I wish to assure you that the preposterous myth is true. We did indeed bail from Lost World yesterday.

Thanks to David's generosity and the help of numerous porters both upwards and downwards along the talus, and especially for the stream running next to Lurking Fear where we filled our water bottles only moments from the start of our route, it is fairly safe to say that it was the least amount of work I have done getting to and from an El Cap route. It is also safe to say that I have never done so much work to gain such little height in so much time!

We decided to blast based on what appeared to be a decent forecast, and with the help of our porters and hairyapeman Mark and his friend Jeff, we got the Remote Simul Space Haul going where we had four guys pulling down on the loads to heave them up to our first bivi fast. And it was there at our first bivi we spent the next FOUR nights! It was total desperation -- fighting the rain, fighting the snow, fighting to stay awake, trying to keep the beer from freezing. The shiraz was so cold I had to put a bit of water in the Jetboil stove and heat the bottle to drinking temperature. I guess we should have brought at least one chardonnay. The tequila and Sailor Jerry were most welcome during the cool evenings. The canned ravioli was totally unpalatable until heated. Truly, it was hell on the wall.

David is a pro photographer and carried at least fifty pounds of camera gear, which he used to great effect as I led upwards - or at least tried to lead upwards - through various forms of precipitation, none of it friendly and all of it cold and wet. I did stop short of leading through the waterfall of runoff that was cascading down the wall and directly onto our haul bags and ledges. Amazingly and perhaps miraculously, we managed to stay reasonably dry, perhaps because much of the time it was snow that was covering our bivi. We had good flies, bivi sacks, Thermarests, rain gear, and plenty of warm synthetic clothes along with warm synthetic sleeping bags.

Wee-Wee the Big Wall Crab was accompanied by his longtime friend Herbie the Big Wall Sponge, and Herbie certainly earned his keep after so many walls buried in the portaledge fly. I picked up Herbie from the one-dollar Bargain Bin at the Sponge-O-Rama in Tarpon Springs, Florida, and he is indeed a real live dead sponge. He seemed to enjoy his time in the winter conditions, although his continual snowball fights with Wee-Wee began to get tiresome after a few days.

The climbing was fairly straightforward with the occasional tricky placements in a row to keep me thinking and get me just scared enough to remember why I enjoy climbing walls so much, and I knocked off some of the leads in just over an hour. During the brief spells of good weather, we led a couple pairs of pitches in blocks whereby I was up front leading the next pitch having short fixed while David was simultaneously cleaning the pitch beneath, connected to me with the zip line he was carrying in a bag and sending gear to the top as needed. So we actually felt like we were accomplishing something, and we optimistically moved our bivi upwards, teased as we were by the occasional moments of brilliant sunshine.

An important note of beta regarding the fifth pitch – McTopo and Nanook take heed – which is the first pitch of the Squeeze Play variation we planned to climb. As you leave the small right-facing corner and clip a couple of rivets, you pass through a roof that accepts about ¾” cams. This feature is now hanging by a thread, having opened up on my two cams and spitting me out onto the rivet. It remains attached – barely – almost directly above the bivi, and it is impossible to trundle safely until the belay has been vacated and you have hauled to the next station. We would have done this, but we bailed the next day, which I believe I have previously mentioned [ahem]. I used a portaledge fly pole to cheat-stick past this dangerous feature, and the next party should plan on doing the same until such time as they can get themselves and their pigs safely past it, and then cut it loose. After sending it off, the cleaner should inspect it to see if this newly scoured section can still be climbed, or if a rivet needs to be added, and record this information for the benefit of the next party.

Incidentally, this very same dilemma faced us on the fifth pitch of Cosmos several years ago, when Valley Giants Tom and I trundled a huge block that weighed several tons. In this instance, I first drilled a three-rivet ladder around the thing to bypass it – above the 3/8” bolt that the previous party had left there when they bailed and also left me a nice 3.5 Camalot – and those rivets I believe remain. I don’t think the route has been climbed since, and it’s possible there is a thin pecker crack where the flake used to be, in which case please chop the three rivets and the bolt. This beta has not been recorded in the newest McTopo guidebook, but I think I added it to the website beta.

As mentioned on our Lost World – Squeeze Play attempt, we had plenty of food and water, and with the temperatures so cold we were probably consuming a bit less than two litres per person per day, including the mandatory one-litre press of Mark Hudon's excellent Hood River Coffee each morning, the New Guinea dark Custom PTPP Blend. With so little action apart from watching the skies open up on us, we didn’t eat much either. Our supplies could have lasted us another week no problem, but David was starting to feel the effects of the wall and came down with a pretty serious case of Big Wall Hands aka Crab Claws, that kept him from sleeping in spite of copious doses of Aleve and ibuprofen. He also has a photo shoot next week that he really wants to make, so when we learned of the Doom and Gloom Forecast for more of the same that is said to be coming our way on Saturday and Sunday, our fears got the better of us [I was fearful of not eating pizza for so long and Dave was fearful of being unable to press his camera’s shutter button] we contacted Ansel Evans by radio, and waved for help.

And if Dave ever gets his fingers working, you can look forward to coming back here and seeing some of the bitchin' photos he took of us.

Craftily, and in no way accidentally, we took our time getting our loads together, ensuring that we arrived at the El Cap Bridge long after Tom was gone, thus avoiding the Walk of Shame, which I plan to do – beer in hand – as soon as I finish writing this. And after having another cup of coffee. It’s not yet Changeover Time, but it’s pretty darn close, unaccustomed as I am to Pacific Daylight Time. So for the first time ever on a wall, from four pitches up Lost World I dumped out our excess water. It would have been enough to fill a small sized swimming pool, or had there been any sunshine and the appropriate supplies, enough to solar power shower the entire Swedish Bikini Team, which was conspicuous in its absence. If I have extra water, I usually leave it for the next team, assuming I’m in a place on the wall that gets climbed with some regularity. But with the stream running nearby, it was pointless to conserve the water, so out it flew and our bottles comprimed for the next wall. Our pigs remained fairly full of leftover food, and if you can believe it, leftover beer. It really was so cold most of the time that the beer was fairly unappetizing[!] In fact, I shall have to bring some of that beer to the bridge this afternoon, assuming these ever-greying skies don’t open up before Tom packs up his kit and heads for drier confines.

All in all, we had fun. Or at least, I think we had fun. Having now spent 448 nights on the side of El Cap, not counting base and summit bivis, I can say unequivocally that I endured the longest continuous period of bad weather ever for me, which was six days straight. I’ve sat out a few three-day storms, but this stuff just kept coming at us, and on the lower flanks of the Southwest Face of El Cap, there isn’t really any protection from the elements. Not like over on say Zed-Em, which is completely protected from all the bad weather and enjoys near tropical conditions all of the time. Only a total pussy would bail from Zed-Em.

We, of course, are not pussies for bailing from El Cap. Certainly knott. Rather, we are Hardmen, bailing proudly and bailing in style. The storm had wiped clear the entire Southwest Face of El Cap of all other parties - those parties who were weaker, softer and much much smarter than us. We were, in fact, The Last Men Standing, and as we waved for help, our terror and cries were not audible to Tom on the bridge as he snapped photos of what we thought for sure were our last moments on earth. Or at least on the wall.

And as we and our hundreds of pounds of piggage arrived on the ground, we simul-cracked our beers and declared, "We cheated death once again!"


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Note the appalling weather conditions in Tom Evans' photo above, for which we blame our bail.

We spent six nights and therefore seven days on the wall, and managed to reach only as high as the top of pitch 6. Accordingly, I am unable to sign this story as “Pitch A Day Pete”, because even I was unable to keep up with my erstwhile and proudly-earned moniker.