Tuolumne Meadows with Sam, Alexis
aus mowiki, der freien Wissensdatenbank
Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite, June 16th-17th, 2007
Kendra, Alexis, Sam and I left at 5am to the Meadows. We stopped in Oakdale for groceries. Alexis brought his portable gas grill and so we got lots of patties, bans, sauces and stuff for a nice BBQ planned for the evening. We were to meet Chris, Justin, Sharon and Paul, and we got enough food for all of them. We arrived at Tenaya Lake around 11am and got the gear ready. We wanted to climb in the Pennyroyal Arches area, where two 5.7 routes run quite parallel. Kendra and Alexis did Eagle Dihedral, Sam and I got on
- Euphoria, 5.7, lead Sam (1st, 2nd & 4th pitch), Moritz (3rd pitch)
The climb is one of the non-SuperTopo climbs as I understand it (it's listed in the Reed's guidebook), that's why Sam was eager to give it a try. Indeed, the route was apparently not quite popular. It was a bit dirty and best of it, we found two fixed nuts which I was able to clean. One was a really nice one, and Sam worked quite a while on it until it got loose but still contained in the crack. The other one looked like a rusty self-made nut from the seventies or so...
Sam and I cruised it up in four or five hours or so and waited at the top for the others. Actually, we waited quite a while, because as we learned later, Alexis and Kendra had route finding problems. But fortunately nothing too serious happened and eventually they were happy to top out, too. By now it was about one hour till sunset, and we got ready for the four-pitch rappel. It worked pretty good, however it felt a bit sketchy when all four of us were hanging on three bolts on the second anchor from the top. It's funny how your mind plays tricks on you- it's same gear you trust when climbing or rapping, though you find yourself checking it again and again while you're waiting in line for the rap down...
It was dark when we were back at the car. We wanted to meet the others at 8:30pm so clearly we were late. So we got the food off the bearbox and drove over to the Lembert Parking Lot. As we got there we saw no sign of the others. We sorted our gear, waited a bit, and eventually started the BBQ. We had the first round of burgers, flame grilled and correctly assembled by Alexis (four years jobbing at McDonalds finally payed off). It was getting chilly, like 6 Celsius, and Kendra started thinking on how she should spend the night if they don't show up. She was supposed to ride back with Justin. Around 11ish they finally were there, like really exhausted. They were doing Cathedral Peak, got lost on the decscent. They had fought their way through the bushes until they got back to the trail, took'em like four hours. The were totally happy when we served them super delicious burgers!
We drove to the bivy spot at the Mobil, which is quite a bit lower in altitude than the meadows is. So the night was fairly warm, like 17 C.
The second day Sam wanted to try something harder, he picked a two pitches climb at West Cottage Dome:
- Cottage Cheese, 5.10a, lead Sam (both pitches)
Sam lead the first pitch looking really safe, Alexis followed trailing a second rope and I followed on the second rope and cleaned the placements. It was a crack in a dihedral varying from a hand crack to a lieback and a short easy offwidth part. The first pitch ends on a terrace and you have to move belay to the other end of the terrace for the second pitch. The second pitch had the crux right at its beginning, an overhanging handcrack section of about 2.5m. Sam managed to get a really good hand jam with his left hand, blocked it and reached for the next jam with the right. When Alexis got on it, the crux turned out to be really hard. He tried for like half an hour without much success. He got up for 2m, yelled take, and needed to let go. But because of the enormous rope stretch of 60m's rope his efforts where in vain. Then he pulled on the first piece Sam had placed, but too without getting it up. Eventually we got some slings off our anchor and Alexis prusiked over the crux. Once he got that, he cruised up the rest of the climb.
When I got on it I tried to do it Sam's way. But there was no way I could block my hand jam, so I fell back to the ledge again. I tried a couple of times, but I too wasn't gaining any height because of the rope stretch. This is just so frustrating. Next I tried to use the dihedral instead the jams, and after a few promising tries I finally got over the crux. But it was a close thing. The rest of the route mainly was thin offwidth, where you can get fist jams deep inside the crack. Strenuous but straight forward. None of us knew where the descent was, but were lucky and found it the first try.
We grilled the last burgers. In fact, we were having triple cheese burgers with a slice of Sam's Wonderbread in the middle. Then we got on the road again. The way back was uneventful except for a traffic jam in Oakdale which forced us to take a detour we're probably not gonna find again. We were back around midnight.
