A day on the Grand
Mike and I spent a day on the Upper Exum ridge of the Grand Teton in snowy early season conditions. Here's a sense of the spectacular alpine climbing action. Apologies to those of you with motion sickness/vertigo...the camera shots make things look pretty steep and I'm still getting used to my video setup...
Beyond Everest
The events of this spring are still with me, and each day this spring my mind would wander to where I was expecting to be around that time. In fact, I was planning on returning from the trip a just few days ago. I took some much needed time for reflection and finally got back to the mountains. Our research group spent a week doing fieldwork together in Wyoming, after which I stuck around the Tetons to do some climbing with my old friend Mike. We did a few alpine classics, an alpine not-so-classic sufferfest, and a day of sport climbing on spectacular conglomerate in Maple Canyon, Utah.
This summer, I'll be going on some spectacular adventures, lesser than Everest only in elevation. They will be in wild places. They will be shared with good friends. And they will be awesome. Since I hardly got to show any climbing with the Everest video series, here's the first installment of this summer's stories...
A Petit Epic!
The second half of my time in Colorado has been characterized by iffy weather. After a couple days up in Rocky Mountain National Park, we headed south hoping to try a small loop of climbing around the state. On a rest day of sorts, we climbed the Kelso Ridge on Torreys Peak and traversed to Grays for a nice half-day excursion before driving south towards Crestone. Once there, we realized just how grim the forecast was for pretty much the entire state. We spent the next day catching up on some work in Salida and heading back north to the Front Range where the forecast seemed best. On a day where the alpine certainly would be out of commission, we went up the First Flatiron before getting drizzled off any other climbing.
Yesterday, we headed back up to RMNP with the idea of capping off our trip with something memorable. Well, we got what we bargained for!
James and I got another pre-dawn start, this time with the intention of climbing the South Face of the Petit Grepon, one of Roper and Steck's 50 Classic Climbs of North America.
The five mile approach was spectacular, and having ironed out a few route-finding issues from our climb on Spearhead to start the trip, things went smoothly.
Once at the base of the Petit, we roped up for some steep pitches on spectacular rock. James led through the crux, a perfect hand crack.
We enjoyed the spectacular setting with views of the Continental Divide and the Loch Vale. Every belay had a perfect ledge better than the last.
We summited just as the sky started to turn. We quickly rigged the first rappel and were on our way down as hail and graupel began to pelt us. Down at the second rap station is when our luck turned. Our ropes were completely stuck. Several hours of desperate attempts to reorient the ropes, change our pulling angle, use brute force, even a 9:1 pulley system I set up thwarted our efforts. The mind turned to somewhat dark places. Thankfully, the brunt of the bad weather passed, and after some more thinking and roughing the worst of the shivering cold, James prussiked the entire pitch (major major kudos to the thrashing effort!). Despite the lousiness of the situation, we were able to keep things light between bouts of cursing, joking that at least James would get to work on that six-pack.
After some discussion about what could have gone wrong, it appeared that it was merely bad friction that was stopping us. James reversed the orientation of the main line and my now super-stretchy 6mm tagline and rappelled again. Fingers and toes crossed, we pulled the retrieval line, again without luck. Our hearts sunk. After traversing far to the right, we both set up a brute force scheme where bodyweight was able to get the ropes moving.
After probably another hour of serious effort, we were down the first rappel with all of our gear, but fading daylight. We crossed our fingers for the remaining five rappels and vowed to test each one before James left the station. Just as we reached the bottom of the descent, darkness befell us and we hiked out by headlamp. A twenty minute drive took us straight to the last thing open in Estes...Subway never tasted so good!
Pilgrimage
A brilliant combination of work and play has me living on the road for the next couple months. After a last minute climbing trip to Tuolumne, I packed my bags and headed off on the first leg of a trip that will take me to Utah, Colorado, British Columbia, New York, Wyoming and Montana before returning to California for fall quarter.
I headed out with my good friends Zach and Brad initially aimed at some big objectives in the High Sierra. With an iffy weather forecast, we opted to stick around Tuolumne for some world class rock climbing. On our second day, we managed to climb the West Ridge of Mount Conness which had turned me back just a few weeks earlier.
Following a conference in Utah, I made my way to Colorado where I met up with my friend James for a week of climbing, hiking and 14er peakbagging. We started off with a couple amazing days in Rocky Mountain National Park and are headed on a quick loop over the next few days.
Yesterday, we hiked up Glacier Gorge and climbed the beautiful yet moderate Spearhead.
Today, we got an early-ish start to try Kieners, the classic mountaineering route on the East Face of Longs Peak. At the base of the route, James decided to rest his legs for later in the trip. Unable to contain my love for the peak that started it all for me, I climbed up and over Mount Lady Washington and soloed the North Face. On the descent, I bumped into Tommy Caldwell and Jonathan Siegrist, who were projecting a wild route on the Diamond. I ran the whole way down with Tommy, whose intimate knowledge of all the shortcuts had us in the parking lot an hour and a half after topping out.
