lizolas

Bishop & Yosemite Valley

October 11-14, 2019

I’d planned to do Mt Humphreys as part of my preparation for Saber Ridge. A flat tire on my way over to Bishop put a hold on that. I ended up not making time to do the route before our Saber deadline. My idea was to take a short rope for the downclimbs, but first to try and solo them. Scrambling in the Cathedral Range the previous summer, my partner had remarked that something we downclimbed was about 5.6, to which I replied that that was impossible, as I barely even up-climbed 5.7! During that conversation, I realized that my idea of my climbing limit is what I feel I could comfortably reverse, on account of I do a lot of getting lost on long, wandering routes. Frequently on that kind of scrambling outing, I come to a short downclimb that occasionally has death-fall potential (looking at you, Matthes) and initially think there’s no way I can safely do it. After Ben patiently points out the footholds to me, I can generally do it just fine. With two short (10-foot) 5.6 or 5.7 downclimbs on blocky granite, this seemed like a good opportunity to see if I could talk myself into figuring out the beta for myself for once.

Tuolumne June 16-17, 2018

After finding out that Ben had never been to Tuolumne because he moved to the Bay Area after 120 closed last fall, I suggested a trip there; he agreed and proposed a trip to do Echo Peaks, then created a route with a loop traverse of several things in the Cathedral Range. I deemed this acceptable as long as we got to make a detour to Elizabeth Lake – I’ve been meaning to get there for 2 years now and hadn’t made it yet. We left Sunnyvale at 8, got stuck in traffic anyway, and made it to Hardin Flat Road at 12:30. We woke up to the 5:30 alarm the next morning and drove the rest of the way to the Cathedral Lakes Trailhead where we had breakfast and got our gear organized. We’d previously discussed taking ropes and harnesses along for the more technical Echo Peaks, but decided to leave that behind and just scramble whatever we felt comfortable with. I was expecting a lot of me telling him to go on ahead because he was way more comfortable than I was, but there was only one thing during the whole day that I couldn’t do the same way he did.