Annie gets out her calendar — a single piece of printed paper for the month of October, and begins excitedly filling in the boxes. October is the holy month of Yosemite Valley rock climbing. The weather is perfect — with the sweltering temperatures of summer simmering down some, with cooler nights and days not yet cut short by daylight saving’s imminent arrival. The summer crowds have gone, with kids back in school and mom and dad grinding away at their jobs until the holiday season gives them a brief respite again. And the valley fills with a different kind of crowd — Camp 4 is overrun, spilling over the brim with starry-eyed climbers from all over the world, falling asleep in their tents among the boulders and ponderosa pines, dreaming about their own plans of ascending the world’s most sought after big wall routes.
Annie scrawls my name into the box on the calendar for next Thursday with the words, “south face.” We were to climb the South Face of Washington’s Column in a day. My first big wall, and I shivered with excitement and anticipation.
“This’ll be easy, you’re gonna do great,” Annie said encouragingly the day before, as we practiced the art of lowering out over at the Laconte boulder. We spent about 20 minutes covering how and when to use the technique and called it good. I had enough trad experience — four years worth of multi-pitch routes in the valley and in the high sierra — and was confident that I could figure most of this aid stuff out on route. So in a few days we packed our bags, heavy with a triple rack of cams, plenty of offset nuts, and one rope so we had no choice but to summit. Taking away the comfort and security of the option to bail adds a tone of seriousness to the undertaking, as we wouldn’t be able to get down easily if something went wrong. Or we could find ourselves climbing exhausted through the night, or be forced to sleep on route. But there is something in the spirit of Yosemite Valley that whispers in the wind that carves around those granite walls, and says, “go forth, take that chance,” and imbues you with not a sense of recklessness, but a sense of boldness — following in the footsteps of those pioneers of climbing history who dropped their ropes and gunned for the summit no matter what it took.
The air was crisp and cold as we hiked silently up the steep approach in the morning dark. I racked up at the base as the sky slowly turned a lighter shade of indigo, and led the first three free climbing pitches by headlight. By mid-morning we were four pitches up the route and suddenly not alone. Parties seemed to appear out of nowhere below us, all eager to make their own ascents of the same route — arguably the most popular big wall in Yosemite besides the Nose. I was stumbling a bit, finding it hard to get in a rhythm with the awkward traversing terrain, confused about when to leave gear and when to back clean it, trying to anticipate what would be easier for the follower to clean and what I was comfortable with for my own safety. I stood up warily on a micronut, and feeling nervous and off balance, blindly placed a cam into a lip, yanked it a couple times and called it good. 10 seconds later I was upside down, having whipped on my daisy chain when my cam blew, feeling the awkward and jerking sensation of a fall onto a short piece of webbing instead of the more comfortable rope falls I was used to taking. I felt stupid, and frustrated. I had taken a fall on the easiest aid route in Yosemite, a route that was well within my climbing abilities, in front of an audience of people who were waiting impatiently behind for me to climb faster. My aiders were constantly tangled around my daisies, I struggled to gain balance while trying to get higher in the steps of my ladders, lunging for bolts that always seemed just out of reach, I back cleaned too much or didn’t back clean enough, and scolded myself for not learning how to short fix, feeling like I was wasting time sitting at the belay doing nothing after I had gained it and fixed the line.
Meanwhile Annie was having a crisis of her own. She had to pee so badly she stopped mid-pitch, hung on her jumars, apologized to the parties above and below her, and proceeded to relieve herself into an empty Gatorade bottle attached to her harness. “Oh my god, I still have to pee so bad,” she exclaimed when she reached me at the top of the sixth pitch, apologizing quickly to the two ladies that were sharing the ledge with us while yanking down her pants. I finally understood why everyone talks about how routes on El Capitan always reek of piss — I had always assumed it was because of the sheer traffic, the hundreds of people a year attempting to ascend the giant, which of course was true. But I had never myself been on a route so equally sheer, so exposed, with bolted anchors hanging in space and barely a ledge or purchase for your feet. There was no vegetation on a face so steep, and no shade from the sun. It was stark, blank, piercing white stone. This all means that there’s never an easy place to relieve yourself, made especially harder for those of the female variety. So every little ledge with enough of a surface on it to extend yourself from the belay and pop a squat is pretty much guaranteed to have that sweet and sour stench of ammonia. And sometime in your big wall climbing career, chances are very very high that you’ll experience a golden shower from high above yourself, which had apparently happened to the party of two below us the day before, Annie relayed to me as they had pleaded her not to accidentally do the same. It was all part of the experience.
It was mid-afternoon when we switched lead blocks. Annie cast off onto the thin C1 splitter, and we drew closer to the final pitches of free climbing to the summit. The parties behind us had disappeared, one of them bailing and the others fixing lines to a certain height and then rapping down to spend the night on Dinner Ledge to climb the route in two days. The sun was sinking lower over the valley, and by the time we entered the chimney pitches I was bonking. I wanted to mindlessly jumar and clean, but the angle was too low and the terrain too awkward, and so I had to switch into free-climbing mode and make my seizing muscles work again.
Soon it was dark, and I led the last, crumbling pitches to the top, slung a tree and belayed Annie to the summit as the lights of the valley below us sparkled like a small city. It was 8pm, and we still had a long descent ahead of us. The notorious North Dome Gully — a maze of steep trail that snaked in and out next to a treacherous cliff, with exposed slab and tricky route-finding.
After an hour of searching for its devious entryway, a sheer, sandy hill with a hint of a trail dangerously close to the edge of a cliff, we sat down, delirious and disheartened. We’d both been down the gully before, but it had been awhile, and our memories were foggy, our headlights dim. “What if… we just slept here?” Annie suggested. The thought had never occurred to me. I had had long days before to be sure, summiting cliffs and mountains as the sun was setting, trudging miles in the dark back to the car, house, campsite. But I had never been presented with the possibility that waiting until dawn to get down could actually be the safest and most logical option. So it was an easy decision to make. Wait until morning, and avoid spending most of the night getting lost and scared on dangerous terrain. “Let’s go find us a cave then!” I exclaimed, sitting up and slinging the rope over my shoulder. We laughed, making light of the situation, chatting about how we were lucky it wasn’t even that cold as we looked around for shelter amongst the boulders for the night.
But as we giggled trying to find good spooning positions, lying on the rope for insulation and draping my one thin jacket over our upper bodies to trap heat, the cold of the mid-October night set in. We suffered that night. Shivering uncontrollably for hours, wishing we could fall asleep just to make time go faster. With no way to make a fire, and no extra layers besides our sheet-thin wind jackets, our bodies seized in pain from cold that settled itself mercilessly into our bones.
Everyone has stories about their first big wall experiences. “It took us three weeks to do that route,” my friend Taylor would later tell me, “we kept taking way too long, had no idea what we were doing, and had to keep coming back and trying again.” Or our friend Lauren who told us it took her and her team the whole day to do the first three pitches, so they bailed and she didn’t attempt it again for awhile. Big walls, funnily enough, are big undertakings. It was only apt, I thought as the morning light finally started to color the sky, and we walked down the gully swiftly and easily, that my first experience have some sort of story, some obstacle overcome to go along with it. My first big wall and my first shiver bivy – hallmarks in any seasoned climber’s career. Some would call you crazy, and others would nod in agreement, when you wake up from a night of suffering and the next day feel like you can’t wait to do it all over again.
