Yet Another Snake Dike Trip Report
I pretty much started climbing trad a year ago so I could do this route. My fiance injured her knee the week our trip, but encouraged me to go anyway after all our organizing of campsites and wilderness permits. A great friend and sometimes climbing partner jumped at the chance to come along and so I was set to go. We spent Saturday 11/29 in the Valley and did the Grack as our multi-pitch warm up. Great work shout out the the Facelift "team". I saw so many people doing their part over the course of the weekend. It's something I would like to go back and do next year for sure.
We hiked in and camped at Little Yosemite on Sunday 11/30 and climbed Monday. We left camp at around 6:30am and passed the other party camping at Little Yosemite on the hike to the base.
After "borrowing" some sun screen from out new pals we started climbing as sun started to hit the route. I went to the "60 meter rope" belay on the first pitch after placing gear in the roof. I don't think I down climbed far enough (I went maybe 3 feet?) and the traverse under the roof was a little tenuous until I could under cling the roof crack and move onto the flake.
The plan was to climb to optional belay two, which is where things went a little wrong. I clipped one of the "original 2nd belay bolts", saw an older looking hanger to my left and a big shiny ASCA one above. Deciding that the ACSA one must be correct I climbed up to it, when I saw the second and third one I know I was on the right track. By the time I got to the third new bolt I knew that I wouldn't be able to down climb the 5.9 moves I'd just done, and of course I could see the Dike but no belay anchors. There didn't seem to be enough rop left to head up into the unknown so I traversed to the dike and down climbed to what I now assumed must be the second optional belay (two older hanger with no rings). This is around 59.8 meters as I had the most pathetic loop of rope left to belay my parter with. He climb to original belay 2 and then I climbed back up the dike to the next belay. I found one bolt on each side of the Dike with no rings and belayed there, then notice some nice ring bolts about 10 feet right. This is at a point, not on the topo, where a smaller dike splits off right. Having read about other climbs there I'm guessing this is for Eye in the Sky as it seems to want to take you right when you need to stay left. Around this point it got hot, very very hot and I drank whole Nalgene in one go. At least we had worked out where we where and the rest of the route went down fine. We saw one other party approaching when we were around pitch 4. Hopefully we didn't slow the brits down too much as we pulled away from them after the second pitch snafu and didn't see them again. Sorry if we got in the way!
After stopping for snack mid slab hike I finished the second Nalgene. By the time we got back to camp I was very very dry. Luckily the batteries on the steri pen ran out on the fourth Nalgene so we had enough water to make it make down. I'm undecided on weather camping is worthwhile or not. You end up with such a heavy pack to carry both ways on the way to and from Little Yosemite, and the climbing day was still 11 hours without us feeling like we where "slow" at any point. Next time might involve a multi night stay in Little Yosemite with a trip to Clouds Rest on the final day after Snake Dike. Definitely a worthwhile climb, but what I don't get it that there must me more routes around there given the other bolts and dikes. Does the falcon guide have them? Can we ease the Snake Dike traffic jam by going up a grade or two in difficulty?
