Yosemite Valley

Well, this last month has definitely flown! It doesn’t seem like so long ago that I was sitting in Ben & Meghan’s living room typing out the last post, but a quick check of the calendar has revealed to me that it’s been….26 days. Yipes! And almost time to be leaving the Valley now. Sigh. Mike was telling me this morning that he feels like we didn’t do anything while we were here, so I’m going to have to make a list and prove to him that we haven’t just been sitting around!

A quick rundown and then some details:

We’ve climbed Stately Pleasure Dome, Lembert Dome, Fairview Dome, Cathedral Peak, bouldered for 2 days in Bishop, climbed the Nutcracker (and some single pitches nearby), Pillar of Frenzy (ditto single pitch stuff nearby), East Buttress of Middle Cathedral Rock, 2 days of bouldering in Yosemite, climbed Serenity Crack & Sons of Yesterday, sport climbed for a day, hiked/climbed Higher Cathedral Spire, Bircheff- Williams Route, Munginella, Werner’s Ant Trees/The Surprise, Commitment, Jam Crack and the East Buttress of El Capitan.

Eight of the above days involved 900 feet of climbing or more. So there!

With the exception of a cold first week we’ve been blessed with unbelievable weather. Gorgeous sunny days with temperatures in the 80s! We’ve actually had to postpone some of the routes we wanted to do because it was too hot to be on a south facing wall in the sun! Hard to believe it could be this nice in October. We’ve been staying at Camp 4 (of course); it’s the ‘official’ climbers’ campground here in the park, and the place where all those history making climbers of the ‘50s-‘70s stayed. Not the most glamorous of campgrounds but it’s definitely fun to be here and be at the heart of all the climbing action. We’ve seen climbers here from all around the world: Germany, Austria, Spain, France, Argentina, Japan, Canada, Denmark, Australia, Poland, Norway, England. And that’s just in the 5 or 6 campsites around ours! Pretty amazing.

We spent our first week here in Tuolomne; the northern section of the park. We met up with my friend Candy from back home and spent a few days climbing the granite domes. The highlight of the week was definitely our climb of Cathedral Peak. Our hike in was somewhat epic, since we missed the shorter trail. Oops! We added a few miles to the approach, but did get to see Cathedral Lakes so it wasn’t a complete loss. The long scramble up the slabs and slippery scree slope on the back of the peak was less than entertaining but we survived it! The three of us got to the base of the last section of the peak where we started the ‘real’ climbing. Harnesses and ropes on and up 900 more feet we went to an amazing picnic-table-sized peak! There was barely room for the three of us and the ropes. The descent was very tricky; lots of scrambling down steep sections of rock and slab with a little snow leftover from the weekend’s storm to make things even spicier! We made it safely down and hiked out the correct trail (phew!), getting to the car just a few minutes after dark. When Candy and I climb together we always seem to end up off trail, off route and adventuring, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it happened yet again!

The rest of our time here has been just as much fun. We spent 2 weekends bouldering with our friends Ben, Meghan, Dan and Andy…..and it took me several days after to recover! Bouldering is not exactly easy. Mike and I tackled lots of classic routes (most mentioned in the above list), and so far we’ve only had one after-dark epic rappel session. Quite the accomplishment! The crack climbing is amazingly fun and challenging; I’ve definitely gotten a lot more comfortable with this whole multi-pitch thing since our first days in January. The vistas from these climbs are just incredible, I love being that far above the valley floor and seeing the vast expanses of granite walls and domes all around. It’s easy to forget the hustle and bustle of the valley up there and just drink in the peace and gorgeous scenery. We’ve done two really long climbs: the East Buttresses of Middle Cathedral Rock and El Capitan. With 1200 and 1400 feet of climbing respectively they were definitely the most challenging days for me. The hike in, the climbing, the gear and rope management, the long descents on steep rock….it adds up to an extreme amount of exhaustion by the end of the day! But, it’s been great to test my limits and push myself to try something so hard and manage to get through it.

We still have a couple days left here and then it looks like we’re in for some rain, so we’ll be trying to pack in as much climbing as we can and after the weekend start meandering our way to Indian Creek in Utah for a few days. The trip is winding down, we’re planning to be home by November 15^th so we’ll just try to fill our time with as many new experiences as possible before heading back east.

Yosemite