Tenaya Peak – Off Belay for the Whole Weekend

September 1-4, 2017

The plan was to leave Friday evening in order to have all of Saturday and Sunday, plus part of Monday for climbing. As usual, nothing goes according to plan. Ryan texted me at 7:45 saying his car battery had died, and he’d have to wait to see if the problem was the alternator or something else. We ended up taking my car after his was towed back to his place, but by that point it was past 10 pm, and way too late to think about a 5-hour drive to Tuolumne that night. We left Saturday morning just before 7 instead, arriving in Tuolumne around noon.

Yosemite - Mt Dana Disaster Weekend
July 13-16, 2017

Let’s just get one very important lesson out of the way: Never count on what you can’t control.

What was supposed to be a fun, relaxed group trip to Yosemite turned out to be a series of mistakes that ended up being not-quite-an-epic with an entirely different group. I should probably have done more to find a group that wanted to do the trip I was intending, but Ryan said he’d ask his hiking group buddies, and then neglected to get back to me. I assumed that as many people would go as could fit it into their schedules, given the popularity of the permits, and didn’t worry too much about having anyone to go with. What Ryan ended up doing was not asking hiking buddies, but instead asking his climber coworkers, who are above measly cables. That wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d gotten earlier confirmation of who was going to be climbing and who wanted to hike. As the “planning” (mostly lack thereof) continued, it seemed like Ryan was leaning heavily toward a preference for climbing with everyone else, leaving me hiking alone. When I left, we still hadn’t planned the details of whether or not he was hiking with me, and if so, for what portions of the trail.