All I want is to slog again, intoxicated by monotonous and inexorable upward movement, to watch my boots routinely yet in my half hypoxiated mindset fascinatingly come into and fall out from a view otherwise filled only with a brightness that burns, pausing only to watch my friend find his way up to me, or glancing up from the snow to see his silhouette above, waiting for me to do the same.
It is more than two weeks after we have returned from our trip, and I'm still reeling. While others I know spent their spring breaks in Hawaii or New York or Fiji or other exotic locales, I took the week off only to go three hundred miles away from beloved Berkeley, to some small towns that few could care even the least bit about--to a desert, a little green church, fractured rock and roads that aren't mapped unless we do it ourselves. All this nothingness and yet a week later I'm still trying to sort it out. I, nor Michael or Yossi or Hamid who came with me, had not expected this place to hit us as it did, or to leave us so hollow when we left. We didn't do anything we hadn't planned to do; in fact we did far less than we mapped out on paper back in Berkeley. And yet something clicked to make the experience more than the sum of... I'm still not sure I grasp the effect.
I wasn't even supposed to have this break. I certainly could have been used at work, and Mike already had plans to spend the week ski touring in Yosemite. But somehow I concocted an idea that it was imperative that the two of us host a formal Cal Hiking Club Spring Break trip to the East Side (of the Sierra): to do all the things that are so hard for a poor Berkeley resident to do on a weekend when all the passes are closed--ice climbing, rock climbing, winter camping, alpinism, ski and snowboard descents, desert hotspringing, world class boulder problems. The fact that we knew as little as we did about so many of these endeavors only heightened the obvious need for this trip to occur and of us to be the ones to make it happen.
With Jeremy in New Zealand, Kelly in Utah, and other hiking club stalwarts just returning and still puking from a climbing trip to Red Rocks, Mike and I decided to open the trip up to two CHAOS newcomers, Hamid Aghdaee and Yossi Farjoun. The former, 19, was trying to transfer to Berkeley--Computer Science--and was relatively new to rock while completely green to snow sports of any sort. The latter just arrived for grad school at Cal in Math, having climbed often and everywhere, worked for a climbing gym and having placed in national competitions. But being from Israel he too had little snow experience, aside from having taken up resort snowboarding over this past winter. For what it's worth, native New Zealander Mike is in his penultimate year at Cal in Math, and me--I'm just a Midwesterner dropped in California like a seven year old in legoland, a guy with a job, trying to figure out who I am like everyone else.
Mike had a conference in Tahoe the first weekend of the trip, so the other three of us decided to spend Saturday resort skiing at Kirkwood to sort of feel each others' personalities and abilities out, and to remind ourselves--at least in my case--that after 10 plus days on the slopes this year, my telemark is still as tentative and weak as a cheap horse. Looking back we can hardly understand what could have motivated us to spend time at a resort when everything we do over the course of the rest of the trip was so much more natural and at the same time more interesting and enjoyable. And yet as I reflect I remember, with wet eyes, how wonderful it seemed at the time: Yossi and I managing to accidentally find ourselves in the expert chutes, and "accidentally" find ourselves out of bounds--surfing through snow still virgin at the season's end, yipping like boys chasing girls.
At day's end we left for Grover Hot Spring State Park just outside Markleville, a park which in this picture of a trip was a garish marring. The overly developed campsites, and moreover the pool they builtover the springs--and charged for!--was a disgrace to it's setting, a delicate snow-sop meadow not yet green, protected by huge and snow-sluffing ridges. Fortunately a walk along a snow-banked creek in this environ, and Yossi's fine dinner of potatoes and onions, lulled us into slumber, out under stars breath of pines, of course. Such was our tranquil state, of course, only until until Mike arrived at whatever ungodly hour it was, bringing the rain with him. Up went the tent for the only poor weather of the trip.
It is expected that poor narration aside there are certain of our experiences on this trip can be directly appreciated by the reader--yes snow and sunsets are pretty, yes hotsprings are pleasing, or snowboarding thrilling. And yet--as much as we absorbed as we had doing and seeing everything we did and saw--what made the trip, as it were, was what fell in the cracks, what seldom makes its way into this report and in fact seldom is even remembered except in a conglomerate smile.
What reminds me of this fact now is a scene that changes the shape of my face to look back on: that of Mike, arriving at the campground from his conference, wandering around looking for our site; it being by his and my flickering our Tikka headlamps back and forth that we found each other. So trivial, and yet--perhaps in part because it _was_ so trivial, there was such a darlingness in that after all Mike's and my preaching the Tikka gospel to others who couldn't care less about a silly piece of gear, it should prove central to our finding each other. Sharing this with Michael, or later sharing whatever the moment might be with whomever might be there to appreciate it, such is the very nectar of life.
The next morning we awoke to the cobalt that would greet every morning hence--the warm, glowing, warming glow of the ever sunny, sunning Sierra sky, as my friend describes--the perfect weather we're almost ashamed to so regularly enjoy in the California mountains. What we also awoke to which wasn't quite so regular was Steve Schneider. You likely don't know man, unless you you've followed climbing even a little bit in the last twenty years. Nor did I, except vaguely by reputation: an international climbing legend and Bay Area local who still holds records in Yosemite and has put hard and beautiful routes up in Patagonia and other places I only visit in sleep. He was out back country skiing and happened to camp right next to us (along with Les Wilson, a first generation Yosemite climbing pioneer, the type Steve looks to the way the rest of the world looks to Steve), and he also happened to be a regular guy, in fact inviting us over next week to the American Alpine Club's Spring get-together, which of course some of which went to had had a fabulous and eye opening time and I could write an entire report just from my experiences there. He called me later to remind me of the party and offer directions; I somewhat giddily left his message on my machine for posterity.
We dawdled that morning. As I remember it Yossi and I kicked, then dragged, then kicked and dragged Mike and Hamid to the cars. But that may not have been quite accurate. The goal was to climb Monitor Pass (in our cars, but even this was a feat) and head for the east side of Yosemite to Lee Vining Canyon and the only decent ice climbing in the state.
We were headed for ice, but whether we would find it was a huge and important question which we had no idea how to answer until we were just upon it. Easily the most scarce and precious commodity on our trip, its existence was also the only way to validate the obscene dollar amount I'd just spent on ice tools. Though some years the ice lasted into July and some flows don't even generally form until April, this had been an unseasonably warm March, and a strange snowfall pattern resulted in an even stranger melting pattern; in short, there was very little chance of ice. If that was not bad enough, Lee Vining canyon, as the premier--some have said only--ice climbing crag in the state (and even here, the ice flows not from a spring or creek but unnaturally from an ever leaky Edison water main) also is known to sport the busiest parking lot, and therefore the longest waits for routes. It was with all this in mind--the horror stories of a hundred CHAOS horrid storiers--that we pulled into an almost barren lot Sunday around noon. Fearing the worst but resolved to look for ourselves nevertheless, we trudged up the picturesque Lee Vining Creek of an approach to a canyon which--to dispense with romance for once in the report, had three marvelous flows of ice running down its south, just under vertical wall. The most easterly looked steep, thin, and with a small crack bisecting its upper and lower sections. The middle flow was huge and solid, steep on the left and lower angled as one moved west, with some notable hollows and vertical sections. The west flow was magnificently varied, sporting a lower section of--depending on your chosen route--either thin or pillared or shallow climbing, then a few meters of trudging, and followed by one's choice of a perfectly formed vertical blue tower, or some delicate thin climbing.
Except for my very meager experiences on ice and Mike's only slightly more, we were not experienced ice climbers by _any_ means. We looked at these flows for a good while before deciding what to do about them--rather as a motley collection of boys who would never be varsity lettermen look over upon the cheerleading squad and make all sorts of absolutely absurd decisions about which girls they could have and would or would want to. "I'm more of a pillar man, myself," I would randomly think to myself, "I don't go in for that verglas stuff, but I really appreciate a good bulge; I'll take the one on the right, and you guys can fight over the ones on the left," And of course what made the matter funny was that there was no reason to think that any of us could have any of what we were lusting over.
There were only two other parties in the canyon--and one crazy soloist. Mike and I headed to the head of the left of the middle flow to set up a top rope. (In case you're wondering, it was not so much due to poor ice conditions as to our own inexperience and cowardice that we lead nothing and top roped everything.) Once set, there's little one can say about what went on. As much as I like to ramble, there certain aspects of outdoor activities and aesthetics I just don't seem able to translate into words, nor have I found others to be able to, nor am I sure that it's desirable to try, and for that reason I'll pass over much of what passed through us as we made our way up this crazy frozen surface. Suffice it to say, Yossi climbed fast, Mike slow, Hamid wrestled with the ice tools he was holding for the first time, and I instinctively looked for the steepest, thinnest, stemmiest and most delicate features, and that fact was I think not lost on my poor belayer. The ice was so warm--you could see the water flowing beneath it in thin sections--that we began setting goals for ourselves--swing as little as we could, use tool pockets left by others, and so on. Arbitrary, yes, but good practice and such great fun, nonetheless.
Greg says I still don't know what ice climbing is all about; it supposed to be freezing and howling, where brittle ice which you've bashed your bloody knuckles into time and time again doesn't finally support your tool, but finally shears off in a sharp dinner plate to fall on your belayer. All I've ever experienced has been beautiful and benign, an anomaly I'm happy to continue.
Not having actually started climbing until two in the afternoon, we had to leave the ice after one climb each; we broke down the anchor and trundled back to our cars. It was decided by "the group"--grumble grumble says the dictator Mark--that we'd camp that night forty miles south of the canyon in the Whitmore Hot Springs area. Getting there well past dark, as has been the case every other time I've bivvied at the springs en route to some east side destination, we tried in vain to find this "other spring" that Mike had heard of, this mythic alternative to the spring we've traditionally patronized (an ensconced tradition since, as I said, we always arrive late). Since Carolyn is reading this I'll pass over more quickly than we did at the time the ups and downs and ins and outs of the roads we traveled looking for this spring; suffice to say, perhaps, they made for the most thrilling and technical part of our trip.
Abandoning the wild goose chase of a search we eventually settled in at our old stand by spring, and, well, for all my grumbling about going so far out of our way, I can't admit but that it was a very good time. They say that the desert hot springs are a wonderful way to relax one's mind and body after a day of East Side exertions, and I--looking up at the stars, wondering if one or another shooting was shared in sight with a friend, or my own private joy--agree. So too did the folks we met that night--one discussing his bid for the Eric Fischer grant so he might clean up El Cap, another lamenting over the fate of her fav gorgeous doctor she met climbing. Stuff to tug the heart-strings. When it was finally time to remove ourselves I was no longer grumbling that we'd come so far to soak. Word to the wise, though: you're on a road trip. You've brought three jackets and a first aid kit the size of Kansas. Take a full size towel instead of your useless swimmer's chamois.
Up earlier next morning. As memory serves me Yossi and I'd pacted to wake each other if we arose early--which meant of course that he woke me--and while he tried his best to do his yoga in the cold, sandy wind, I struggled not to photograph him--damn photogenic boy--before a Mt. Morrison bathed in a pink first light.
Same empty parking lot, same reasonable approach, we set the anchor slightly further west on the same flow, and Hamid settled in to ascend while Yossi and I played with ice screws and prepared me for my first lead on ice, or at all for that matter. Hamid looked ever so much better than he had a day ago--perhaps because he'd dug himself into "Freedom of the Hills" the previous night, or perhaps because the rhythm and ease of the climb wove itself into his muscles as he doubtlessly replayed the scene over and over all sleepless night long like a girl after her first waltz. In any case, once down I took the sharp end, I must confess significantly dulled by the fact that I was not truly leading, but only pulling a rope in mock lead--while still on TR--to get a feel for the techniques involved. There were some nice spots, a bulge (Cobra ice tools kick ass), a hollow cave, a few slightly delicate chandeliery spots. I played and experimented and no doubt bored the Hell out of everyone. But turning my screw into hollows or into liquid underflows, into rock or through white-trash ice, I developed that day an appreciation of why people don't trust ice protection.
All sorts of things went so much more slowly than planned that we were in danger of, despite our early start, having only two climbs each the whole day, and in fact only one for me. Discussion ensued about coming back the next day, but the crack in the eastern flow was larger than before, the rocks on the approach more exposed; it looked like we may have seen already the last day of ice for the season.
As it so happened, however, the crew of Oregon boys who were playing on the lusty western most flow were almost done for the day, and in my audaciousness (desperateness) I asked if I might have a tour with their rope. Sure, they said, so long as I would go last and break down their anchor/ bring their rope down for them. So this route. This route. I hardly knew how to describe it to my friends afterward, hoping not to frustrate them for having missed out on a climb which was so much better than anything they'd sunk into. And yet it was so, so aesthetic. At least for me, admittedly green to this whole ice climbing thing, it was perfect. I spent two days watching other folks move up this flow and deciding I had better ways do do this and that, so that when I finally tied in I just flowed--looking for the steep, thin, bulgy sections, heel hooking, taking the final pillar head on with a wonderful inward calm and outer precision; I swung seldom and slight, and when I reached the top the Oregon boys seemed as impressed as I was sick with elation. As icing on the cake (to my perverted mind), when I went to rapell the rope got stuck so I had to ascend the rope to take care of rappel matter. This isn't a big deal to anyone who's been in this situation before--it's more of an annoyance--but for me it marked a slight turn in my mountain career from that of a problem maker to one who can sometimes solve them as well. And it was as fun to climb/ ascend the rope as it was the day before to climb with no tools up the day before. And since all was taken care of and we were back at the cars before dark, all was well in the end. It was yet another example of what would impress me all throughout the trip: that though by no means did everything on the trip go right or according to plan, things every single time went wrong in such a manner that we were glad things turned out as they did. It again seemed God was looking down with a smile.
That night we spent at the hot springs--same spring as before with the same calming effect--The Tub, the locals called it.
Tuesday morning we split up. Groceries were needed--now food buyer Yossi knows how easily four guys can go through a box of cereal in the morning and still be hungry--so Mike and Hamid went off to do that while Yossi and I--oh, it's so exciting to relate and relive--mapped out the geothermically active area just east of 395 and north of Benton Crossing Road, the LADWP (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which owns seemingly everything in the Owen's Valley) land marked by what every climbers knows as "the little green church" turnoff. (Yes, this church would make a divine spot for a singing retreat, but it's owned by the Sierra Nevada Aquatics Research Laboratory at UC Santa Barbara, run by a nasty old man that will never let us use it as it deserves.) Up and down, in, out, and through all manner of tiny roads and trails and memories thereof to come up with all the springs that are reported to be there, now waypointed with Yossi's GPS and scribbled out nicely on maps each of us now own. More importantly we've been in and around each road now in all shades of day that I believe we have finally developed an intuition that will hopefully get us to where one needs getting to in that desert labyrinth when we next show up in the locale to camp on our way to Death Valley or Mtn Mendel or wherever.
The springs are of the following form. Each has a source that is far too hot for humans. Locals have constructed with rocks and varying amounts of mortar baths that are fed by these springs. Some are clean, others algae ridden. Some are sulfuric. Some have valved regulated flow, and therefore temperature, while others are more natural. One of the springs has been turned into a pool run by the Whitmore school system, another is overtly touristy: in all the guide books and with new smelling guard rails and cedar paths. The others are outright gems, though, one tucked in a small canyon, another hidden under a bluff, almost all with incomparable views of the Sierra. Seldom did we happen upon any spring at any time of day and not find at least one other party bathing. And more than once did we hear a local grumble a snide request that we not put our map on the web, which to mount a small defense, we thought to do. Certainly their annoyance is understandable; apparently things were very different in the Whitmore area before a Mammoth newspaper locally published the locations of the springs, and before Rock and Ice magazine did the same for the national climbing community. Now caravans of RVs have been seen to show up in this nowhere of nowheres and roll out their astroturf for weeks on end, inviting crackdowns by the DWP folk on illegal camping. (all camping here is illegal, but usually the law is unenforced.)
After our mapping experience and lunch at the apparently famous but in Yossi's and my opinion overly hyped Schat's bakery of Bishop, we headed to the Gorge--the Owen's River Gorge--to meet up with Mike and Hamid and get some rock climbing in at California's greatest crag. Our friends had already climbed a good deal that day, and Hamid was absolutely enraptured to finally be in his element--no awkward tools and sharp, ill fitting crampons, just a boy and his rock. "Guy's, you've _got_ to do this," we heard him time and time exclaim as we readied ourselves for some rock time, "It's just like a gym," he squeals. Yossi and I exchange glances, amused and at the same time a little ashamed. Hasn't anyone told this boy that the gym is _not_ the standard to which real crags should be compared?
But as we head up a warmup 5.7 we see the profundity of the comment: this place _is_ a gym. Routes are arbitrary, route finding obvious. At times the climbing is hard and at times not. We can always look down the wall, though, and see ten or so other climbers working sections just like ours, just like in the gym. Yossi and I are less than aesthetically fulfilled. I follow him up another easy route and then take a turn at the sharp end myself. Though there's not much to say about the matter, this is my first lead. In my nervousness I fuck some things up (which I'd rather pass over to stave off embarrassment), and have to hang for a bit even though it's only a 5.8. But eventually it's over and I'm lowering off the chains. Next I utterly fail at a 10b that Yossi leads, but for the first time feel something worthwhile about this place. There's a natural, non-obvious line for once. There's an actual crux, and almost a bit of intellectual exertion necessary. Later, I'm to find more of the same on a 10a--Fear of a Black Planet, I believe. Slab climbing to half lay back to overhanging jugs, all swirling round a sheer face and sharp crack with a precision that gives me bumps to think of it. And this time I _do_ make it to the top, which excites me, as this is theoretically the most difficult climb I've done outdoors. Having made it up, my obvious reaction is to suggest that the climb was overrated, but then again, Yossi did have to hang for a bit on it; if the gods hang, it can't be that easy. Then again, leading is another animal entirely.
Leading is another animal entirely. I wasn't exactly feeling invincible in the wake of my 10a climb, but I was feeling like, when Yossi suggested it, I was more than up for another 5.8 lead. Babushka, which Mike had led earlier in the day, was apparently a pretty straightforward climb. Well, I fell. I clipped the first bolt, then the second, and then, in going for the third, I couldn't keep my hand on the rock. I knew I was at the edge; my right leg was sewing machining and could feel my hands slipping. All the thoughts Kelly gave me about controlling one's fear in such situations came to mind, but I wasn't able to make them work for me. If I could only clip this bolt I could hang safely as long as I wished. But if I didn't I could fall practically to the ground, and a lot can happen that distance. My holds were all good, but I was pumped (Yossi would later tell me all beginning leaders have a tendency to over grip) and scared and sweating and slipping. After a few increasingly desperate attempts to clip, a final do or die approach led me off the rock. Since lots of slack had been in the rope so I could clip, I fell far. Twenty feet Yossi estimated, so that at the end I was well below him, who'd shot up as I loaded the rope, and in fact I was only about four feet above ground as I came to rest. Oh, and I was upside down, having caught my leg through some slack rope on the way. Miraculously--next time I'll wear a helmet--I suffered only a slight abrasion on my forehead and a somewhat more intense laceration on my left elbow and forearm. Yossi did everything right--checking me over and bandaging me up like the EMT he was back in Israel, then soloing up to retrieve the gear. Tick lead fall number one on Mike's new rope, I guess.
Twenty foot whipper and it getting dark and all, it seemed time to head out of the gorge. Yossi and I took the wrong gully, and so had some fourth class scrambling on the way to the cars. We all kept wondering when the adrenaline would wear off I'd I'd be left with the full brunt of my pain, but a week later, with the scabs coming off my forehead and even my elbow starting to look like a normal elbow again, I haven't been bothered. I will have a nice scar, though, to remind me of my East Side trip. As far as longish lead inverted lead falls go, I think I came out about as cleanly and comfortably as one could have, and in my own perverted way am glad I had it. In fact it was oddly fascinating, and I understand why base jumpers are drawn to their game. One will do for me, though, thanks.
That night we had pasta with Yossi's homemade sauce, and soaked in, I think, Little Hot Creek spring.
Wednesday we split once more, Yossi and I to Lee Vining to give him shot at the route I'd enjoyed so much two days earlier, and Mike and Hamid to spend some more time in the gorge. As we approached, we noticed the creek crossings had become more difficult, that our previously snow-filled trail had become laced with rocks. As we neared, we noticed huge ice boulders, and looking up, that crack on the Easterly flow was no more, nor any ice that had previously laid beneath it. Everything looked a bit sketchier, but we were as yet undetered. We headed for the top of the climb to set up an anchor, and while discussing logistics heard beneath us the crack of ice shattering; a hasty glance served as a mutually reached conclusion in favor of bailing from the climb at this point.
"Oh, but please let's not leave this marvelous canyon before I've had a chance to head up around the mouth of the canyon; it looks so picturesque and I really want to know what's on the other side." Yossi gives me reign, and I head up to explore. As I get closer, avalanche danger becomes manifest. I'm not hearing much "whump" in the snow beneath me but all other signs point to slide. Yossi waits below while I make my way slowly, checking angle with every step, and cursing Mike's crampons, balling up with snow, with every other. I don't trigger an avalanche, but within about 30 feet of me a largish cornice breaks off from the cliff above and what remains of it after impact rolls past. I'd been avoiding the cliff for this very reason, but with the fall I for the first time realize that such breakage could easily trigger a slide, and while the fact that this cornice fall _didn't_ start anything should perhaps have emboldened me, being without transceiver and and knowing Yossi was without shovel left me more than a little spooked in its wake. All of this, combined with the fact that I was almost upon a small ice cliff that looked like something I wasn't going to want to climb and then down-climb left me radioing to Yossi that I was on my way down to him.
Just as I reached him, I turned around to survey, and noticed a small slab avalanche on the north side of the canyon. Different aspect, and different snow pack. Still, I was happy I was at a lower elevation, and Yossi and I got out of the canyon in a somewhat more hurried manner than in days past. Ice fall, a cornice break, and an avalanche all in the period of a few hours: this truly was the end of the season, fascinating, sad, and at times a little scary. On the way out we played with some of the ice boulders which had fallen the previous day.
Trip to Bishop to get topos, and we were soon back at Crab Cooker hot spring contriving plans for some back country the following day.
Getting all of us going was no easy task; I think this may have been the morning Yossi and I took a photo-walk around the desert, after soaking in the spring (we'd left the steaming flow on full all night long, and so took quite some time to get ourselves into the water), while waiting for Mike and Hamid to rise. Eventually they did, and we were soon at the Convict Lake trailhead.
The trip was at some level a sort of introduction for Yossi and Hamid to back country snow travel, a taste of what people would have to put up with on our climb of Mt. Tom later in the week. Posing as folks who knew far more about alpinism than we in fact did, Mike and I--decked out lightly in our randonee and tele gear respectively--made our fellow snowshoe-folk don ice axes and shovels and crampons and all manner of gear which in the end they never came close to using. I think my fanny pack weighed roughly a third of Yossi's huge contraption.
We made our way through chaparral for some time up a rather steep slope, wondering what the value was in this plodding, and of course cursing our ineffective ski crampons all the while. (I'm embarrassed to say the expense and travails I went through to get these pieces of crap to begin with. Long and entertaining story, sure, but also embarrassing to me for anyone who knows what the devices are worth.) Eventually the scene opened out onto a vast expanse of white, rolling hills framed in granite faces--McGee to the south and Morrison, Eiger of the Sierra, to the north. With our late start and slow pace--poor snowshoers post holing with every step--we didn't make it far before hitting turn around time. So we climbed a ridge and skied practically all the way to the cars, not failing to notice what a change had occurred during the course of the day. What had once been white on our way up the valley was now polka dotted with chaparral and even barren ground. Again we had been at just the right place at just the right time--late enough so that Sierra corn--ego powder they say--could carry us anywhere and make us whoop like bandits, yet a day later it would have been too spotty to bother with.
When Mike and I originally planned the trip we were considering skiing Whitney's Mtneer's route, a plan which I still insist was his hatching while he insists was mine. In any case, was scrapped pretty early upon upon finding what an extreme proposition it was, as well as finding a beautiful descent alternative in Elderberry canyon on Mt. Tom. From the north it is a perfect pyramid mountain, and Elderberry Canyon apparently boasts some relatively doable skiing for neophytes such as ourselves. We were all psyched as Hell for it.
With Tom planned for Saturday, we considered Friday a rest day. We rented a crash Pad at Wilson's East Side Sports and headed for the Happy Boulders area. And happy they are--beautiful lines, lots of accessible problems. Slabs, overhangs, sit starts, jugs, loose flakes, smooth rock, JTtree friction, it had it all on these little thirty foot rocks, so cute and low, so aptly named. Excepting Yossi, who flashed the problem and went on to look at more interesting rock, we all lusted over and fixated on a V2 problem called Monkey Hang. Sit down start with a rather large dyno to a bomber hold. Then bringing the other up and setting up feet for another huge move about two feet under a ledge. Then another lock off while you bring the hands together. After that comes a series of heel hooks and jungle gym climbing, with feet higher than hands for six or so moves after which one finds easier climbing to exit. At least this is how it is suppose to go. None of us were actually able to link the first to the second move, and only a few were able to get all the moved even disjointedly. But an absolute blast was had, and I guess that's what we were there for.
And Michael--my hero upon joining the hiking club a year and some bit back, since I like to think my friend as well, and still and always my hero--looked so beautiful on the rock that day; I hope hope hope that I do not soon forget the image I have of him on this boulder, upside down, giving over to the problem as only one with as much integrity as he has can give. I can't describe how blessed I feel to be able to climb with my heros and friends at the same time.
Meanwhile, we got some pretty important beta from two climbers who lived at the base of Tom: the snow's gone and it's a two hour approach.
Mike and I hadn't come for longish approaches; we flitted through 50 Classic Sierra Ski Descents at Wilson's, and decided our best bet would be to trek up Esha canyon toward Mt. Morgan, summitting if possible, but if we didn't no big deal; we'd just turn around start the descent from however high we got. We headed home to get some sleep before this culminating climb.
That night, from our site by Crab Cooker springs, we saw the northern lights.
Up early. At the trailhead at 7:30. We hiked up first through the avalanche debris at the small canyon moraine, and then opened into a beautiful alpine valley. I tried my very bestest to reach goal number one, a small scree rise in the middle of the valley, before the sun did. I tried so hard so hard so hard. But the sun damn it to Hell beat me by the least bit, and I was slightly crushed.
After the scree came a succession of alpine lakes, the second of which laid beneath Old Man's Bowl, a popular back country ski location and pretty indesribably impressive juxtaposition of steep rock and steep snow. And the third was just under ... I won't even describe the effect, except to say that I wasn't planning to be so taken back by these ridges and glacier and snow and peaks: the Sierra rolled out before us. After the lakes came the never ending steep snow field, which we did our best to stay to the east of as--even so late in the season--it was entirely untracked. Giddiness at the thought of making those first tracks infected us.
Above the snow field laid a barren snow plateau, just to the southeast of which laid a shitty pile of talus which was Mt. Morgan; the map confirmed it again and again. Perhaps earlier in the season it would have been an appealing knife-edge snow ridge, but now, well, it wasn't. I voted for abandoning the peak altogether and traversing the snow field to the various ridges in the area so as to look out over the western Sierra. But Yossi had never been to an alpine summit before, and Mike had it in his mind to bag the peak since, after all, it was a named peak and certainly had a Sierra Club summit register somewhere, so up we went. We ended up climbing the wrong peak and so had to traverse north a bit along the ledge, where we found--whoopie--the summit log. The log actually turned out to be worth finding, for it had not had any entries yet for the year, and in fact only two entries separated our climb from that of Lizzy, our famed and favorite CHAOT who is seeking to climb all 300 some odd the Sierra peaks she can. Clouds looked to be coming in, so after a few shots, including a final one Yossi insisted taking of me on a small overhanging ledge on the summit block, I survival skied down to where Mike had cached his skis, and from there the two of us took off across the plateau to where the skiing began in earnest.
As before, I'm at a loss as to how to describe certain things that occurred on this trip; I hardly comprehend them myself, and to try to translate them is pure folly. Whether because we had worked so hard to get to the top, or because we were virginity from the slope, or perhaps just because we had invested so much emotional energy in enjoying it, the descent was fabulous. It was more than a bit tricky in my tele gear, as it was for Mike, feeling his way into his new gear. (Yossi of course had no problem, bastard.) That tentativeness, combined with our skiing through every possible avalanche zone singly to avoid all being caught in one slide, made for some slow going. We were about two thirds of the way down, with clouds approaching and the snow already beginning to crust over for the evening when Yossi and I decided to take shots of an approaching Mike. Yossi still had my camera from his shot of me at the summit... except that he didn't. Nor did I have it as he thought; the quickly arrived upon conclusion was that, of course, it was still on the summit boulder. There was no going up again now; we might be able to go up again tomorrow, Sunday, the day we were supposed to drive back to Berkeley, but for now it was too late in the day, the clouds were too close, and we were too far down the mtn.
To make a long story short, all through hot springing and dinner (at a real restaurant in Mammoth, in fact) Yossi and I apologized to each other profusely, taking blame for ourselves alone and promising each other that we'd go up the next morning. Mike was a Godsend that night setting us up for a quick and light assault from our campsite just beneath the climb. When morning arrived, however, I was not to be stirred, and it was only by Yossi's Herculean will (and perhaps kicks) that I managed to find myself out of my bag at 5:30.
Not that sore but plenty tired, we followed in yesterday's footsteps, only having started earlier we were excited to be able to walk on the snow the entire way w/o snowshoes. (I brought shoes and snowboard reckoning that I'd have more control and be able to descend faster than with tele garb.) Blah Blah Blah we made it to the top, wrote our unbelievable and easily fabricatable tale in the summit register, and found the camera on the very rock it had been left, having fallen on it's side in the night but otherwise suffering no damage whatsoever. God love Sierra weather, and He loves me, if leaving my camera in perfect working order is any indication.
We snowboarded down. Two days earlier when we saw the northern lights I thought of the experience as a sort of culmination of our trip, God smiling on us. The next day when Mike and Yossi and I hit the summit block, that two seemed to nicely frame this lovely trip, started in the resort, and ending in a back country descent requiring so much mountain knowledge and obviously tying us together greatly. And yet coming down that slope again Sunday, when it happened, took me far outside myself erasing my insecurities and practical worries with each swath of my board in the white snow. In the moment, they call such things, and it was. It was waltzing. Singing. Communion.
I fell a number of times at first, remembering how to deal with this awkward contraption strapped to my feet for the first time since coming to California, and my God practically for the first time since leaving Michigan. But soon my legs found themselves and we let ourselves go, down an endless wave. Yossi and I surfed together, weaving within each other, feeling each other's and our own spendrift entangle and overtake us. Crying inwardly as we teared up outwardly. We were perfect in a perfect place.
Finally down, we hardly knew what to do with what was left of us. The descent had been incredibly draining, and took it's toll on our boards a well. (Three inches of my metal edge was displaced from the board completely.) Fortunately the exigencies of getting to Berkeley kept us in line. We were soon packed and in the Little Hot Spring soaking up one last precious moment before hitting the road. Then, like teary children leaving their summer camp, the bee hives and sunburns and the overturned canoe and the friends we weren't old enough to know we were lying to when we said we'd write and stay together forever, we left this world behind. We saw our whole trip in reverse--Whitmore Springs, Mammoth, Lee Vining, Markleville, Monitor Pass (what had been completely white was now completely brown), Kirkwood, the Sierra foothills, the central valley, In-n-Out in Tracy, and somewhere around midnight, accounting for the time change, home bittersweet Berkeley.
Yossi spoke for us all when he wrote: that's it....now I'm tired, blistered, bruised, with cramped muscles and some skin scraped off...but you won't get my smile of my face for a long long time.....
