Yosemite adventure with Eliza and Nate - Day 3 - Base of El Cap

On Thursday Eliza and I left relatively early (7 AM) to drive to the base of El Capitan. We were hoping to get an early enough start that we could finish our planned route before the sun came around the arete and took the rockface we were climbing out of the shadows. As we hiked up the short approach, we had to keep swatting at mosquitos. It seems that at this time of year there are a ton of these critters at the bottom of the valley. Luckily they don't breed higher up on the rocks, thereby providing another strong motivation to quickly ascend onto the imposing walls lining the valley.

Our plan was for me to lead Little John, Right (5.8), see how we felt at the end of that, then maybe climb 1-2 more pitches and head home. This way, Eliza could get out of the heat and prepare for her kids to come home from school. Eliza had pulled her hood completely over her face to keep out the mosquitos by now. I racked up and led on up the starting corner. I was in for a rude awakening on this climb, which I quickly discovered just a few feet off the ground. Yosemite crack climbing is just unlike any other climbing I'm really used to. It seems that so often the only thing to use is the crack, and this requires a different set of skills (and a tolerance to ankle pain!) than I already have. I struggled up the first pitch of this climb, through a small chimney and above that into a hand crack, grunting and laughing at myself the whole time. How do you put your feet in the crack below a roof and your hands in the crack above at the same time? How do you keep your hands from sweating and sliding all around? How do you stand for long periods on a foot jammed in the crack when the muscles and tendons just below your ankle start to burn, and your toes are screaming? These are all skills that I want and need to learn to climb around here.

Eliza and Kenton at the top of the first pitch. Middle Cathedral Rock is in the background.

I made it to the top of the first pitch, belayed Eliza up, and we surveyed the second pitch to our left. It looked straightforward enough: ascend a narrow, low-angle ramp, climb the crack above for a short while, then traverse left across a relatively blank face to another ramp and from there up a short way to a belay in a corner. Here I wish I had looked more closely at the topo map before setting out. My heart was already racing while I was on the narrow ramp just above the belay. I moved into the crack above and starting up what seemed like a straightforward path. Eliza had warned me several times that I would need to traverse left early on and that I wanted to be sure I didn't go too high before I made the traverse. Look at the topo map below:

Topo map of Little John Right and a few other nearby climbs.

See where it says, about halfway up, "traverse 10' above 2nd piton (don't go too high)"? Well, I went too high, probably about 15' too high, before I realized that I was just going to have to make the traverse whether it looked like the right place or not. And then I was forced to downclimb around the shrubbery, effectively on toprope with one solid cam at this point, but with a heckuva lot of rope drag. Finally finding myself on the proper ramp to the left, I climbed as high as I could to make a belay in the corner above (circled "K" in the topo map with " 140' " written next to it).

Unfortunately, the situation I created by taking such a tortuous route was not the safest one for Eliza. She would have preferred to make the traverse lower down, in the recommended location. But before she could do that, she needed to climb up to where I had traversed, remove the cam I had placed there, and then traverse over. In my attempt to keep the rope drag to a minimum, I had not placed any gear after that cam, so a fall for her would have been a terrific pendulum, a very dangerous fall to say the least. Eliza calmly cleaned the last cam, downclimbed as far as she felt she could (to remove as much pendulum swing as possible), and made the traverse over to the ramp to join me at the belay. Eliza Kerr is a badass climber, cool under the most intense pressure!!! Needless to say, this episode did not inspire confidence in my route-finding abilities.

The last pitch was a short and straightforward crack in a corner to a wide, blocky ledge. At the top, over on the left side of the ledge is a 5.10d, single-pitch finger crack called Hardly Pinnacle. After the spanking I had just received on a 5.8, I wasn't in any mood to try leading 5.10d. Eliza happily tore up the route, setting up a toprope for me on the bolted anchors. Yet again, I was forced to use techniques that felt foreign, difficult, and painful to me. This crack was narrow enough in places that I could barely get the tips of my fingers and shoes into it. But Eliza assured me that I could get my toes in far enough to stand, using just the tips of my fingers for balance. And she was right! If I can perfect my technique on cracks like this, I'll be prepared to head back to tackle Finger Lockin' Good at T-Wall again next fall.

From there we rappelled in a single shot to the valley floor below. We finished with a relaxing picnic by the river in El Cap meadow.

Eliza coils the rope at the bottom.