Half Dome, Regular Northwest FaceOctober 2003 Here’s a short trip report of my ascent of Half Dome. It’s been a couple of weeks and the
move-by-move experience is already starting to fade. What a fantastic route, though! The whole thing took us about 16 hours,
and I think it will go substantially faster. We launched at about 6:30 after a few false starts early
in the morning. There was a team of
Eastern European climbers who were attempting the route big wall style and
had fixed their lines to the top of the third pitch. Rather than attempt to pass the inevitable
mess of haulbags and gear we opted, and they graciously allowed us, to jug
their fixed lines. Mike was just
getting the hang of jugging and it took us a little longer to get up those
first few pitches than we had hoped.
As an aside, this was Mike’s first wall and the speed with which he
learned and mastered basic wall techniques was amazing. Talk about getting up the learning curve
fast! Sometime shortly after 8 we were ready to take off on the
real climbing. We had agreed to climb
the route in blocks… I would take the first four pitches and then continue as
we would simul-climb three more. Then
Mike would take the sharp end for seven pitches and then I would get us off
the remaining six. That gave me the
crux aid pitches and Mike the wide and free stuff, kept us relatively fresh
and minimized changeover time. In
retrospect it worked pretty well. One of my vivid memories of the climb is watching the
sunrise from somewhere low on the route.
The Valley brightened and colored in such a spectacular way. I’ve seen plenty of sunrises from the side
of the rock, but maybe it was because such familiar monuments (El Cap,
Washington’s Column) were in different places that the moment struck me as
particularly beautiful. No description has ever been written. None can be
written on this earth. A man must die and learn the language of angels before
he can describe Yosemite. -- J. H.
Beadle Off we went. My
pitches were pretty straight-forward, although I did more pseudo-aid climbing
than I would have liked, especially early on. It took me a while to get into the groove, but once there we
started making pretty good time. We
were targeting about half-an-hour per pitch and did pretty close to that down
low. The free climbing was great… it
seemed harder than it was but flew by.
Soon we were simul-climbing and I promptly led us off-route. A party of super strong climbers came
charging up behind us and politely pointed out that we were slightly
off-route as they whipped by. These
guys were really fast! Anyway, a
short correction later and the Robbins traverse and it was time to give Mike
the lead. He led a couple pitches into the wide stuff and then
cruised through the chimney sections.
It was great watching him ease through the off-width and grunt-y
stuff, knowing that I could follow it on jugs, which I did. A couple more pitches and we were at Big
Sandy ledge. We’d fallen a little bit
behind but I was still hopeful we could get off before dark, but alas that
was not to be. I headed up the Zig-Zags, the crux aid pitches of the
route. The aid was really, really
easy, especially with my clean-aid toys – offset aliens and cam hooks. I cruised up the pitches but aid climbing
is just slow, slow, slow. On reaching
Thank God ledge I sat down to recover and watch the sun set. We were only a couple pitches from the top
and I knew we were going to make it, and I began to relax a little bit. The sunset was absolutely stunning, and it
felt somehow like a book-end to the climb.
I realized that this was probably my last big route of the summer, and
it felt like the end of something more – of sixteen months of intense focus
on climbs and adventures which sort of crowded out the other things in
life. Crowded out by intent, I
realized in a moment of melancholy communion with the Divine. So I just sat there while Mike jugged and
did nothing. One of the greatest spiritual attainments is the
capacity to do nothing. -- Dallas
Willard I made my way across the notorious Thank God ledge to
lengthening shadows. Like just about
everyone that leads that pitch I resolved not to crawl and soon started
crawling. But I made it across and we
were only a couple pitches from the top.
Two things happened then that slowed us down considerably. First, it started to get dark for real;
and second we got our trail line stuck.
As the dusk deepened to darkness I rapped down to see our line stuck
with lots of other dead lines. I
managed with some effort to free it and jugged back to the ledge. The first bolt ladder was kind of a
disaster in the dark… I couldn’t exactly see where it started and then I
couldn’t figure out how to clip the last bolt. I ended up doing the pendulum from the second to last bolt and
executing a couple cam hook moves to get up to the correct high point. After some negotiating I led the last
wandering pitch to the summit and brought Mike up. What an awesome route.
Lots of great free climbing in an absolutely unbeatable setting. The approach is a bit of a drag, but the
climbing itself is amazing. Something
to be done again soon! |