The Great Matthes Crest Cluster, Liz's Version

[lizolas]

Prior to this summer, I didn’t really do anything that merited trip reports. I went hiking in highly-trafficked parks around the Bay Area and that was about it. My first thing approaching a trip report was some notes in my gym training log journal about Whitney 2 weeks prior. I took notes on a lot of the rest of this weekend when I was alone, but for this portion, I just took the text from Joshua's trip report and added my own comments in red. Mine is devoid of pictures after the phone accident earlier on the trip, which is too bad because of all the things I’ve done in my life, this was by far the most scenic.

The Great Matthes Crest Cluster

On Saturday (that is to say, July 15th), Josiah, Liz, and I went for an attempt on the Matthes Crest traverse from south to north. It was a total mess; in my book, it falls just barely short of an epic, we never at any point felt like we were in serious danger but it certainly crosses the line over into being a total cluster. We got in a decent ways over our heads, which in some way was a relief to me, because I was expecting a terrible trip where they were exceedingly capable, fit climbers and I spent the whole day slowing them down made a mess of basically the whole route, and had a really long day. Remarkably, almost the entire day was still fun. Here is, more or less, how it happened.
Josiah and I drove up to Yosemite on Friday night, leaving the Bay altogether too late. We camped just outside the park, on the West side; Liz mentioned that she expected to camp on Hardin Flat Road, and we indeed had no trouble finding her van parked there. We spent an hour and a half or so making camp, eating the remaining Chinese food, putting food in a tree (not at all out of reach of bears), etcetera, and then off to bed we went. I slept like crap, like I always do in a tent and on a sleeping pad -- and anyway, the stars were above me shouting reasons why I should stare at them. I also slept like crap – maybe 2-2.5 hours the whole night, although I was in a van with a supposedly comfy bed. I had waited up til after 1 am before leaving a note on the back of the van in case the rest of the group made it. Sometime around 4 I woke up feeling incredibly anxious, I think from general concern about the day ahead and the fact that I hadn’t found the rest of the group yet to discuss plans. It was midnight when I finally gave up and closed my eyes anyway, for an 05:30 alarm. We had a long day ahead of us.
After not many hours of sleep, the sun came up, and it was time to get moving. Although I actually felt fairly good, given how much I hadn't slept, my slow ass took forever to get moving, and it was nearly 06:45 by the time we left the campsite -- still having been too full from the Chinese food second dinner the night before to make breakfast yet. By 07:50, we arrived at the Cathedral Lakes trailhead, found parking, and started assembling ourselves. We'd arranged gear the night before, at least, but my daypack wasn't packed, since I'd used it the previous night to hold my food hanging from a tree. Sigh. Breakfast was made courtesy of the Jetboil; some bathroom stops, and general sluggishness and errors ("wait, I thought you had the second rope. wait, I thought you had the second rope. sigh. back to the car.") meant that we truly got under way at 0850 or so. This "a little slow, a little late" business, as it turns out, would be a theme for the day.
Had I known what vehicle the rest of the group had taken, I might have gone looking for them down the road while Joshua and Josiah broke camp – with a plan to meet at the parking lot just inside the entrance. Lacking any way to identify them, though, I just waited around while we got ready to go. I didn’t manage to make myself eat very much breakfast, still feeling pretty bad from the state in which I’d woken up. I had about 2/3 of a Costco poppyseed bagel and some applesauce - “carbs, mostly”. The second rope, to the extent of my knowledge, although I may have missed something, was never discussed the previous night. Ideally we would have camped toward the Tuolumne side, and indeed Joshua had texted me asking if we could do that, but it was after my phone was turned off, and anyway I would have said my main commitment was to the rest of the group also coming to Hardin Flat, but they could go without me if they wanted. Still, had we planned better we might have just aimed for a 4 am wakeup time for a 5:30-6 trailhead time or something similar. Same total amount of driving, just split differently between night and following morning.
Our gear for the day was basically as such: Josiah had the rack in his pack, and a 1L water bottle; Liz had the 60m rope in her pack and a 1.5L water bottle; and I, wearing my Daylite, had the 70m draped over the top (and a 2L water bladder and the rack). All of us seemed to have some difficulty with hiking uphill at elevation; hauling the 70 on my back was particularly miserable with the way the Daylite was balanced. We were concerned about routefinding, and we were concerned about snowfields; beta we had been given the night before led us to believe that the approach would be a snowy muddy mess. To our surprise, routefinding given the topo was relatively easy, and the snowfields were not terribly bad to traverse, either, given poles for an extra point of balance. (I had left my ski poles at home, like an idiot, so I borrowed one of Liz's.) In the event that the angle was anything other than perfectly flat, the snow was good enough to kick steps in, even in my 5.10 Camp 4s. The snow was even easier just following in 2 other sets of kicked steps.
As easy as the terrain was, though, we were still woefully out of shape, and having great difficulty keeping any particular speed up. Breaks were relatively frequent, and we had to throttle the pace way back to keep heart rates sustainably low. The ascent to the turnoff at Cathedral Peak is about a 10% grade on average (picking up 1485ft in 2.7mi); we made decent time, getting there at 10:22. Along the way, someone asked us what our objective was; we said "Matthes Crest", and they commented "A rather late start for that! Ah, well, you're young and fit". They were half right, anyway; we had to take another break at a stream at 11:40. But spirits were high as we refilled our water; the objective was in sight! We could see Matthes in the distance, and it looked every bit as glorious as it looked in the guide book. Stoke had temporarily dipped when we were slogging up hill, but seeing the crest provided a burst of excitement, and we were ready to get after it! At one point, Joshua said “We’ll be there in just 20 minutes!” to which I replied, “20 minutes?! I’d give myself an hour for that.” Over 20 minutes later he agreed that 20 minutes may indeed have been overly optimistic. Both on this approach and on Dana the day before, it felt like I had frustratingly little idea of how to gauge the approximate time it would take me to cover a given distance of uneven or steep terrain in front of me, in addition to knowing I was moving frustratingly slowly. I also really have no sense of distance by sight, and usually estimate time based on miles remaining. This approach is only supposed to be about 5 miles, and it never felt like we were moving incredibly slowly, yet our pace for almost the entire walking portion – both in and out – was well under 2 mph. (The first 1.6 miles of Dana took about 50 minutes, and the <1 mile talus scramble after that took almost 2 hours.) I think some of that has to do with the frequent breaks, especially on the way out even though it was downhill.
It took us nearly until 13:00 to get to the base of the route, ascending quite a steep grade to gain the base of the ridge. This, conceivably, should have been an indication that the objective that we had planned was unreasonable. At the Cathedral turnoff, we briefly mentioned aborting Matthes and doing Cathedral, but decided against that, I think partially due to not having planned our rack for that. But having failed to set a drop-dead turn around time in advance, we ate some lunch, put on our rock shoes, and roped up to begin simulclimbing on Josiah's 57m rope. The first pitches to gain the top of the ridge were done in two belays, with Josiah on lead; he commented thinking that he was slightly off route (about 15m to the left of the easy stuff), and I also found myself thinking that we were in trouble if the climbing sustained like that all day. My calves were very pumped on simul waiting for Josiah to place gear before I could keep moving. Although the idea is generally “Don’t fall,” it felt incredibly sketchy climbing with the constraint of basically being exactly 1-2 moves behind the first follower at any given point. We had to communicate a lot about how good of a position we were in, try to get ourselves where both of us could rest ok, have each other wait to prevent tension in the rope between us, etc. It felt like an eternity, even at good stances, not knowing whether he was placing gear, routefinding, or building an anchor. (He reported that carrying the 70m in his pack on lead was quite a tiring experience indeed, too.) But at last, at 14:30 (a question I did not want the answer to), we had gained the top of the ridge, anyway. Finally, time for some easy climbing -- this is what we had come for! Views were good, and this felt like the Matthes Crest we were promised ... but we had a long day ahead of us.
The climbing on top of the ridge was not super challenging, which is basically as people said. There were, in fact, a few 5th-class downclimbing moves, but a lot of it was solid 3rd-class walking on a ridgeline. I would say more like 4th, given that an unroped fall would have been certain death, but yes, large stretches of the walking felt very secure. We simuled it, with me leading the first little ways. I put in some pro every now and again, but much of the time I relied on rope drag for protection, and threading the rope back and forth around fins and horns. Occasionally, there were routefinding challenges, but nothing too serious. The climbing was easy, and we finally were making what felt like solid progress. Granted, we never reached the more technical part, or the “traverse with your feet on a slab” part, but from my impression of the route description I was expecting something a lot harder than the median climbing we were doing, but also with less variation. Downclimbing isn’t a particular strength of mine, but the two downclimbs we came to seemed substantially more challenging for me than for the other two. Who knows if maybe they were just as unhappy about it as I was and just didn’t have anyone right in front of them to spot/belay, though.
After a handful of figuring out which way I was to go, I was getting tired, though, and I started to get at least a little bit sloppy; for instance, rather than building real bombproof anchors when I stopped to belay to pick up gear, I often slung a fin with a single Dyneema sling, tied it off, and simply belayed from that. After being fairly mentally flamed from leading -- even a not terribly taxing lead, but nonetheless one with as much weighty responsibility as any other -- we swapped leads, unroping entirely to do so. (Since we had three on a rope, with Liz on the follower's end tied in on an 8 on a bight, there was a defined leader's-end and follower's-end.) Although the only way that anybody could have fallen there is if a meteor became crashed into us or something, it was still cutting corners unnecessarily. In hindsight, maybe a better method would have been with me in the middle of the rope, equidistant from each end.
Josiah took the lead for a handful of ropelengths. A big hulking object was ahead of us, which seemed like good news. It looked like something that protruded and had some face climbing to do; a closer view, anyway, showed that it was simply a pretty exposed 4th-class scramble. (In which I swear I will never again scramble with hiking poles on the Verte 25 pack, then proceed to do exactly that a couple months later at Bear Creek Spire.) Better not to fall, but falling also pretty unlikely. We'd been going for a while, so we were hopeful; when Josiah wandered up to the top of it, the indication was that the news was, in fact, not good: "hey guys!" "what?" "this is not actually the South summit." Well. That's bad; by now it was somewhat after 17:30. We proceeded on for a bit, until it was time for the next belay; around 18:30, we realized that there was no way we were going to hit the summit, and that it was, frustratingly, time to retreat. We had a long day ahead of us. This was probably the part where it was the most uselessly difficult to gauge distance progress over time. Climbing 5000’ of normal climbing pitches is not only something I’ve never done, but also not an accurate estimation of our progress. However, given the numerous stops and discussions we were having, it was also nowhere near the pace of simply scrambling a mile uphill.
Having changed modes, we got to business. We started at our belay, slung the nearest thing we could find, and backed it up with our belay just in case. This was where I feel like even at the time I should have known to speak up. I thought “let’s bail now” meant we’d keep going until we found a good rap anchor, but instead we just slung the thing right in front of us. I don’t think there was any reason we would have had to leave more gear; we could have looked a few dozen feet in each direction for a more secure rock feature to use. One of the BD Neutrinos came off the rack, the ropes went through it, and a few turns of tape around the gate secured it, and so began the retreat off the West face. Josiah went first, and to his chagrin, found an established rap station some 30ft over to the left of where he ended up; he wandered over on good slabby terrain unroped, while Liz rappelled straight down to where the rap station was. “Straight down” and “where the rap station was” are mutually exclusive here. I started to rappel over to where Josiah had said he’d found a rap station, then remembered the seemingly-precarious position of the sling anchor. I switched back to a straight-down course to a small flat spot with some bushes where Josiah had originally landed. In the interest of making myself seem like less of the useless idiot that I seem to be as the evening progresses, before I rappelled, Joshua also put himself on rappel, and I pointed out that he’d clipped his carabiner through just one of the two loops of rope in the ATC. I assume he would have tested it while still anchored before weighting the rappel without a backup, but that incident was a bit unnerving given that I was supposed to be the one deteriorating into starvation-induced uncontrollable shivering. My mental state never seems to deteriorate with hunger the way most people’s does, but I’d also only really pushed myself like this once before – on Whitney 2 weeks prior, during which I also felt close to collapse after about 12 hours without food. I went last, cleaning the backup anchor as we went. As I established on the rappel, the anchor (now just a single sling) shifted a few millimeters; Liz reports the gulp being audible from the anchor below. I resolved to be very careful not to bounce on rappel any more than I needed to.
It probably isn't surprising that our rappel was slow, given that our approach was slow and the climbing was slow. This trip really made me aware of the gravity of Henrique’s repeated admonishments about efficiency in small actions adding up to be the difference between being able to swap leads in a minute and climb dozens of pitches in a day vs. coming nowhere near the intended goal. While I think we took the right approach in taking our time at every step due to our collective discomfort with the whole situation, so much hesitation and contemplation probably wouldn’t be part of a successful traverse of the full crest. The terrain was incredibly low angle; low enough angle, in fact, that the most efficient way to navigate around some of the rap stations was simply to sit nearby unroped, and again just assume that there would be no meteors to become crashed into us. This low-angle rappel worked against us, too; the combination of a 57m rope and a 70m rope meant that the rope created an enormous cluster, and throwing it any reasonable distance was completely impossible. Raps took up to half an hour each. Liz was starting to shiver at the rappel stations, too, not having eaten any substantial amount over the course of the day. Again, to make myself seem less nonfunctional, at one point I seemed to be the only one methodically checking for no knot as the rope was pulled, and a knot before the rope was thrown down (“Oh….did that have a knot in it?” “I don’t know, I didn’t check.” “I did. There was no knot when the end was pulled past me just now.”). On at least one rappel, the 70m end didn’t have a knot, but since the 57m end I was tending did, it was ok.
The sloppiness and tiredness continued. I had, optimistically, hoped that we'd be unroped by sunset, and hiking out by then. 2 hours did seem to be plenty of time for what we thought would be 2 or maybe 3 double-rope rappels, but it turned out to actually be 4 rappels plus downclimbing. This was not to be the case. At the bottom of the second rappel, I decided to switch from rock shoes to the Camp 4s I had clipped onto my backpack. This all was fine, until I fumbled the left one and sent it tumbling down the face. A few minutes of staring in disbelief, but it was true. I burst into uncontrollable laughter, not really knowing what to make of it. Joshua, you idiot. We had a long day ahead of us. From where we were sitting, it seemed that there was a roughly isosceles triangle of 3 bushes, and we could see where the shoe had landed between them. As we descended, however, the bushes turned out to be at very different elevations from each other, and by the time we were at the bottom of the rappel, we felt we’d lost the fix we thought we had on the lost shoe.
Josiah set up for the next rappel. Our optimism continued, thinking that it would be the last, and then we'd be on easy slab. This was not the case. I mean, it was the last rappel, just not easy downclimbing after. While he fought with the ropes, Liz and I got to enjoy the most beautiful sunset over the High Sierras that I never wanted to see, now around 20:30. My entire thought process while sitting in the ledge-hole we were in was that the sunset and scenery in general were making the entire experience worth it. However, that was also with the assumption that we’d be on walkable ground before it was completely dark, and that after the next rappel would be easy crabwalking down. At some point on this ledge, Joshua also decided that I seemed to be in worsening condition and needed to eat something. I managed to drink about ¼ of a bottle of Soylent before giving up. Mentally I still felt fine – at least, fine enough to proceed with extreme caution with the knowledge that I was likely not functioning at full capacity at the moment. Maybe he thought differently, because despite our “Go really slowly and make sure we avoid stupid rappelling accidents” plan at the top, he checked my rappel from where he was seated and elected not to put himself on rappel and have me check him there. We were definitely not unroped yet. Eventually, Josiah got to the ledge where we thought my shoe had landed, and began searching; Liz rappelled over to what looked like a lower angle way down (Narrator: it wasn’t.); and I rappelled towards the ledge, now wearing one Camp 4 and one Butora Altura.
As the last one, it was my turn to pull the ropes, which was fine, except that where I landed was absolutely horrendous, and not on a flat ledge at all. I took myself off rappel, since I could at least perch myself on the ground, and began shuffling ropes; I figured I could pull a bunch of the 57m rope to get an extra 6.5m out, then put myself back on rappel, getting me at least closer to the ledges. This was a great theory, but in practice, what happened was that I dropped my ATC. Tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink ... Joshua, you idiot. Josiah had had no success finding my shoe, and the ATC, well, it was already dark when I dropped that, so who possibly knew where that damned thing went. Someone would find it in a few years, I figured, and get a hearty laugh at my expense.
With nothing better to do, I fed myself down slowly on a clove hitch, not trusting myself to tie a munter. I found a ledge, finally, that I could get myself down from, but I didn't trust myself to scramble down with ropes attached to me. I looked over to call for Josiah to catch the ropes, but he was busy; Liz had rappelled somewhere that she didn't feel terribly comfortable scrambling down on and was quite unhappy indeed, and so Josiah was over there assisting. That’s a nice way of saying Liz could very stuck, and then it got dark so she was trying to put her headlamp on her helmet, but couldn’t get 2/4 clips attached, so she started crying because she felt less important than a shoe, although logically, the shoe was not going to get itself out of the mess it was in, while Liz should have been able to, and likely would have, had it not suddenly become inescapably dark. Just before Josiah came up, I did have the realization that I could just skip the back 2 attachment points and put the headlamp band under the helmet, so it at least couldn’t go flying off into the night. I figured I'd better do something on my own, since he wasn't going to be involved in whatever I was going to do for the next 20 minutes; looking for something to do to make myself useful, I flaked and coiled the two ropes. I tried to make some progress by hucking them as far down as I could, at least, without losing my balance and hucking myself down the slabs, too.
For those keeping track, this was about the half hour of this operation where I thought we were pretty fucked and about to get into even worse trouble in short order.
But finally, after Liz was moving again, and after I had divested myself of the ropes, Josiah came back over to pluck the ropes from below me, and I crab-walked down, still in one approach shoe and one rock shoe. At some point, I went to put on my headlight. It went rocketing off the sloped part of my helmet, and I dropped it into the bush below me. So, at least all my concern about having all points attached to my helmet weren’t entirely unfounded. I cursed, picked it up, and did a more careful job of mounting it to my helmet. Phew. Just as I had committed myself to hiking out in one rock shoe -- we certainly didn't have time to keep looking -- Josiah went over to grab the ropes, and somehow found my shoe!
Finally, at 21:30, we were all three reunited with two shoes per, ropes ready to go into backpacks, and ready to get out of there. Although first we sat around eating for a while – I managed to get a few oreos down, but didn’t bother to dig the crackers out of my pack. Joshua had to help me put my headlamp on properly and somehow had absolutely no trouble doing so. Maybe I’ll just never figure out how to do that. Five minutes further down the slabs, Josiah stopped to switch from rock shoes to hiking boots; he apologized for having to do so, feeling embarrassed to have caused yet another delay. As he looked down, right in front of his feet was my ATC. Score. The delay was worth something. Finally, we were mostly in the clear, but we had a long day ahead of us. Or maybe night.
The hike out started reasonably enough. We descended on our butts until we felt comfortable walking, and then started hiking until we hit our previous path. I suddenly felt very glad that I had mapped it out on Strava; At one point, Strava wasn’t showing sufficient topo for something, and my GPS was marginally useful – or maybe I’m just trying to justify having stayed up til well past 1 the previous night trying to get my computer to recognize the device so I could load a Yosemite topo onto it – but in general Strava seemed to have a better display/interface for seeing where we were relative to our track coming in. the moon was not yet out, and so no mountains were visible on the horizon yet for bearings. From behind us, we saw headlamps, too; people descending off of the North side of Matthes, it seemed. We wondered if they were going to catch us up, and when they would be back to their cars, and if they meant to be out that late. To our luck, the snowfields had not refrozen yet, and were perfectly enjoyable to walk on; some were a little firmer, and some were a little softer. Nobody fell. I definitely fell, once, about 5 seconds after Joshua declared “There’s nothing objectionable about this snow!” and I was right behind him; he turned around and was surprised that I didn’t go rapidly sliding down the hill into everyone else.
By 22:30, Josiah had drained his water bottle. Liz was now substantially shivering, still not having eaten anything substantial. I actually think I was doing ok by then, and this didn’t get edited from the correction that the worst of my issues happened at the beginning of rappelling, not later I was feeling okay for the moment, but lightly hungry, and I knew that if I didn't eat, I'd be in trouble. Then, I drained my water tanker, too. Luckily, we stopped for a stream, and Josiah had a chance to refill and add iodine tablets; they were said to need half an hour to work, so we did the best we could and got moving again. The dehydration was getting to Josiah; we had to stop every five or ten minutes to let him catch up.
We discussed having a nap (then firing ze missiles) until the moon came up; it was warm enough that I was still wearing a T-shirt, we all had extra layers, I was wearing all my layers, but overheating as we hiked up, and only wearing them to make room in my pack for a now much more poorly packed 70m rope and we had a space blanket with us. Josiah was very tired; on the other hand, I was pretty concerned about accidentally having SAR called out on us if we didn't make it to cell service that evening to tell Colin and Elaine that we were okay, and Liz was not excited about getting a ticket on our cars for overnight parking without a backcountry permit. We pressed on anyway, slowly.
Eventually, we found a clearing, and declared that it'd been half an hour, and began draining some water. Joshua and I shared my 1.5L to leave Josiah his entire 1L, as Joshua had not wanted to dig his reservior out of his pack at the refill stop. Josiah had as much of a protein bar as he could stomach before the water had replenished his system; Liz had some oreos; and I had half of a Clif protein bar, also unable to reasonably put the rest of it in my mouth. My stomach was unhappy, and I spent the rest of the hike out emitting noxious tailpipe fumes. We figured that the remaining amount of hike time was starting to come into reasonable bounds, though, and Josiah started to be able to pick out the outlines of mountains to navigate by, leaving us finally with little additional need for the GPS.
Finally, we found the Never-Ending Snowfield that told us we'd be nearly on the Cathedral Peak approach trail. After an appropriate never, we hit the Cathedral turnoff at about 00:15. The hike out from there was entirely downhill. Over and over, we estimated that we had about a half hour hike left; over and over, we were abjectly wrong. We figured we'd end up stopping somewhere along the way. We didn't, and continued along the march until we finally hit the car at 01:45, 17 hours after we had left. It was far and away the slowest downhill 3 miles I've ever hiked. I didn’t know one could be moving so steadily – downhill, on a trail – and still make such slow progress. The GPS track shows no more than 2 mph even for the last trail section, and I was sure that at least for that portion I was moving close to my usual 3.5 mph hiking pace. Possibly, again, due to a faster pace coupled with numerous brief breaks to catch our breath, and some hesitation as we lost the trail a few times even where it should have been clear.
Liz got in her car, and we mumbled an "uh, see you at the gym". Josiah and I got in my car, and we beat feet for the East exit of Yosemite, with Josiah somewhere between asleep and staring at both of our phones waiting for one to say that they'd managed to squeeze out a message to Elaine. We wandered over to the Mobil Mart on the East side of Tioga, reclined both seats, opened the windows, grabbed sleeping bags from the trunk, and fell asleep in the Genesis. As I dropped some layers, I found that I had torn a solid hole in the seat of my pants from the crab-walking earlier. I had another fitful five hours of sleep, and at long last, we had a long day behind us. I had pondered aloud on the way down several options, like “just go back toward the Valley now, start the hike early, and be up toward Clouds Rest by the time it gets hot” and “go to Half Dome, at least, to say you used the permits” but as the clock crept past midnight I became aware that I was certainly not going to get there before dawn like I’d need to for the full linkup I intended. At the cars, I felt like I’d barely even been awake hiking – the same autopilot, nearly asleep on my feet feeling I’d had descending Whitney at only 10:30 pm – and there was no use risking my life and anyone else’s on the road just to say I climbed up some rocks that will still be here for the foreseeable future, barring meteors. I planned to stop at a turnout on the way down to avoid having to drive all the way back up 120 from Lee Vining, but a combination of the presence of bathrooms with running water there and my general inability to ever gracefully and adequately slow down in time for turnouts downhill meant that I eventually ended up at the Mobil station. Although I think I may have set a record for fastest time to sleep (I remember looking at my watch at 2:40, and Fitbit has me asleep starting at 2:43), I slept only 3 hours until dawn, and woke up at 5:35 to another beautiful Mono Lake sunrise which, much like the sunset the night before, I’d actually hoped not to see.

An epilogue.
Afterwards, I took a look at the Strava log, and had something of a point of contention with Josiah. I was trying to figure out where we bailed, and how far we were from the summit, proper, when I had the unusual discovery that we hadn't actually started at the South end of Matthes; we must have come up somewhere in the middle. Josiah swore up and down that we did, but I also remembered that he seemed to think we were off-route left (i.e., North) on the way up. We saw a bunch of people, including a handful of free-soloists, head up before us; surely they knew the route? But looking at the SuperTopo, the route clearly began south of Echo Lake, and looking at the GPS log, we clearly began north of Echo Lake. We simply could not have started on the route.
As it turned out, the source of our disagreement was that the SuperTopo was wrong. In fact, the route began north of Echo Lake indeed. A picture I took just as we established on the route reflected many (one) similar photos on Mountain Project.
I spent much of the drive home wishing that I was not such a terrible mountaineer. Everything seemed to have gone wrong, and I made a lot of very silly errors that shouldn't have happened. It seemed that every time we went out for such an objective, one that has such a low number grade in the SuperTopo, we had a Highly Educational Experience -- or, anyway, a total mess. Somehow, we had managed to beat Cathedral Peak for "total cluster score", when Josiah and Emily and I did it in 13 hours. How did we possibly get worse? I felt pretty conflicted about whether bailing off a horizontal thing is better or worse than bailing off a vertical thing. On one hand, it seemed better, since there was no substantial peak I missed. On the other hand, we still had a definite goal of “at least the South Summit” and missed that completely. This did make me feel very much like any competence I’d felt before had been entirely Henrique telling me what to do, and doing all the hard parts for me very efficiently. I may be able to wander up mildly snowy short things by myself or lead a couple 100’ 5.6-5.7 trad pitches in a day, but I’m no mountaineer.
Well, next time will be better. I will physically train more, and so I'll be fitter next time, and I will have just learned a hair more. It will still be a cluster next time, but maybe just a tiny bit less. Maybe we'll pick slightly less ambitious objectives next time, instead of more ambitious objectives. Or maybe we'll make a huge mess and end up having to bivy anyway. I guess I'd better bring a full bivy sack. Having gotten the idea that I’m going to at least make an attempt at Shasta via Clear Creek before the end of August, I better train more too. I’m not sure how much one can accomplish in a month, but perhaps a good start would be to stop living in the past and believing that I’m still in as good of cardiovascular shape as I was when I ran 3-4x/week and my resting heart rate had gotten down to 48-50. And always be willing to turn around when you’re in completely over your head.
I can't wait.