Mount Rainier Ascent - Emmons Glacier

July 26-27, 2014

Just a couple of weekends ago, a small group of friends and I summited Mount Rainier. It was epic. This is our story.

Summit Team

Annie Frederick
Dan Kuchan
Erica Bliss
Hexar Anderson

Team Pineapple Express reporting for duty!

Route

The most common route to the summit of Mount Rainier is called the Disappointment Cleaver, which starts at Camp Paradise (5500’) on the south side of the mountain and requires you to hike up 4500 feet of elevation gain to Camp Muir (10,080’) or Ingraham Flats and then make your summit attempt via a rock feature called the Disappointment Cleaver to the top at 14,411 feet. The total elevation gain is 9000 feet, and most people do it over three days (or more). It is generally considered to be the easiest way to the summit of Mount Rainier.

We are apparently gluttons for punishment, because we didn’t do that. Instead, we opted for the Emmons Glacier route, which starts at the White River Campgrounds (4400’) on the northeast side of the mountain. It starts with a three-mile dirt trail that leads you into the Glacier Basin (6000’), a somewhat rocky but mostly flat area below the Interglacier. From there you ascend the Interglacier approximately 3200 feet until you reach the ridgeline just below Steamboat Prow (9200’). Next you descend a rocky section down to the Emmons Glacier, and then traverse over the Camp Schurman (9450’). From Camp Schurman, the route takes you up the Emmons Glacier, typically via “The Corridor”, then traversing right across the Alpine Meadow, and then around the bergschrund just below the summit at Columbia Crest.

Approximate route path topo

Approximate route as seen from Camp Curtis

Day 1 – White River to Schurman

I woke up to my alarm at 4am and left my apartment by 4:30am in order to meet two friends at the Kent P&R at 5:15am, then Enumclaw at 6am. We reached White River Campgrounds by 7am, and started hiking the trail with heavy packs (approximately 35 lbs) at 7:30am. It took us about one-and-a-half to two hours to reach the Glacier Basin after three miles of hiking and 1600 feet of elevation gain.

We hiked across the Glacier Basin, which is a somewhat rocky but mostly flat area below the Interglacier. This probably took us around an hour, and had some stunning views.

The view from the Glacier Basin

From there we started ascending the Interglacier. It was definitely slow going despite trekking poles and a pretty clear boot path, but we ascended 3200 feet in probably around four hours, arriving at the ridgeline just below Steamboat prow around 2:30pm.

Hiking the Interglacier

Camp Curtis on the ridgeline between Interglacier and Emmons

Little Tahoma and some awesome crevasses on the Emmons Glacier

Intimidating.

After taking in the stunning view of the Emmons Glacier, Little Tahoma, and the summit of Rainier itself, we scrambled down a short rocky hike to the Emmons Glacier, roped up, and traversed over to Camp Schurman to set camp. We even brought a gift for the rangers, a pineapple!

Camp Schurman

Summit view from camp

After several hours spent setting up camp, boiling water, and cooking dinner, we finally went to bed around 6:30pm. It was a tad difficult to sleep given it was still light out until 9pm or so, as well as some noise from other climbers in the area, but we got at least a couple hours of sleep until...

Day 2 – Schurman to Summit

The alarm on my phone went off promptly at 11pm. I was happy to realize that I’d actually been asleep, for at least a couple hours, but also couldn’t help but think to myself, “Mountaineers are f***ing crazy.” After some groaning amongst our team, we started putting our layers on, followed by boots and crampons, then harnesses. We roped up and were finally ready to move at midnight, and started heading up to Emmons Flat with nothing but our headlamps to see with as it was a new moon that night.

Fortunately, there was already a line of headlamps heading up and climber’s left past Emmons Flat to The Corridor, a long section of Emmons Glacier that is relatively free from crevasses. We moved up at a methodical pace, separated from each other by about 30 feet on our 40 meter glacier rope, crampons crunching quietly in the snow. There was a pretty good boot path all the way up the Corridor, so we didn’t have to kick any steps, thankfully.

What hiking in the dark looks like

Once we reached about 12,000 feet, we followed the other climbers traversing right and encountered our first scary crevasse crossing via a snow bridge. It wasn’t actually all that bad, but in the dark it looked pretty spooky and we tried to keep our collective cool as we made it across. Once we did, we breathed a collective sigh of relief, and we could see the line of headlamps again above us, and this was the moment when I realized that we would probably make it all the way after all. We continued to follow the long line of headlamps above.

Around 5:15am, the sun finally started to light our path. It hadn’t risen yet, but the light from the horizon east of us started glowing bright like sunfire. I had gotten pretty cold by this point, due mostly to the wind I think, so I was pretty excited about the possibility of the sun warming us a bit. Not long after, we took a short break at a flat spot at 13,000 feet for food and water, then continued following the other rope teams up the “alpine meadow”.

Sunrise! So much for the alpenglow.

Once we reached about 14,000 feet, we encountered the bergschrund. A bergschrund is a large crevasse that forms where a moving glacier ice separates from the fixed ice or firn above. In this case it was the bergschrund right below the summit cap. We traversed pretty far right near the Liberty Saddle and encountered a relatively small but deep crevasse that we sort of had to step / hop over in order to make it onto the final approach section. This was pretty scary, but we all made it up and continued on for the final push.

Liberty Ridge

The last 400 feet are by far the hardest. It’s amazing how significantly the elevation impacts your ability to breathe and make forward progress; at 14,000 feet even walking feels hard, but here we were continuing to hike up a mountain. On the other hand, I was surprised to find that for nearly the entire hike up from Schurman, I felt pretty fresh and full of energy, and didn’t feel all that tired aside from realizing that my heart rate was pretty elevated during most of the climb. However, past 13,000 feet I definitely started feeling a bit lightheaded, and even more so during the final push.

Annie and I definitely both got summit fever during that last 400 feet, because we could pretty clearly see that we were almost there. We pushed on and reached Columbia Crest, then traversed over to the “true” summit, reaching it by 8am after 8 hours of hiking. We were pretty exhausted but also pretty stoked, so we took a bunch of summit photos and even had a friend take us a summit dance party video. Hooray!

Success! Team Pineapple Express FTW!

Sun's out, guns out!!

Summit beer never tasted so good.

Day 2 – Summit to Schurman

After approximately an hour at the summit hanging out, drinking a Rainier, signing the logbook, etc., we decided that we’d better start descending because none of us felt particularly good. I think we all figured by now we had some kind of altitude sickness happening, and I started to get a headache. I figured I would probably feel better after descending at least 1000 feet or more, so I really wanted to get out of there. We left the summit around 9:30am.

When we encountered the crevasse again, this time instead of stepping up and using the ice ax for leverage, we jumped it on the way down. This was pretty funny and kind of reminded me of the dwarf-tossing scene in Lord of the Rings. We continued climber’s left and gawked at the huge cornices and crevasses under the bergschrund.

Sketchy crevasse jumping! This was actually super deep and pretty scary going up.

Unfortunately, as we descended, my headache only got worse. And what’s more, Annie started to get some pretty intense knee pain as well. Fortunately, Dan had a knee brace that we lent to Annie, and we switched up the rope team so that Annie was leading, and this seemed to help a lot.

Ironically, while I felt great and fresh on the way up, on the way down I felt completely horrible. My headache kept getting worse and it felt like a painful annoying slog stepping down for hours. I must have been pretty tired, but I was also completely miserable due to my headache. It was also pretty challenging trying to not step on the rope with our crampons on, and the snow had softened into a more slushy slippery surface, so we all fell down a bunch, but ultimately after about five hours we reached our tent at Camp Schurman at about 2:30pm.

Schurman to White River

We decided it would be wise to take a one-hour nap at camp, considering how awful we all felt and the fact that we’d had no more than four hours of sleep on Saturday evening, and thankfully we all passed out in the tent almost immediately. The alarm went off at 4pm and we started breaking down camp, which took us about an hour.

It took us only about half an hour to reach the ridgeline at Camp Curtis. The Interglacier seemed a bit melted out compared to just the day before, but we found some really nice glissade chutes on the way down (carefully avoiding the um.. crevasses on the way), and got down it in under an hour. Unfortunately, when we finally reached the trail from the Glacier Basin to White River, we still had three miles to go and it took us another one-and-a-half painstaking hours of drudgery. But we did finally make it to the car around 9pm.

Glissading down the Interglacier.

Unfortunately… Erica’s car had a flat. Between replacing it with her spare and the traffic we ran into between Enumclaw and Auburn due to a concert getting out at the White River Amphitheatre, it took pretty much forever to get home. I was so exhausted, my body was so sore, and I just wanted to be home. You should have heard me whining. In any case, when I did finally get home, I crawled into my bed at around 1:30am on Sunday night and honestly nearly cried from gratitude that my day was finally over. After all, not counting the nap, I’d been awake more than 26 hours, 17 of which were spent ascending or descending. How’s that for crazy?

Overall Stats

Total Elevation Gain: 10,000 feet
Approximate roundtrip distance: 18 miles?
Time spent ascending: 16 hours
Time spent descending: 9 hours
Sleep: 5 hours or less, including nap

Detailed Timeline

Saturday

7:30am – Left White River Campgrounds trailhead for Glacier Basin (4400’)
9am – Reached Glacier Basin Campground (6000’)
11am – Reached the bottom of the Interglacier (6800’)
1:30pm – Reached Camp Curtis (9200’)
3:30pm – Arrived at Camp Schurman (9450’) and started setting up camp, boiling water, etc.
6:30pm – Got in sleeping bags and attempted to fall asleep (with mixed results)

Sunday

11pm (Saturday) – Woke up, started getting ready (9450')
12am – Roped up and started heading up the Emmons Glacier towards The Corridor in the dark (new moon!)
5:15am – Sun finally came out (13,000'?)
8am – Summitted!! Took photos, took dance video, drank a Rainier, signed the logbook, etc. (14,411')
9:25am – Started heading back down to camp
2:30pm – Got back to Camp Schurman (9450')
2:45pm – Quick nap
4pm – Got up and started packing up camp
5pm – Left camp
7:30pm – Reached Glacier Basin trail (6000')
9pm – Arrived at car (4400')
9:30pm – Fixed flat tire
10pm – Left White River Campgrounds
1:30am – Reached my house finally (236')

Trip Highlights

• Excellent weather!!
• Erica brought a pineapple to Camp Schurman to attempt to bribe the rangers into letting us camp there instead of Emmons Flat (successful)
• Several somewhat sketchy snow bridge crossings across crevasses
• Actually had to “jump” a crevasse to make it onto the final summit section (!)
• Ran into someone we knew at the summit (who took some photos and a video of us)
• Rainier (beer) apparently tastes delicious at 14,000 feet
• Fairly awesome set of glissade chutes down the Interglacier (no match for Little T though)

Not-so-highlights

• A bit difficult to sleep at Shurman due to light and noise
• I had an epic headache pretty much from the time we left the summit until we reached Camp Schurman
• Annie’s knee started hurting her on the summit descent as well
• The hike out from the bottom of the Interglacier to White River took FOREVER
• Flat tire once we reached the car
• Was awake for nearly 26 hours the second day
• Entire body was sore for several days after the trip

Other Comments

• 2-day ascent was pretty rough given not much time to sleep or acclimate to elevation
• Crevasses blocked parts of the typical route but the boot path was pretty obvious
• The ranger station apparently gave out unlimited wilderness permits so it was super crowded on the way up – mixed blessing as it made routefinding easier but slowed us down in parts waiting for other rope teams

Mount Ellinor / Mount Washington

Intro

So I'm taking this mountaineering class this spring with an organization called BOEALPS, or the Boeing Alpine Society. The class is called Basic Climbing Class, or BCC, and every year there are roughly 60-70 students and a whole bunch of instructors helping teach the class. Every Wednesday from mid-February there is a 2.5-hour lecture where we review the material we should have read for our homework each week; most of the material is from Freedom of the Hills, THE bible on mountaineering. The students are also split into teams of roughly 6-8 students for either Saturday teams or Sunday teams, and every weekend from mid-march until early June there is an outdoor outing on the selected day.

The early outings focus more on skills work, such as routefinding / navigation, belaying, rappelling, ice ax arresting, snow anchors, kicking steps, etc. But then the trips transition very quickly into "real" mountaineering outings where the goal is to summit a peak and live to tell the tale. For this particular outing, it was actually a two-day overnight outing where we had to set up a snow camp overnight inbetween our first day's hike and our second day's objective.

The plan

For this trip, we selected Mount Ellinor and Mount Washington in the Olympic National Forest, about 2.5 hours' drive from Seattle. Because we wanted to start hiking from the trailhead around 8am, we planned to arrive by 7:30, which meant that most of us met up at the Kent P&R at 5:30am or earlier. Personally, I got up around 4am on Saturday. If you know me very well at all you probably already know that I am not a morning person and I consider 10am to be a reasonable time to show up at work. So waking up at such an hour feels like insanity every time. But I digress.

We had determined online that there was some kind of trail from the Mt. Ellinor upper trailhead to a saddle just east of Mount Ellinor via either the "summer route" or the "winter route", where the winter route goes right up a steep snow chute. Since it's not summer yet, and there was some snow in the chute, we opted for the winter route. The snow was super icy and the chute was super steep so kicking steps up to the saddle was challenging, but not quite impossible.

Snow chute!

Kicking steps in the chute

Mt. Ellinor summit

Sonny and Leonard headed to "A" peak (east of Mt. Ellinor) to begin leading the rock face on the west side of it while the rest of us booted up to the top of Mount Ellinor, which was an easy hike. Fortunately for us, the clouds cleared right when we got there so we took some excellent summit photos (and selfies of course).

Seal Team 6 - Mt. Ellinor

Sun's out, guns out!

"A" peak

After that we headed back down to the saddle and traversed over to "A" peak, and got our harnesses on so that we could toprope our way up to the top of the prominent rock face. The climb was pretty easy, probably 5.4 or 5.5, but was made harder by the fact that we had mountaineering boots on and scarier because there was a lot of exposure.

"A" Peak

Rockin the summit

Whoa, that's a lot of air.

Steep gully

There was a little bit of confusion as to the way to proceed next. We had figured that we wanted to traverse north / northeast into a flat bowl roughly north of "A" peak, but weren't quite sure what the right way to do that was. We eventually found a steep gully coming down from a saddle and set up fixed lines with snow pickets and tree anchors to downclimb with prussiks. Looking back up at the gully from the bowl, we realized it was actually steeper than we had thought.

Wait, we came down that??

Descending the steep gully

Snow bowl, setting up camp

The snow bowl turned out to be even more flat and perfect for camping than it looked on the topo. Plus, the snow was pretty soft so we set about digging trenches for our tents, both for wind protection and to flatten out the snow. Soon we had our tents set up and we were ready to melt snow, boil some water for dinner, and watch the sun setting over the horizon.

Home is where your tent is.

Snow kitchen

What was really amazing was that from our "kitchen" we had the perfect view of Seattle, Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, and Mount Saint Helens. We were truly blessed by good weather and good visibility!

Amazing sunset!

Unfortunately after sunset it got really cold really fast so we hightailed it to bed.

Rope teams to flat spot

In the morning we got up early and set about deconstructing our tents. This was made somewhat difficult due to the fact that the snow was now quite solid and icy, but we managed.

Amazing sunrise!

Eventually we geared up and started traversing northeast-ish towards Mount Washington. Since the snow was so icy, we decided to set up rope teams protected by snow pickets, and then ascended a fixed line to the top of a steep / icy section that flattened out nicely at the top. From there we took in the view and decided to leave behind our camping gear in order to lighten our load a bit.

View from the "flat spot"

We headed up a gully that looked promising, but when we reached the ridgeline we realized that we had probably gone the wrong way unless we wanted to rappel off to the west side of the ridgeline, which we didn't. So we headed back down to reconsider.

Traverse around

Eventually we decided to traverse around further to the northeast to try to find a route from the south of the summit, but by the time we got nearby we realized that we probably didn't have enough time to reach the actual summit considering that we'd need to set up some ropes on the ridgeline even if we found a good snow path to the ridge. So we took a good look at the route options... and headed back to where we'd stashed our camping gear.

Mt. Washington is the pointy tall one in the middle.

Bushwhacking down to the road

After a short-ish snack break, we decided to head back down to the road. We had figured a bearing of around 120 degrees would get us to the road, so we started heading down. I wouldn't quite say we followed the bearing very well though, because we were trying to find the least-steep way down through the snow. We made quite a bit of progress downward until we got bounded in by a steep creek (waterfall?) and a cliff, and we weren't quite sure how to proceed. We stalled for at least 20 minutes doing some recon and considering our options.

Finally found something resembling a trail.

Eventually we decided to hike up and right, away from the creek, hoping to find a path that wasn't too treacherous, and we found one. In fact, we actually found something that resembled a climber's trail, and from there on out we were golden. When we got to the road we were actually only about 100 feet from where one of our cars was parked! Success! So we rounded up the other cars and changed into more comfortable clothes, and headed out for post-trip burgers and beers =D

Meeting up with Dave in Tonsai

So after a night of staying up way too late, I grabbed my stuff from my Bangkok hostel in a rush and headed to the airport to catch my flight to Krabi. The flight was short and more importantly it was cheap, only 2500 baht or $83 USD. I arranged for a taxi to take me to the beach in Ao Nang, and from there you buy a $3 longtail boat ride to Tonsai which is only accessible by boat. I was quite literally stunned at how amazing the Thai cliffs looked framed against the beautiful turquoise waters of the Andaman Sea.

Is this place even real?

I stepped off the boat and found myself in the little-known hippie / rasta beach village of Tonsai. Most tourists visit the more developed Railay Beach nearby, but Tonsai is where most climbers stay and you can get bungalows on the cheap. I knew Dave was staying at the Jungle Hut so I oriented myself to the layout of Tonsai and headed back there.

This is roughly how Tonsai is laid out.

Very shortly after I met up with Dave (or as I like to call him, Coyote Dave). Dave and I met over three years ago in Potrero Chico, Mexico, and as both of us were "long-term" climbers there, we quickly became good friends. Dave is a fellow nerd, formerly focusing on web development and now studying robotics at CU-Boulder. In fact, he developed this very awesome Potrero Chico website which I personally consider to be the best. But I'm biased. In any case, Dave had already been in Thailand for nearly six weeks and only had a few short days left in Tonsai, so he let me sleep in his hammock on the porch of his bungalow for the low low price of 100 baht per night, and then he let me take over his bungalow when he left for only 325 baht per night. Shya!

Jungle Hut bungalow! Climbers reuinte!

In the afternoon of my arrival, Dave and I headed out to the Fire Wall to do a quick easy 6b as my first Tonsai climb. The rock is yellow/orange limestone mostly, and is absolutely riddled with tufas and pockets, and although I'd like to say that I've climbed plenty of limestone in my life (thanks Mexico!) this limestone was really completely different from anything I'd ever climbed before. Footholds are often polished but the routes tend to be overhanging and have huge jugs for hands. The kind of place where your biceps get stronger than your fingers, and if you keep at it you get really strong.

After the 6b warmup, Dave wanted to try out a really classic route called Burnt Offerings, which goes at 7a+. For you Americans, that is roughly equivalent to a 5.12a sport route. It starts out in this pretty cool cave and you then find yourself traversing across the lip of the cave and then up and over the cruxy overhanging finish. Dave worked it pretty well, making it to the cruxy part, and then he convinced me to try. I wasn't particularly keen to try hard at the time, so I only climbed the first couple of moves and then I was good. I'd like to blame the fact that I was hot and dehydrated and not acclimated to the heat and humidity, which is true. That's one thing I didn't quite realize about climbing in southern Thailand: it's fucking hot. I was sweating like crazy before I even started climbing, and sweaty palms do not a good send make. So we bailed right after watching another party trying the route with much more success =)

A Korean girl absolutely rocking this route.

Anyway, we quit climbing for the day and he introduced me to some friends and we had dinner and I believe we went out for drinks at one of the village bars. The cool thing about the bars in Tonsai is that they are all outside in the open air, and instead of standing packed inside of a building you typically sit down on wooden decks and drink and relax. It's definitely a very laidback, jungle rasta vibe. Many of the bars put on fire shows, or slackline and fire shows, or sometimes there is a band playing, but ultimately it's a very friendly place, and the visitors are very international, so when you meet people (and it's easy to meet people), you never quite know which country they will be from. I should mention, nearly everyone in Thailand, including the Thais themselves, speaks English or at the very least enough broken English to get by, so if you're lucky enough to be from an English-speaking country you will be able to converse with nearly everyone you meet. However, there were enough French/Canadians/Germans around that I definitely wished that I was competent not only in Spanish but in French and German as well. Maybe next time.

My favorite bar in Tonsai, Small World Bar.

Dave and I unfortunately didn't quite manage to climb much together in the next couple of days; his next day was a rest day so I merely convinced him to belay me on Groove Tube, a fun/easy/classic 6a on the Fire Wall. It was pretty groovy. The next day Dave and I planned to go deep-water soloing together via BaseCamp Tonsai (on a paid/guided excursion), but I woke up super nauseous and decided to cancel; ended up throwing up three times that day, probably due to food poisoning of some sort. Dave ended up partying long into the night with his Tonsai friends for his last night while I slept most of the evening and night in the hammock, so we couldn't get on the same schedule to climb on his last day either. I did end up climbing with two of his friends from Sweden though, Simon and Seven, the first of whom I *probably* met in Mexico three years ago as well. We tried a couple of 6b+ routes at the Tyrolean Wall and a 6a at Dum's Kitchen, all of which were fun, but by midday it was too hot to climb and I wanted to say goodbye to Dave.

Tonsai Roof Wall, near Dum's Kitchen.

Later that night I ended hanging out with some of Dave's friends, and got invited to a house party, and ended up using my glowing juggling balls to entertain quite a few people. They weren't completely sober, if you know what I mean, so the juggling light show was quite a hit so despite my new "alone in Thailand" status I made some friendships of my own. Success!

Glowing juggling balls for the win.

A Day in Bangkok

So my flight from Seattle to Bangkok arrived at 1am Thai time, which is sort of inconvenient, but I had a reservation at the Lub D hostel in Siam and I knew they had 24-hour checkin, so after grabbing my checked bag I took a taxi straight there. Found my mixed dorm and tried to quietly arrange myself for bed without disturbing the others and mostly succeeded.

Hostel lobby

I woke up the next day with only one main mission in mind, to book a flight to Krabi the next day. I probably could have done this online in advance but I'd heard that this was unnecessary and no cheaper so I didn't. I hailed a tuk-tuk for a travel agency and booked a flight for the next day. Success.

After that I decided to check out Chinatown, so I rode the tuk-tuk there and started walking around. I've been to a few other Chinatowns in the world, and this one wasn't much different, except I stumbled upon a Buddhist temple named Wat Mangkon Kamalawat. Lots of people were buying flowers and papers and incense, apparently to offer as gifts, but I didn't really understand it. So instead I walked around and took pictures and tried not to offend anyone.

Wat Mangkon Kamalawat

After wandering around Chinatown for a while, I realized I was hungry so I took a ride back to Siam Square and started hunting for Thai food. I actually had little success until I went into the Siam mall and ordered some curry in the food court. Really good and remarkably cheap.

I then wandered around the mall and found a wax museum which I thought might be fun. It was, and I convinced some strangers to help take some photos for me.

Bend It

Wolf It

Next I headed back to the hostel, which is really nice by the way, and saw a flyer for a nearby massage place, with a price of only 360 baht ($12) for an hour-long oil massage. Sold! It was really good and professional and well worth the $12.

After the massage, I took a nap and got my phone charged so I could go out a bit later. I wasn't sure where to go, but I eventually decided to go to the Hard Rock for dinner and a beer and then go to Club Insanity. I ended up meeting some people at the Hard Rock from Maldives / Russia / Ukraine and somehow convinced them to come as well so we did. The club was pretty wild with electronic dance music and plenty to drink, so I found it pretty amusing and stayed there pretty late until it was time to take a taxi back to the hostel. After all, I had a flight to Krabi to catch.

Club Insanity

Tilting at Windmills

So after a painfully long week in Potrero full of more rain than I can ever remember seeing in Mexico (especially in the dry season), punctuated by only a day and a half of dry weather, the end of the year was nigh. Spirits were probably not quite as festive as they would have been after better climbing weather, but still, the climbers of Potrero gathered for a night of celebration by drinking and dancing around a bonfire while Edgardo spun beats. My recollection of the night is a bit hazy but you can be sure that fun was had by all.

The next day my friends and I awoke, eventually, and gathered up. We headed for the Spires and I led the first pitch of Aguja Celo Rey (5.10a) in order to get to the saddle while the other half of our friends climbed up the west side of the spires. I then belayed Eric to the top of the second pitch and bailed because I had to take a friend to the airport, but I had played my part. We had previously purchased several Santa hats and sent them to the top of the larger (downhill) spire and made the party of Bostonians who were there join us in wearing them for a festive Christmas photo. The results speak for themselves.

Merry Xmas Potrero Style!

After that day of fun shenanigans, it came to pass that it was my last day in Mexico, and I still had one piece of unfinished business. There's this climb in the Virgin Canyon which I first attempted on toprope three years previously, and eventually managed to climb (once) without falling, on toprope. This was quite the achievement for me as the climb is a very difficult, pumpy, technical dihedral called Don Quixote, and it's rated 5.11d. Definitely the first, and perhaps still so far only, climb of that grade that I've climbed clean on toprope, and I had battle plans with it.

Toproping the Don over three years ago

A few weeks previously I'd managed to climb it again on toprope, possibly for the 4th or 5th time, and even though I hadn't climbed it since last year I actually climbed it clean. Which unfortunately meant that I was out of excuses for avoiding the scary task of leading it. So on my last day in Potrero, my friends and I set out for the Virgin Canyon so I could try to redpoint my project.

Unfortunately, when we got there, we realized that the rock was still a little wet from the rains that had come before. Shoot. But we looked at the route and it seemed like the wet spots might not actually affect the difficulty of the climb that much. So I led Mugre Mugre (5.10d) as a warmup and it felt pretty good and not too difficult while Felipe led another 5.10d. A little while later, I convinced Felipe to lead Don Quixote for me both to hang the draws and to test how wet the route was. He sent the route and placed some much-needed draws for me, and assured me that the route wasn't really that wet.

Warming up in the Virgin

I was pretty stoked, but pretty nervous, when it was time to climb. I tried to calm my nerves by singing a few notes from The Final Countdown, and it seemed to lighten my mood a bit, but I was still really nervous. I made the first couple of clips without a problem, going slow and remembering to breathe, but soon after the third clip or so, right before it starts getting hard, my left foot popped off of the corner and I found myself falling before I realized what was happening and fell about 15 feet. Super clean except for a slight hit on my right thumb which made it feel slightly numb. Despite the fall, I was actually pretty stoked and felt pretty good and pretty psyched that I'd had the nerve to try the lead in the first place. And somehow the fall made me less nervous as I got some fear out of the way.

Devon decided he wanted to try a few moves on it, so he did, but he wasn't feeling too stoked so he stopped before it starts getting serious, and this gave me some time to regroup and shake out and get ready for my second go.

Making some moves

Now it was go time, again. I made the first few clips, no problem. I made it past the point where my foot had slipped before, and suddenly it was business time. The cruxy part of the route is tricky because all of the bomber holds are on the left face, and it's overhanging, and you have to stem and smear the right foot on essentially a blank face. So your feet feel insecure and your left arm is pumping out, but what's worse is that the bomber jugs kind of disappear and you find yourself sketchily moving your feet up with not very much for hands. I made some sketchy moves and stemmed hard and was convinced my feet were going to pop, especially when I lunged for a key hold on the right face, but somehow everything held and I stayed on. Then the only thing left is to stand up awkwardly and grab the money jug above the roof, which I managed to do to my surprise. Todo bien. From the jug it was a relatively easy clip to guard against the fall, and I knew the hard part was over. Or so I thought.

I was tired and out of breath and although I had a money jug for my hands, I didn't want to stall too long. I knew the next clipping stance would be balancy and awkward, but I moved up anyway thinking I could handle it. But the pump was overwhelming, and I couldn't figure out how to move my feet into a secure spot, and before I knew it I was trying to clip the next bolt but lost my ability to hang on. I fell... and when I did so, my left foot got caught on the rope between my harness and the last draw I'd clipped, and before I knew it I had flipped upside down!

Right before getting flipped

Fortunately, somehow, the fall was super clean, even cleaner than before, and even with my back to the wall I hadn't hit a single thing on the way down. My friends were silent for a moment, trying to assess the damage, but when I screamed "Holy shit!" they knew I was basically alright. Unfortunately I knew that I was out of time and I had to leave the crag in order to pack up my tent and fly back to Seattle, but my friends convinced me to finish the route so I did after a short rest. Then I bid my awesome Potrero crew adieu =)

Love these guys!

In the end, I didn't send my project this day, but I was super proud of myself for having the cajones to finally try the route on lead, and I even managed to pull the crux without falling. And I even took a couple of really good (and safe) whippers in the process. I am confident that next time, Don Quixote, you are mine.