lizolas

2019 Annual Recap

If I’ve learned nothing else this year, it’s to stop making climbing resolutions. Here’s a brief and embarrassing recap:

• 29 trad pitches 5.9 or harder (make the rope go to the top)
  I did 11 trad pitches that were 5.9


• 10 sport pitches 5.10c or harder (make the rope go to the top)
  I did 0 sport pitches that were 5.10c


• 3 trips where ice tools get used (because owning gear you don’t use is almost as bad as owning gear you don’t know how to use)
  I did 0 (but I am going to use them this coming weekend!)


• 5 trips where snowshoes get used (see above)
  I actually think I definitely exceeded this one, and by this point using snowshoes isn’t unfamiliar to me, so I stopped counting.


• 3 trips with moderately involved routefinding off-trail (climbing or backpacking)
  I’m not sure Lani’s and my collective inability to find the start of routes occasionally counts for this.


• 3 solo backpacking trips
  You guessed it: zero.


• 1 snow camping trip with a summit attempt (or at least an attempt at a summit attempt)
  Besides guiding on Shasta, zero.


• Shasta dayhike
  I did this one my very last trip to Shasta this summer. 12 hours car-to-car and I didn’t summit til 11 am. Not my proudest moment, but it just felt like a long day, not a hard day. I’d started from the Bay Area after work and drove straight to Shasta, arriving at 3 am and starting immediately after throwing some food, water, and a headlamp in a backpack, which meant I basically went from sea level to 14,000’ in less than 12 hours and was slow but fine.


• Haystack w/ haystacks
  Tragically have still not done this despite occasional attempts to find a partner for it.


• Specific Peaks (attempt, not necessarily a summit)
  • Alta Peak (ok this one has to be a summit)
    no
  
  
  • Mt Russel
    no
  
  
  • Mt Whitney Mountaineer’s Route
    Yes, but shadowing a guided trip.
  
  
  • North Palisade
    no
  
  
  • Mt Langley
    no
  • Mt Conness
    Another failed summit attempt
  
  
  • Mt Williamson
    no
  
  
  • Lone Pine Peak
    no
  
  
  • Mt Clark
    no
• Specific Ridges
  • Matthes Crest >br>Yes, 10 hours car-to-car, but Ben basically led the entire thing. I’d like to go back next summer and do most of the leading myself, plus tag both the north and south summits.
  
  
  • Saber Traverse
    Climbed a few feet up and aborted mission.
  • Eagle Lake Buttress
    Never reattempted
  
  
  • Torment-Forbidden Traverse
    Never reattempted
• Mt Dana every time I drive by and it’s not time-prohibited (optional if dark).
  I can’t decide if I failed at this, because every time I drove by, it either was dark or I was driving to a destination with a time constraint, but I didn’t do this a single time this year. I’d envisioned lots of summer Sierra trips and instead made a bunch of Shasta trips.

The 5.9 trad pitches I did in 2019

Despite how few of my goals I met, I’m not disappointed in myself. At the beginning of this year I felt pretty aimless in my outdoor-related pursuits and made a huge variety of goals to cover every possible type of activity. I don’t think there were actually a feasible number for me to have completed in a year. I like to discount things and say, “Yeah but I should have been able to do all the climbing if I just had partners.” That’s a constraint though. I don’t really have partners in my area with the same kinds of outdoor goals as mine. The few I do have are often not available on the same weekends as I am. It’s not some enormous failure on my part as a human. I spent a lot of the summer going to Shasta (or saving money to use for gas for Shasta by not leaving on other weekends), which was a situation I wasn’t anticipating when I made my original goals.

By the end of the year I’d finally started trying hard outside again. I’d practiced the not-perfect-hand cracks in the gym and led pitches outside with thin hands, butterfly stacks, and finger jams. I’d gotten comfortable enough to assess a pitch and protect it with the rack Ben had taken (which he said before I started was probably less than I’d have chosen to take), running it out in the middle where it was safe for me, protecting it adequately at the crux, and then trying until I fell rather than giving up. Instead of insisting on the #nobabysteps approach that seems to work well for Lani but just scares me away from everything, I started just taking any incremental step I could find to take, and I learned that even the easy unimpressive things are fun and rewarding to do.

I hope to develop some climbing goals over the next year and some training routines to help me accomplish those goals, but right now I have no list of boxes to check off by one year from today. Today I’m content to take the next year one baby step at a time.

Mt Whitney

August 10-12, 2019

Shadow - Whitney Mountaineer’s Route 3-Day with Neil
Clients: 2 perfectly agreeable guys and the most unagreeable woman I’ve ever been on a trip with.
Summitted with 2 clients; one stayed around camp

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Freel Peak and Sugarloaf

March 23-24, 2019

Online dating can be a great way to meet hiking and climbing partners. It can also be a great way to meet people who are less than ideal hiking and climbing partners. This one seemed to be the first, but ended up feeling like the latter. After one date at the climbing gym, Austin and I planned a trip to do a ski/snowshoe of something in the Tahoe area. We decided on Freel Peak as something that would be a long enough day to be challenging, but shouldn’t have much in the way of hazardous terrain. Since we had another day in the weekend, we planned to climb at Sugarloaf on Sunday.

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Mt Shasta, June 23-24, 2018

Several months ago, I signed up for an F5 event to climb Mt Shasta via Casaval Ridge. I had another Shasta trip planned via Avalanche Gulch in May and figured I’d do it by the easy route first, then a harder (or at least slightly more technical) route a month later. As it turned out, in May we had terrible weather and didn’t get anywhere near the summit. The Casaval Ridge plan changed to Avalanche Gulch after a couple of Corneliu’s friends told him they did the ridge earlier in the week and found that the catwalk was melted out and there was a section with a steep ice traverse. Corneliu (and probably Aaron and Ian) wouldn’t have found this insurmountable. The other 5 of us without as much technical experience were not up to that, nor did we have the gear for it. I was expecting to be the group member with the least amount of experience, but several of the people who RSVP’d “going” didn’t end up going and a couple others came along who had no prior mountaineering experience, putting me solidly in the middle of the pack.

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Round Top & Red Lake Peak – March 31 - April 1, 2018

Last March I went with Henrique, Jessica, and Faryar on what was supposed to be an easy introduction to snow climbing on Round Top. Maybe climbing the couloir would have been relatively easy, but the high winds forced us to turn around just short of the base of the climb. I decided I was never going to be a mountaineer and had been a complete idiot wasting money on gear I’d never use because I wasn’t good enough for real mountains. A year later, I decided that I was going to be a real mountaineer someday whether or not I could ever find anyone to go with me. Round Top seemed like a good starting point. I’d already been there once and had a general idea where I was going, it’s recommended as a beginner snow trip, and it’s on my list of prominent CA peaks to summit. Right across the street is Red Lake Peak, just over 10,000’ and another easy beginner summit. I’d bought snowshoes as a birthday present for myself in December, but due to the dry winter I hadn’t tried them yet. Both peaks had more moderate terrain where I could get some use out of them.

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