Zodiac A2 5.7

Once I had arrived in LA, Eli and I quickly packed and drove to the valley. We were going to climb something good, that was the plan, and we had no particular route in mind… when Eli suggested Lurking Fear, I agreed, if he led part of it. He was psyched an we walked to the base first thing in the evening. We wanted to carry everything at once, and only took 2 jackets and a sleeping bag to share along. Bad thing we had no idea what the temps during the night were going to be. I assumed July=HOT and that was wrong. after freezing our arses off for the night we started climbing a bit rustily. After pitch 6 or 7 Eli decides to not to lead anything, and my psych drops a bit,… having a 5.12 climber jug behind me for his 2 only days of climbing in the Valley for that year seems a bit of a bad idea.
I suggest we bivy on the ledge of 10 and go down the next morning by rappel. That way Eli could climb the next day, and i would be fully rested before going to hit Lost in America with William. But then our rope got stuck in the offwith pitch! We had to basically cut it in half, and thus had to reverse the traverse.
We were glad that two guys had fixed the two first pitches, and we made it down by only having to leave out 2 short bits, but keeping my lead line. This was my first round of the walk of shame. A large haulbag, a grumpy, depressed face looking at the ground, and a slow pace are the typical signs that you know you're walking the walk you would rather avoid. Smile, be friendly, and a bit ironic if you can, and it does go by. A partner that takes his share off the "we bailed" explanations is helpful.
Bad luck did not stop though… After getting all set up after pitch one on LiA and climbing half of the next pitch, William decided to go home the next morning, for very good, personal reasons … the fact that we had to give up is nothing compared to why...

I went down and wanted to find a partner for the route but no luck. Erik E had just come down from a wall, Dave had to answer tourist questions and was injured. Nanook had no time either... I thought : "This is desperate" Since all my gear, water, food etc. was already up there, I decided to try and solo the thing.It already smelled a bit like another round of the Walk. To prevent this, Dave made me a little drawing on how to solo, gave me some explanations and encouragement and off I went. If you are thinking that soloing because you have no partner, opposed to soloing because you want to, is a bad idea, you are right.
I had like zero fun… On the first day it was okay, I finished pitch 2 , and went back to the valley. the next day i went up there in the morning after getting some more gear from nanook and dave (thanks again guys!) and did pitch 3. For some reason everything I did, I did it super slow. I paused in the middle of leading to look around, and took plenty of time to think. This allowed the little thing in the back of my mind to grow, and the things between my legs to shrink. After having done p3 I set up the ledge and watched it get dark for looooong time. I knew I would retreat first thing next morning. Yes, the next pitch looked fabulous! But I just didn't enjoy climbing without William up there. I have bailed off of a lot of climbs, but this one was one of the easiest in terms of taking the decision. There was not really any doubt it was the right thing to do…
Going down from 3 was already quite a jugging/swinging challenge! I woke up at 6 and was at the bridge at 11. Bail of the Day! I was relieved when Dave said he had bailed off of El Cap solos before too. I spent the rest of the day getting my gear down. I split it up in 3 portions and gradually shuttled them down. I had not eaten anything but 3 cookies and a powerbar all day and by 3pm, I could barely manage to walk uphill for 300ft without a bag. I must have looked pretty cooked, because a family from the Netherlands asked me at the base of the nose if i was okay, and i was like, no, do you have something to drink? They gave me an apple and a smoothie, the best of my life. I was very grateful! A dad and his sons from Indiana that looked like they walked straight out of the movie " The Patriot" helped carry all the crap down, and the dad estimated that my loads must have been 150 pounds… no wonder I was fried. It's amazing how many good people there were around.

Bailing is a lot of work, but then soloing without liking it is too.

Now I was back in the Valley and wanted to climb, but having given up on soloing and partnerless, this was challenging.

Day by day i got less psyched…

I was hanging out at the slacklines in C4, when a guy with an old down jacket walks by, and I asked him: "Are you a climber" and he said yes, and I said - want to do Stoner's Highways one of these days?
He wants to, and a couple days later we are off! After eating cookies and drinking beers day in day out, this is exactly what i needed…
Turns out Everett is on the SAR, and a really cool person.
While I led the first the pitch, a bear and her cub strolled along the base. They did not seem to be bothered by us that much, and were soon gone.
After the first pitch which has the hardest climbing and is scary for the follower the rest of the route develops along cracks with some great, well protected slab climbing on very featured rock, until it gets a little headier on pitch 6. Going to the second bolt involves a runout on fairly large holds and from there I decided to climb down and right to what looked like a face with good crimps. Climbing this face, I reached a ramp, and was not sure where to go. Now a ways above the bolt, I carefully "walked" this ramp to some thin gear, and it became relatively obvious where to go. A cool flake leads to the anchor at the end of the slab, from where we, and most other parties I think, rapped.
We had a good day, although climbing on Middle Cathedral with El Cap behind you is a bit like writing an exam with a really pretty girl sitting next to you… We were back at the lodge at around 1 and got some beers going around the pool, which ended in a pretty awesome barbecue dinner with Margaritas at the SAR site. Finally a good day, more of that was welcome.
After another hanging out day - I have lost count how many of these abrading days there were - Allen and I were going to do the Regular Route on Half Dome . It looked like it was too hot for Autobahn, which I was initially more psyched for.
Alan was the only psyched and not perpetually busy climber i met in all that time at the bridge! When we realized we had too little water, and were already pretty late, we changed plans to climb Astroman. With a party ahead of us, that bailed below the Harding Slot, progress was pretty slow…
Such a good, classic, climb - but burly! It just doesn't let you walk out easily until after the last pitch. One splitter is stacked on top of the next - with super varied climbing. At the move into the Harding Slot, my onsight ascent was over. I tried multiple methods, but to no avail. Looking up into the slot i wondered if I really wanted to lead that thing…. I asked Allen if he wanted to lead, but he said he could probably not send this mouth of a monster either… a sling for my foot clipped into the cam helped. I got in there and immediately got claustrophobic! I wanted to get out as quickly as I could. I moved towards the edge, which scared me because there was not much but a lot of air below my feet. I struggled up and finished one of those leads that make you really tired but I still could not use any climbing skills. That part is more like a mix between crawling and wrestling with my brother - although my brother has never been as bad as the Harding Slot. Another pitch and best pitch came along: the changing corners. This pitch is almost too good to describe, you have to see for yourself. Varied and very splitter!
We raced the shade which was slowly approaching the base of Half Dome, and went as fast as we could and did the last two pitches pulling on every piece there was, which was scary on the last one, but it worked. I would like to go back earlier and in better temperatures, and send these pitches in good order…
We made it to the top with an hour of daylight left, and got back to base as it got dark. I was really trashed the next day…

The next weekend was rather uneventful, a scary climb of the very wet Northwest Crack on Lembert Dome, when the thunderstorms approached us faster than we wished…. Another full value climb, even if we did not anticipate that!

Back in LA, and ready to leave for Wyoming to climb in the Winds and the Tetons with Jim Donini and my dad, which I was looking forward to.


Driving through the nothingness of these huge plains I had read about in Karl May's Old Shatterhand books as a kid. Sometimes the nothingness was interrupted by the occasional town.
After walking in to the WInds with Llamas carrying most of our gear, it became apparent that the unreal masses of mosquitos would make this trip memorable in an annoying way. Even the joy of Darren's truly awesome cooking and Jim's and his friends' company was disturbed by these bugs.
After a climb on Midsummer Dome, where we climbed a potentially unclimbed dihedral, that was a lot scarier and harder than it looked, my dad and I left the next day and packed everything out without the Llamas, which was easier than going since we could go our pace. We were bummed that we did not get to climb anything further north than Midsummer Dome, but relieved to not to have to use that disgusting bug spray for a while. Thunderstorms in the Tetons meant we were going to check out the City of Rocks, a crag neither of us had been to before.

We had a lot of fun! We expected it to be a bit like Joshua Tree, but it was a lot better! Tribal is one of the best face climbs I have ever done… Unfortunately it rained every day for a short time in the afternoon. Still we climbed a lot of good meters in 2,5 days. We then left for the Valley because we could't wait to climb a wall.

Yosemite.

A bit smoky when we arrived, but still… There is no place quite like it. This time, everything went smoothly, and we immediately started racking and fixing.on Tribal Rite

We chose the New Dawn start, because it seemed like the most straight shot to the summit, and we wanted to be on the right side as much as possible.
I had never climbed to the right of the Nose, and was afraid that having the sun first thing in the morning would make the heat a lot worse, but with cool temps in the 86es it was not the slightest problem, and I am now a convinced Dawn Wall fan. It is hard to beat the feeling of getting woken up by the first sunrays on a portaledge 2000 feet of the ground.

This was the most fun I have ever had on a wall. We had Pizza for the first night!
After a couple terrible hauls and mediocre climbing on the New Dawn, it was glorious climbing from El Cap Tower to the top. There is some strange engineering on the route, but that doesn't distract from its classiness.
The pitch above the Carrot and the Rurp pitch are the best aid pitches I have ever climbed.
We enjoyed every bivy to the max. A ledge to stand on, a couple beers, a great portaledge, plenty of food!
Had someone asked me if I wanted to add another 300m to the route, I would've said yes at the last anchor. We topped out after 5 days, and were even more psyched about El Cap then before we started!

We carried everything down at once, which immobilized us for a couple days.

After a climb in Toulomne, Oz, we went back to the Valley so I could take revenge on Lost in America. This would be my dads last route before he had to head home, After the usual pre wall procedure of humping and fixing a pitch we started.
We climbed to below the free climbing the next day, where you are really close to the Trip. My dad was not psyched on the aid on Lost in America, and wanted to finish with the Trip, which was cool with me. The climbing on LiA had been fun, but not like I expected. It was either straightforward or fixed, which was quite a bummer. Since it was so steep it felt a lot like sportclimbing in Ceuse, which was not a bummer. While we climbed it, I read the Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is an awesome book by Milan Kundera, but I liked how the activity and the title had an ironic relation. We topped out after 3 days on the wall, with a lot of beer left.

We met 3 russians that had done the nose in 3 days whith 15l of wather between them, and gave them some beer. They liked it! After this route I felt very much done with wall climbing, or aid climbing for that matter. Huge racks had lost their appeal, and I was ready for some sportclimbing. After my dad left, I was in the Valley by myself and not being psyched to climb, it looked like a long, dire time before I could go home to my friends and climb normal stuff again.

But I hadn't yet realized how awesome meeting new people can be, and soon my spirits were high. I did a bit of cragging for a while, climbed Nutcracker, and the East Butt on Middle, which got me super psyched on getting back on the Captain.
Danny and Paul had planned to do the Nose in a day, but when they told me the forecast was thunderstorms for the days they had envisioned, I suggested we go 3 people on the Trip. At the end Danny couldn't make it, so it was Paul and me. Paul had only done Lurking Fear and the nose before in terms of aiding, and we had only gone cragging together, so it would be interesting to see how it would go for both of us. We liked each others company, which I figured was the most important thing anyways. I hadn't shortfixed before, and totally underestimated how much fun it is, and how much you can climb without ever stopping. We did the direct LiA-Viriginia start, a took off at 11.40 am after a relaxed, large breakfast. Neither of us had climbed in the night, so when Paul started his block after 51/2 h on the 7th anchor, it didn't take too long to get dark, which slowed us down.
The only real problem that appeared was when I dropped my jug, and it took a couple attempts to let Pauls jug slide down the haul line. He did the next 3 pitches, the I took over and climbed the pitches I already knew to 15. On p13 I fell asleep hanging off a bolt in the ladder while waiting for rope. My hips were getting toasted. Pitch 15 is a leftwards traverse, and it was early morning, and I started to get a tired brain. I had to concentrate hard to do simple tasks, and popped out of a pinscar with a C3. I used on offset and reached the next anchor without much trouble as it got light.
Paul, who apparently does not get tired, took us to the summit, where we got at 9.30. We were psyched on both our first El Cap in a day, and the fact that it had involved so little suffering.
We walked down, and the first couple beers sure didn't take long! We stayed up the rest of the day, eating awesome food and enjoying everything.
I was sleepy for many days after that and only climbed Serenity and Crag routes, which was nice.
I belayed Mayan on the Skinner pitch below the Alcove and saw pert impressive climbing! I had no desire to climb hard or move a lot, I wanted to do one more wall though before I had to go home. I was psyched now! Danny finally got off work, and we planned to do Mescalito with a bivy on Bismark. This would Dannys second aid route after Lurking fear, but somehow we ignored this fact until I had four pitches fixed. That night we talked about how we may be getting in over our heads. We laughed pretty hard when we figured out that we had both been all scared before falling asleep the night before. We decided to recover our ropes and gear and do the Zodiac.
When the weather forecast changed to thunderstorms, we were even more psyched about our choice. Because there were no parties on the route, we chose to start early to avoid having to pass people that come to fix the first four.

Danny is a super enthusiastic person, and our spirits we sky high until we reached peanut ledge, where we realized how tired we were. My block had been from the base of the Black Tower to there, and I was glad he would take us to the summit. It took us almost 6 hours to get to the summit from there, and we topped out after 23h.
I was so tired, it felt like I was drunk. It was tricky to walk down to the rappels without stumbling. When we made it down, we just wanted to sleep. I felt quite jetlagged…

After to days of hanging out and resting, I now sit in the train to Bakersfield.

This TR is about climbing but what I will remember most is the people i met. Thank you.