s experienced at very different aspects of climbing than the things we were doing. He didn’t even know the basics of multi-pitch transitions and verbal commands. Some of the leaders didn’t know how to tie alpine butterflies. I know the leadership team was busy, but there should have been some sort of group session to make sure everyone was up to speed on this stuff, not leave it up to the leaders to teach their group at the last minute after being told that everyone knew what they were doing. I think the posting in the Facebook event telling people what they needed to know turned out to be insufficient.


• Corneliu is a skilled, talented mountaineer and climber. As such, he shouldn’t really be the last word on route selection, because everything feels easy to him. I expressed concern about this route as a group event multiple times and was told that Corneliu said it was easy, so it would be easy. It wasn’t as easy as promised. Calvin even said in a Facebook post that this was the most challenging multi-pitch route he’s done. The combination of the runout climbing, the long approach/descent, and the fact that it’s in Yosemite - where ratings are notoriously more difficult than elsewhere - made this trip not well-suited to beginners.


• Fairly minor in relation to everything else, but I should have been checking my followers assuming they were 1st-time climbers, because for what we were doing, they essentially were. I mentioned to Nick that he could back up his “ascender” (an ATC) with a sling, and figured he would. Instead he came up with no backup, and confidently assured me that he had good dexterity. It hadn’t even occurred to me that someone could be so clueless about risk management that they’d consider “good dexterity” bomber backup.

Epilogue

A couple days after the event, I got a phone call from the main organizer. First, to his credit, he assumed responsibility for how things had gone, saying that he now realized he shouldn’t have just taken Corneliu’s word on the ease of the route. He agreed with my assessment (the bullet points mostly as they appear above, sent to people from the leadership team who’d asked for feedback), and said that it hadn’t occurred to him that having so many people on a route would be problematic.

Me, again.
How does it not occur to anyone with even a moderate amount of climbing experience that 24 climbers on any multi-pitch route is not going to go smoothly? We did 2-3 dozen climbers at Joshua Tree, and even a couple dozen climbers at a crag was a bit crowded. I think that’s definitely the last time I do anything but single-pitch cragging with this group. I love the social atmosphere of these events, but the huge group dynamic doesn’t lend itself well to climbing.

He also said he realized he’d miscalculated a lot of people’s experience. I think that was partly due to him not being experienced enough to assess what people did and didn’t know (or how much there is to know) and his enthusiasm to include everyone who wanted to come. Some of it was definitely the participants’ ignorance of their limitations and tendency to overstate their qualifications. For instance, he said he’d gotten the impression from Nick that he was an experienced climber. Apparently, Nick conveyed that he’d previously been climbing partners with Michael, the leader in the first group that actually summited at a reasonable time, and had surpassed him in skills. When I talked to Michael, I found out that what actually happened was that they went climbing once, and there was a (single-pitch sport) route that Michael didn’t want to lead without a stick clip, but Nick went and clipped the first bolt for him. Without a screening process in place, there was no good was to discern that, short of asking a series of questions that would probably come across as rude and disbelieving.

I further learned that Michael lowering Nadine from the first pitch wasn’t solely because she got a charlie horse as originally stated. It was because she was failing so miserably at easy 5th, low-angle climbing that he didn’t think she should continue and keep dragging her partners off the rock since everyone was tied in to a single rope. I assume she was aware that the charlie horse wasn’t the only reason she got sent down, but either out of embarrassment or hopefulness for a second try, she didn’t speak up about her lack of ability and instead slowed another group - plus all subsequent groups - down by the better part of an hour.

At sunrise, everything is luminous and hasn’t yet had a chance to go horribly wrong.