With a beautiful weather forecast for Valentine's weekend in the Valley, Mike and Leonardo hashed out a plan to ascend Skull Queen and I was going to tag along. As the weekend drew near, words on the Taco suggested other parties were also planning on climbing Skull Queen, so backup plans to climb Southern Man or The Prow were made. I picked up Leonardo and Mike around 5pm on Friday and we headed off to Yosemite from Davis. We were going to spend the night at Camp 4, but my amazing friends, Robin and Roger, in El Portal put us up for the nigh. It turned out they too were planning on doing Skull Queen, but decided to allow us the opportunity to climb it and they would climb the Gold Wall instead. Did I say they are AMAZING?
Still not sure how many other parties were planning on climbing Skull Queen, we decided to try and be the first ones there, so we woke up at 5am. After breakfast, driving into the Valley, and packing our gear we headed off to the Column around 6:30am. We got to the base to find two guys from Davis, Will and Rick had beaten us, but they were going to do South Face, so we got dips on Skull Queen. Another party of two from Palo Alto showed up a few minutes behind us and decided last minute to do Southern Man. I’m not sure what their original plans were, but we gave them our print-out of Southern Man since their guide book didn’t have it.
I’ll let the pictures to most of the reporting from here:
A quick note on rappelling from P5 to P4: It is difficult to impossible to swing left to get to get to the next anchor so leave a tight fixed line to guide you back to that ledge at the end of the Kor Roof pitch (P4).
With about an hour left of day light when we reached the top of P10, we decided it was best to begin rappelling back down to Dinner Ledge to get our things and leave the last pitch for another day. We got two rappels in before the sun went down, then we rappelled the rest of the climb and hiked back to the car under the light of our head lamps. Though we didn’t get to go all the way with the Skull Queen, I would say it was a successful Valentine’s date with her, and a second date is to be arranged.