Somewhere between the bottom of the climb and the summit is the answer to the mystery of why we climb
-- Greg Child
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| nick on the $ pitch... with Middle Cathedral lurking behind... |
Managed to squeeze in another day of navigating up granite walls with Nick this year! STOKED!!! We were talking about going for Royal Arches to Crest Jewel... but as it's already October and we were getting short on daylight, we settled on the E. Butt of El Cap.... a route that I have been wanting to do, and one that Nick hadn't done for close to 10 years. It was funny what he remembered about the route and what he had forgotten (i.e. most of it).
I packed up, and started the drive up after putting my kids down for the night... around 10 pm. I got to a reasonable pull out and got to sleep for a few hours before waking up at 5 am, so I could meet up with Nick at 5:30 at the hwy 120 entrance to the park. I'll talk about the climb with the pics below... but we climbed at a relaxing pace and we reached the summit by 5 pm, descended the ledges on fixed ropes, had a beer at Nick's van around 6:30 pm, and I made it home at 10 pm.
A 5 star day for sure.
East Buttress links...
- Topo from FISH - the main difference I saw from this and SuperTopo is at the top of ST's pitch 5 (Fish pitch 3), SuperTopo says move belay 50 ft to base of gully, whereas Fish keeps going straight up. Either way is OK...
- beta from SuperTopo forum - the story from Largo is worth a read here... check out their gear rack, "Dean and I brought one rope, several slings, about eight assorted nuts and no pack, no water and no food. Aside from swami belts and chalk bags, we had nothing else whatsoever. I didn’t even wear a shirt, nor drag along sneakers for the long hike down." - insane....
- TR from Ed Hartuni
- TR from DRC - glad we had better weather than these guys...
- TR from Brian
East ledges descent
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| my bunk for the night... |
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| check out Nick's vacation home! Very jealous... |
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| we got to the base around sunrise, and started our hour long slog up to the base of the climb. Here's a party on Zodiac. |
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| Raven... these guys were swooping around all day long. Beautiful birds, it was easy getting lost just watching them while belaying... |
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| First light on El Cap |
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| when we got to the base, we heard some voices, and saw the first party heading up the first pitch. We definitely timed this one all wrong as we found out that there were FOUR parties ahead of us... we were contemplating alternatives (superslide, royal arches... but we started BS-ing with the folks and found out they were shooting a short clip for National Geographic. So they let us go in front of them. I don't think they wanted us in their shots anyway... |
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| so Nick got fired up and started getting ready... |
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| the second in the first party... pulling the rope through the crux... I actually didn't see this until I looked at the pic on my computer. No wonder he flew through the crux. The crux move is the first move from the first anchor. It's a thin face to a slopey slap (at least for me)... I fell off on my first attempt, barely got it on my second. I think the thin feet have gotten worse over the years. Anyway... trying to do this clean will give me a reason to go back. |
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| At the top of the second pitch, you get a nice view of half dome. |
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| my feet & second |
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| a great view of Middle Cathedral too... |
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| Nick leading the 3rd pitch. |
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| feet & middle cathedral |
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| Nick taking another smoke break waiting for the parties above to do their thing |
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| the National Geo folks doing their thing... |
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| ... |
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| Add caption |
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| Nick capturing the icon of Yosemite... |
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| on the E. Ledges descent... we descended with a team from Canada that had just done the Nose in 2 days. While chatting with them, the descent was quite easy to find, easy to do (with the fixed ropes), and we made it down without pulling out our headlamps (which Nick didn't bring anyway...). |
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