Wilderness Odyssey - May 01, 1989
Remember those adolescent love affairs? The infatuations, the fumbling approaches; the bliss, the disillusionment; the pleasure and the pain. And always promising yourself that you'd never be so foolish as to get involved like that again. It's a phase we all go through, and one that we soon grow out of. Or so we like to think...
I was off again.
This time it began with a photograph in a book, an image that flashed from the idly flicked pages and burned itself into my mind.
It was a picture of a mountain – a great, bald skull of granite, cleanly and breathtakingly truncated by a vast, vertical face. Its smooth simplicity of form, its strange, alluring beauty, commanded my attention. And that face - the enormous sweep of ramps and roofs, cracks and grooves, walls and bulges, all found focus in a central line that beamed out a challenge. Climb me, it said.
I lapped it up.
For the rest of that winter, the Northwest Face of Yosemite's Half Dome became almost an obsession. Hungry for knowledge, I devoured books, magazines, guides. I pored over pictures. And get this — I even copied the route topo onto a piece of poster-sized paper and pinned it to the wall above my bed.
It was that bad.
One Tuesday afternoon in March I picked up the phone and dialled the travel agent's office again. This time I managed the whole number without hanging up. My gut tightened as the ringing tone burred urgently in my ear. They answered. I gulped.
"Er… I'd ummm… I'd like to book a flight to California... ". I was on my way.
It was late spring in the Sierra. The valley was bright with bursting buds and greening meadows. Chattering bluejays and inquisitive squirrels quarrelled over scraps left by the first of the season's campers. The melt-swollen streams surged and burst from the valley rim in thundering, white cascades, their sprays decorating the taller cliffs in delicate, sparkling ice veils. But up in the high country, old Winter still lurked, crouched in the cold blue shadows, aghast at his shrinking snow-hoards.
Pete, my climbing partner, arrived and we played around for a week or so on the smaller cliffs. But the pull of the face was strong. Soon we were sweating up the steep, winding trail that climbs from the head of the valley, rising out of the wet-moss mists of Nevada Fall and into the pine-woods of Little Yosemite, there to swing around to the left in a wide, sweeping curve, and sneak up on the mountain from the far side. We camped on the shoulder below the Cables Trail, planning to make a start early the next morning. But a local bear made a sunset raid, and ran off with the bag containing all our food.
Not content with our three-day rations, the bear and his mates returned at intervals throughout the night, shuffling out of the darkness to gaze curiously from the edge of the campfire's dancing pool of light. Their calm, unblinking eyes reflected a menacing red. For me, bears were an unknown quantity, and I stayed awake all night, nervously feeding the fire and flinging pine-cones at the shadows. Pete, unconcerned, snored through it all.
We wasted the next day, and lots of energy, making a round trip to the valley for more food. But that evening we made the steep descent from the shoulder, traversed an old, soft snowfield with a scary, ski-jump run-out, and struggled through thick and thorny brush to reach, at last, the foot of the face.
The bivouac was uncomfortable. Half Dome reared above our swaddled forms like a huge, nameless headstone, blotting out the stars. I dozed fitfully, and dreamed I was eaten by bears.
Next morning, halfway up the second pitch, I was stiff, and cold, and struggling. I wished that I'd never started this stupid climb. The rock felt awkward and unfamiliar, and I was tired from two nights of sleeplessness.
Stumped at a small roof, I wasted a half-hour fussing with protection before miserably failing to make the required move. Exasperated, I aided what must only have been VS, while Pete, embarrassed, looked the other way. Sullen and cursing, I plodded on to the top of the pitch. It took me twenty minutes to arrange the belay. I dropped a krab, barked my knuckles, and made spaghetti of the haul line.
But the pitches came more easily as we settled into a rhythm, alternately leading and jumaring, slowing getting to know the idiosyncracies of the climb. The sun ambled up and around, and about lunchtime she peeked round the comer of the cliff. Warmth soaked into us like melted butter into toast. The rock felt more friendly and encouraging now, and the pitches flew by. I leaned lustily into laybacks, flowed smoothly up cracks, picked the right nut for every placement. At the stances I sang, or sunned like a lizard, and hauled on the sack to the heave-away-boys of a hummed sea-shanty.
At last, almost half the cliff lay below us. The sun lazed low and golden in the late afternoon haze, and burnished with bronze the polished, vertical shield of granite that now reared flawlessly above us. A line of tiny bolts tiptoed foolishly into the middle of this shield, to where a little tatter of slings played tag with the breeze. This was the pendulum pitch.
Momentum carried me up from bolt to bolt, teetering each time in the top rung to reach the next. In a wink I was up there pulling suspiciously at the piton hidden behind the bunch of fluttering slings. I clipped and lowered, and lazily began to swing, building up slowly, savouring the drop; building up gently to great whooping swoops, back, more, forth, further, to climax in one huge, moon-walking, heart-stopping arc. Then I was pulling onto a little ledge, giggling and shaking with adrenalin. Now there was no going back.
One pitch more, and the sun had gone. We curled up in a long narrow fold of rock and slept deeply, without dreams. Under cover of darkness a gang of mean little clouds sneaked up and surrounded the mountain, and in the cold, grey light of dawn it began, softly, silently, to snow.
Snow. Sparse, grey flakes, not heavy enough to lie, but floating down in the still air and slicking the rock with a finger-numbing, slippery wetness. The climbing was now slow and uncomfortable - a long, tedious aid pitch; jammed ropes, an abseil to free them; a strenuous, slimy undercling; then a long, gloomy gullet of a chimney that swallowed us up and spat us out, hours later, high on the exposed face. As if in apology for her earlier absence, the sun came out and warmed us for a brief spell as we scuttled up a right-trending ramp and spidered some cracks to a clutter of big ledges some few hundred feet below the jutting eaves of the summit overhangs.
The sun, ignored, went in. Above the ledges, the face appeared to close up; it turned its back on us, shrugged. We were tired. I felt myself begin to close up too.
Shadows which, through the day, had lurked cockroach-black in cracks and corners now crawled slowly out across the face and prickled my skin with the chill of approaching night. We would not be up before dark. While Pete inched his way through the overhangs above, I closed my eyes and wished myself elsewhere.
Those next few pitches were a real struggle. The rock was cold and unco-operative, forcing us first one way and then another, never relenting. We grew irritable; there were arguments, and shouting. On one small, uncomfortable stance I hunched and watched through thickening mist as the watery grey disc of the sun slipped slowly, sadly, behind the ridges to the west, and thought longingly of the day before — the sunshine, the laughter, the warm, familiar rock. And then it was dark, and the mist closed in, and the face clammed up completely.
"Safe!"
Pete's shout came tumbling out of the darkness above and knocked me out of my half-sleep. With one faulty torch between us, progress had slowed to a crawl. I shifted into auto-pilot and shuffled awkwardly on my narrow ledge, kicking off the haul sack, fumbling my jumars onto the rope, taking up the slack. Then I consigned my weight and my fate to the rope and swung frighteningly out into the dark, the invisible drop a black, clutching presence in my guts.
I started up. Left foot, right hand, right foot, hang. Left foot, right hand, right foot, hang. Grope for the first bit of gear, a tiny, twisted wire in a mean little seam. Pay for it with some knuckle skin. Left foot, right hand, right foot, hang. Left foo…
Something snapped, my stomach lurched and with a clatter of krabs I was falling. It was all over. Some stupid adolescent impulse had driven me here, I knew not why, and now … my mind screened vivid images of my battered body lying twisted in the pines two thousand feet below; dead, damned, a victim of my own foolish desires …
Then reality returned with a jolt. I had stopped. Now cold, raw fear flooded my brain and I screamed at Pete in a panic, clawing the smooth rock for a handhold. Poor Pete had been asleep when it happened. One of the belay nuts had pulled, but fortunately there had been two backups. Even so, I climbed the rest of that rope like it was silk thread hung from a razor. Two more pitches of blind, groping, sleepwalking steepness, then we rolled, exhausted, onto the wrinkled, ice-glazed slabs that formed the summit. It was 2 a.m. A full moon silvered the high, snowpatched Sierra. In silence we stowed the gear, and headed down towards the forest. That night in the woods, I stopped once to look back through the trees at the hunched silhouette of the Dome, cold and sparkling under the stars; then I turned my back, and grinned, and strode off along the trail that led down to the valley. No more of that nonsense for me.
That is, until the next time …
