It’s starting to quiet down in the valley. The mornings are darker and the evenings are getting almost agonizingly long. I will be wrapping up my season in less than a week and begin some winter climbing travels. It’s been a great season of climbing rangering, with clean-up projects far and above at the top of the list. From Facelift to this latest “Nose Pick”, it has been wonderful to be paid to visit the most incredible places and make them even better– by hauling our trash, tat, and turds. Memorable poop episodes this year were: base of El Cap, (actually that’s not very memorable, but less frequent this year!), Camp VI (obviously), and my favorite but absolutely disgusting, the second pitch of Lembert dome’s Northwest Books (they even had the style wherewithal to use a Supertopo printout for Lembert Dome as their landing pad!).

We (Jesse, Jake, David our intern, and I) also managed to pull off the rock a substantial amount of junky fixed ropes. Everything from lines strung off route and over sketchy rock in the Grey Bands–leftover from a frantic party with a broken femur on the Nose, to a rope hung like Christmas tree lights in the woods below the southwest face that remained for weeks.

A project not yet completed this season is to restore the Salathe/Freerider back to the status of a respectable wall by taking down the thousands of feet of fixed ropes used by various groups throughout the season to work those routes. For some historical perspective on how far a regression this season’s Salathe was, I’ll quote the FA history in Big Walls:

“While the first and second ascents of the Nose broke the mental barrier to climbing El Cap, the ascent of the Salathé Wall in 1961 defined the style of how the new routes on the great wall would be climbed in the future. Aware that any rock face could be climbed with expedition tactics, Royal Robbins, Tom Frost, and Chuck Pratt dug deeper for a different style of climbing.” (from Yosemite Big Walls, Second Edition)

We may be at a juncture where it is important to revisit the definitions of style as it applies to free climbing El Cap. Freerider has grown and will continue to grow in popularity as the years pass, and it will be our job as a community to define how the increasing numbers of ascents should take place. If one must bring Freerider down to a style below that of the first ascent party, by sieging the wall with fixed ropes, then perhaps they should wait. Train some more, climb some other Yosemite free walls, and when ready, commit to a full ascent. Respect the vision of the FA team, and take pleasure in the fact that there is a free passage up one of the most incredible walls in the world. The state of the Salathé as it is now with fixed ropes is an incredibly selfish statement of climbers perceiving their personal goals as more important than the rock. It’s an old discussion, but remains just as important.

Recently, we inaugurated a new method of climbing patrol, Rappelling! Although, it is not to become a standard procedure (hopefully), it seemed to be the most effective method to make a dent in the huge project of Camp VI. In years past, we have done multiple ground up clean-ups of the Nose, a rap in and jug out a few years ago, and earlier this year we filled a couple haulbags during a rescue on the Nose. But the burning desire to get a little deeper, and hit the rest of the route had us hiking in from Tamarack two weeks ago. With extra haul-bags, plenty of plastic gloves, and a 6-foot Nose pick hand made by our very own Werner, we set off on the most fruitful Nose clean-up yet.


At this point, if you’ve read through the whole TR I’m sure Camp VI is a no-brainer to you. It’s gross, frustrating, and you wouldn’t want to contribute to it. Somehow, there is still fresh human waste every time I have been there, and I really do not want to see the trash level rise again. I don’t expect climbers to carry an eight-foot pole up there to get deeper trash on their next ascent, but we do have the chance to discuss these issues and make our stances clear. Talk to people starting up walls, do they have poop tubes, are they gonna carry out their trash? It may seem obvious, but it definitely won’t hurt things.

Freerider was a magnet for foreign climbers this year, (not to say they deserve all the blame). Abandoned ropes strewn across the route does not establish a leave-no-trace precedent for how they should treat Yosemite. Our community is small enough and strong enough, that if we adopted a vocal stance on issues such as trash at the top of El Cap, or fixed lines on all but three pitches of the Salathe, then even the most clueless visiting climber wouldn’t dare to go against the local style.


Mark Hudon started a thread recently discussing some similar issues about trash and LNT that people should check out here: http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=1298738