This is the version written for my grandparents our attempt at climbing The Nose in Yosemite National Park.
Hey guys,
I wrote this trip summary and thought you might also like to read it, to accompany the photos I sent yesterday.
The Nose on El Capitan would be my partner’s and mine first true big wall climbing experience. We had already climbed something called The Moonlight Buttress but we’d never slept on a wall or hauled water, food, etc.
Overall I was very nervous going into it, as I was for Moonlight Buttress. Typically I don’t sleep much, I’ll have to develop a strategy for that because it’s becoming a pattern. For The Buttress it was because we hadn’t “aid” climbed much, low on practice. By this point we were good aid climbers but there was a litany of other items that I didn’t feel were practiced enough; docking and undocking the haul bags, rappelling with the haul bags, setting up the ledges, etc.. I found out the night before about “lowering out” from the anchor! So we learned it in the RV the night before.
It’s funny really, because that anxiety doesn’t set in earlier. Or rather it lies dormant, beneath other stuff in the days leading up to the climb. At first there’s excitement when you’re checking out the pictures in the guidebook and telling select friends and family. Then there’s calculation; how am I going to do this, what are the objectives for day 1 and day 2, etc. and how much food will we need, what gear do we bring and what do we leave on the ground. And then finally anxiety just the night before: are we really going to frickin’ do this ??!
So anyways typically on El Cap you fix ropes to pitch 4. This means you climb the first 4 pitches to get them out of the way, then rappel a straight line to the ground, and haul your stuff and leave it at Sickle Ledge and your ropes attached to the cliffside overnight. When we did it there were already 2 sets of crusty old ropes in place, all the way to the ground (it takes 3 rappels to get to the ground from pitch 4, so a total of 6 crusty old ropes). We didn’t want to add a 3rd set of ropes, so we just hauled our stuff and left our ropes on Sickle. We came to the ground, got dinner and slept (or didn’t sleep) in the RV. In the morning, you guessed it, we went to ascend the fixed ropes to find that they’d been taken down! Usually, not a problem, but we left all our gear and climbing ropes 4 pitches up…
Introducing the rockstronauts David and Yani !! We met these two guys dressed in astronaut suits in the dark at 6am where the ropes had been dropped. They were cool enough to let us climb with them as a party of 4 to Sickle Ledge. This was happily pretty uneventful, we all got to the ledge by 8:30 if I had to guess.
However Sickle Ledge was where we stayed until about 1:30pm I believe, absolutely baking the sun. The Nose is sometimes called the best rock climb in the world. As such it can get crowded so we needed to wait for other parties ahead of us to clear out. We had our sunscreen on but no shelter from the sun to be found (yes we could have retrieved a space blanket from the haul bags, but we only thought of this later).
Once we were on our way until the sun set, things went pretty well ! My partner led the tricky, traversing pitches really smoothly and I had no problem with the “lowering out” that I learned in the RV the night before.
As the sun was setting we got to The Stoveleg crack, so named because the first ascensionists needed to hammer in sawn off stove legs in order to protect their falls. Nowadays we have camming devices.
At the Stoveleg crack I took the lead for 2 pitches; absolutely beautiful climbing up the Stoveleg crack, hand jam over hand jam all the way up. But at the next pitch it really was dark, and I was thirsty as a dog. I hauled the 67 lbs of water and surely 35+ lbs of gear up to the belay, and kept going. At the top of this next pitch, and 1 pitch before our sleep spot on Dolt Tower, I was really cruxing out ! Mostly the dehydration. Similarly to the space blankets, our water was not nearly as accessible as it should have been. By the top I was really having serious dehydration issues. And to think I thought it would be too cold to climb in November in Yosemite…
It was about 11:30pm by the time we turned up to Dolt Tower to sleep for the night. I was really having a hard time doing anything, I was inflating my mattress about half a breath at a time. So the dehydration had affected me pretty bad. We ate some canned fish (delicious, really) and some mango and some dehydrated mushroom risotto and slept suspended above the Dolt Tower ledge (David and Yani had gotten the ground spots on the ledge).
In the morning, somewhat rested, we got going again. Ate some oatmeal and waited for David and Yani to be on their way. Once they got on their way two guys doing a NIAD (Nose In A Day) passed us. These guys were frickin’ studs man ! Absolute units, barely putting in any gear between them, just cruising on through. What took us 45 minutes took them 5. The best part is they were dressed as Officer Dongle and Officer Dangle. I was asked for my Big Wall Permit (something you do actually need to climb the wall) and I got all stuttery. He informed me that he was the nice one, that Officer Dangle, who would be up any minute now, he’d crack the whip. He also said that it should be no mystery as to why he was named Officer Dangle.
It was 3:30pm by the time we got to El Cap tower, which was way behind schedule. Ideally, we were aiming for Camp IV that day, another 6 pitches up. David and Yoni were still on the ledge by the time we showed up too, and David had just fallen out of The Texas Flake; a heady unprotectable chimney (no device yet exists that is wide enough to protect a fall). Things had pretty much come to a standstill for the 4 of us, then Yoni said “the b word”. Bail. Everyone is always thinking about it, but saying it out loud gives it a certain power over you. And it took over the group. My climbing partner is a particularly stubborn and persistent individual in life as in climbing, and even he conceded that he had been thinking about it.
I said to the group:
“Well the good news is there’s enough wag bags for everyone!”
Because you see, when you’re on the wall you need to do your business somewhere right ? So you bring these “wag bags” preloaded with a little detergent, sold at the local outdoors store. My partner and I had brought 7 for a worst-case 5-day ascent. The arithmetic there was not in our favour, but the stores at Yosemite National Park were all sold out. Even better than that ? David and Yoni had brought only 1 for their entire ascent. I don’t know how they thought that was going to work, but David’s other strategy was to take Imodium tablets to constipate himself on the wall. It’s no wonder he was starting to feel sick in the heat, as Imodium’s mechanism is to dehydrate your colon.
That certainly broke the tension. Briefly instead of contemplating the abandonment of our project we were now doubled over laughing about the thought of lining up on the nice wide El Cap Tower Ledge to defecate into bags in unison as the tourists in El Cap meadow watched us through binoculars and telescopes. Happy Halloween everyone !!
As David was not feeling well, my partner and I did our descent immediately. 12 60 meter rappels brought us down, which on its own wasn’t trivial, but the anchors were well positioned requiring only minimal swinging and searching by headlamp in order to find them all.
And that wraps it up !!
Love ya loads, Nick