From the base of the rappel at the highest point of Contact Pass, follow the climbers' trail north down sandy switchbacks into talus. Here it is crucial to stay right (away from Temple Crag) or you will either a) end up in a dangerous snow gully or b) end up on a loose and dangerous sandy slope."
Pg. 74, ST High Sierra.
With a start like that, you can guess how the nutjob trip report ends. But I get ahead of myself.
My buzzing Blackberry alarm jolts me awake at the splitter crack of dawn. Well, it was 6:40am. Uhh... that was actually a missed call. From Bryce. Whom I was supposed to meet at 6am on this fine Saturday morn. Leapin' lizards and fvck a duck batman, not a good start for the big trip! At least I packed the car the night before, I'm out the door in 5 minutes, and at his place within 15.
Now Bryce and I have been on some adventures that would grow hair on a Calvin Klein model's chest (boy or girl, I can never tell which they are anyways), and I can tell you he was spun from the same cloth as a Tibetan monk: peaceful to the core. Nary a word of angst or a spit of vitriol. But he has suffered the Nutjob Way™ long and mightily in silence. He has shivered at the Pleasanton BART station on a cold dark night waiting for me on several occasions. And on this day it would end. My chronic tardiness coaxed and teased his inner Manson. Actually it wasn't that bad, but the few choice words he had, no need to curse, hit me right between the eyes. Well, he did try to eat a child at the Tuolumne Backcountry permit station when we stopped there. I tried to patch the kid up afterward. After his venom was spent, he redeemed himself by picking up trash. With Karma cleaned (well his at least, I was still sportin' some skid marks), we got over the irony that we didn't need to stop in Tuolumne... and after swinging through Bishop for our overnight permits and a breeze through Big Pine, we chased the sun into the deep and beautiful Eastern Sierra skyline.
In the dwindling rays we hiked past a smiling and weathered couple emerging from the trail, radiant, as if Moses brought Zephora along to help carry the 10 Commandments down the mountain. I will consider my life successfully lived if I follow in their footsteps with my soul mate in 40-50 years. The trail is surprisingly mild for the elevation gain; I call it a gentle consistent rise, but at other points in my life I might have called it relentless. We lament the moon's absence, and follow the trail in near-black monotony for a timeless span. When the time seems right, we diverge from the trail and trend down a steep forested slope toward what we hope is the gap between Second and Third Lake. After padding across a field of squishy brown marshmallows, we set camp in a slightly elevated dry spot. But while attempting to fill our water bottles, we have second thoughts. The place we've chosen is a natural animal trail, and visions of bears licking our faces has us packing our bags again. So we backtrack, and set camp somewhere on the forested slope in a relatively flat spot. And those damn visions of bears licking us gets us up again to hang our food in a tree. I opted to leave the bear canister behind, so we craftily rigged up a rope high between two trees, and suspended the foodbag from the center of the rope. And finally to bed for real this time, and the moon joins the party just in time to burn through our eyelids and challenge our sleep.
We had no alarm, and woke up at 8:30am or so: alpine lunchtime.
[img]http://lh6.ggpht.com/skeagy/SOZ-21EomcI/AAAAAAAAA6E/zytfGklW9aU/s400/P1000222.JPG[img]
Of course the views are incredible. Alpine blue lakes, jaggedy crags, deeply shadows of doom on the object of our desire: Temple Crag, Sun Ribbon Arete.
Pictures are nice, but if you've been anywhere in the mountains you know the pictures just can't capture it all. The approach from the north shore of the lakes is longer than it seems like it should be. Massive rock formations have a way of making everything in front of them look small. And to think Temple Crag was just a "boulder" en route to the real mountains behind it - The Pallisades! So by 10:30am, we're skirting the edges of a 60 degree ice field, and I'm figuring out how to cheat past a couple foot section of clear water ice in my trusty SierraLite boots.
I figure out that if I stick a dirty rock in little ice divots, I can scamper up faster than I slide down. And after some chossy 4th-classing and letting loose pickup truck loads of gravel, we make it to the base. Phew! We're already relatively high up the right side of a gulley, several pitches up compared to the dudes on Dark Star over on the next arete. I'm on the sharp end to get things started, and I make a 5.6 chimney look like Generator Crack before I figure out where to stick my feet.
Next comes some cruiser 3rd-class stuff, almost a pain to be roped but less painful than undoing the knots and coiling. Best to just run it out.
Our rope strategy was a single 8mm (half of a double-rope 60m setup) doubled over. I don't remember all the details after that, but I do remember endless 5.6 - 5.7 climbing and not much pro. I made the "technical alpine rack" last until pitch 5 or 6 before we had to stop for gear change-over. Unless you move like Pheidippides after the battle at Marathon, you better be satisfied with a couple of pieces of pro per pitch or you'll get benighted. I think we saw a few pitons, but bolts weren't really a fixture of this climb. Mostly this wasn't a good stretch for pictures because we were far from each other most of the time:
I think my shirt designers got a view of this lichen during an acid trip:
And then we hit this point... sling what?
I wish I could say it was easy. But we were very nearly foobar'd at this point of the route. On his first throw, Bryce has a solid showing that almost pulled the Hole in One. We cajoled it to fall into place, but it just barely slid off the edge. And deeply into the crack where it was HOPELESSLY STUCK! We tugged, we caressed, we were surprisingly cool. Or fatalistic. By some divine intervention, we got it loose, and then I got it stuck again! This time, it was just below a rock that we could dislodge with enough yanking.
OK, let's git 'er done!
Yeehawww:
Dude, I shoulda been in rodeos.
I'll bet my life on that.
But I'm a gentleman... ladies first. Ahem... Bryce? Gee is that a becoming shade of puce in your cover-up foundation, or does the setup concern you?
And the whole grisly event is captured on video (oh the humanity):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMZYi_6WOI8
(check the high quality link in the lower right corner of the vid)
And this is his reward for being first across, to see this with his own eyes:
Then it was time for my moment of truth:
We could have used a little more tension...
And then some more run-out climbing:
Bryce got the money pitch, a beautiful 5.9 crack to akward sloping ledge traverse. It looked like a sidewalk from below, but Bryce was floundering up there like an elephant seal in heat, so I knew there must be something more to it. He made it through the actual traverse and then on up without too much fanfare. When I followed with benefit of a toprope, I mantled on the ledge easier than he did. But I paused a bit more at the traverse, a couple of 5.10a face moves, and I was glad I didn't lead the little bit right above the end of the traverse.
It all becomes blurry for me after that... a bunch more run-out climbing on pretty easy terrain; plenty of places where falling is not on the menu.
At last we reach the final ridgeline to the summit, as purple velvet and orange fiery skies give stark relief to the blackest silhouettes of the Palisades behind us. We claim a daylight ascent by a margin thinner than Dubya's 2000 election. I think the hanging chad is the only thing that kept our headlights off til the descent.
Did I mention it was getting cold? I seem to recall continually wiping a stream of snot off my numb nose... and my insulated Camelback froze within 5 minutes of taking it off.
As these stories usually go, getting up is only half the battle. We stumbled down a massive talus field on the backside, our headlights off for a while; in the gradual darkening, our eyes had time to adjust. But the time came for headlamps, and I remembered a supertopo thread as we followed occasional obscure cairns. We would have been fairly screwed without them. But we were fairly screwed even with them, so it was hard to tell. Finding the rap station that gets us to the top of Contact Pass was like a needle in a haystack. Well, the cairns steered us homeward, and after several seeming dead-ends we found the rap and were on terra firma of Contact Pass.
But the night is yet young!
From the base of the rappel at the highest point of Contact Pass, follow the climbers' trail north down sandy switchbacks into talus. Here it is crucial to stay right (away from Temple Crag) or you will either a) end up in a dangerous snow gully or b) end up on a loose and dangerous sandy slope."
At first we follow an obvious climbers trail, but little by little 'tis lost to the sands of time. At this point, we go down and left fairly close to Temple Crag. It gets steep. Real steep. And sandy. Real sandy. It was pretty comical pouring a gallon of sand out of my shoes every few minutes. But it wasn't comical how that steep sand held washing-machine to car-sized boulders strewn all over the place, perched on the brink of destruction. Every step in the sand brought a few extra feet of sliding, and I was riding a mini-avalanche with my feet going like a deep powder descent in snowshoes. The trick was to not step on the lower side of the boulders, where the sliding sand would cut them lose. It only took a couple of tumblers that echoed through the valley before I figured this out. And based on the rumbles coming somewhere nearby but out of sight by Bryce, he was learning the same lesson.
Now I had been lagging badly behind Bryce, my aforementioned cardio conditioning not up to par. But Bryce managed to get himself into some hairy shite a little right of me, and ended up back-tracking and following my path. As it turns out, he had been riding the crest of a wave of rocks, ready to cut loose in a ridiculous torrent of granite destruction. Going down over there just plain wasn't an option. It wasn't all rosy on this side, but that's where the darkness helped us. With the little LED glow around my head to shield me from the ugliness all around, I could wander and stumble in stupid bliss down toward our camp far below. If it had been daylight, I might have crapped my pants looking up at what hung above us. But then again, in daylight we might have gone a different way...
Finally at the base... and the night is no longer young. Nor is it over. To get back to our camp, we have to cross a sea of boulders akin to the Wonderland of Rocks in Joshua Tree. It's been a month since the episode, but I've already forgotten the gruesome details. Let's just say I was worked. I do recall lots of moments lying on my back looking at the stars. At one point I looked down at a gap between boulders that looked like a toilet seat. Soon I was racing the brown loggerhead turtle, moving in a panic to unclip the strap that held my leg loops to my swami. There was no time to search for leaves, sticks, or small rocks. That would have to come later. I was barely able to drop my drawers before unleashing armageddon on the denizens of the crack below. And after some moments, catching my breath and enjoying the feeling of emptiness, I found the will to keep moving. It went on like that for a while, until we reached our gear stash on the north shore of Second Lake not far from the logjam.
EPILOGUE
The morning after shot of where we came down... hard to judge the scale in this pic, but the steepest part of the rubble pile took us an hour to descend. And this angle doesn't capture how steep the crest of those perched rocks really is:
One of the things I realized after this climb, my first real simul-climb (South Crack and Great White Book notwithstanding), is this: when you do a really big day on a normal climb, you're actually sitting on your arse or hanging in slings half the time. Which gives plenty of time to recuperate, and I guess that's how I can be in relatively lame cardio shape and still pull out some long days every once in a while. But damn we were continuously moving ALL DAY for this climb, with a brief rest while futzing with the tyrolean traverse rig. So when all was said and done, I was "knackered" as my colorful Kiwi friends would say. It must be an effort overall similar to Snake Dike when you count the approach hikes and climbing... except the climbing on Sun Ribbon Arete is noticeably more difficult than Snake Dike (but pro spacing was not too much different!). And you feel a lot more "out there", like there ain't no walkie talkies and YOSAR to come get you when you stub your toe. Of course help in the worst case would only be a day a way if your buddy was healthy enough to go get it. But still, it's a little sobering introduction to what it must be like in the bigger and more remote places of the world. And reading from the history of this route... doing it in the winter with verglas and snow, in a push from the car with heavy gear all the way to the tyrolean? Topout the next day in sub-freezing temps? I'm not worthy. And I don't want to be.
And I leave you with some parting pictures:
Transition from riparian sub-alpine forest to desert:
Looking back on the approach:
