In one of my classes, we have been discussing self-evident truths. Lots of things in this world are self-evident: rain is wet, Maine is cold in January, M&Ms melt in your mouth. Climbing has its own self-evident truths: falling is bad, rock is hard, and big cliffs take a long time to climb. Or so I have always thought.
Yosemite Valley, California is the Mecca of American rock climbing. Every May and October the walk-in campground fills up with climbers so quickly they begin lining up at 5 a.m. Climbing’s Golden Age occurred here, and new generations come year after year to try and climb the parks huge walls.
East coast climbing maxes out at 1,200 feet. The World Trade Towers were 1,368 and 1,362 feet, respectively. There are cliffs in Yosemite Valley larger than the two of them put together.
The climbing there is famous worldwide. The Valley draws climbers from hundreds of countries. Among the campfires languages change from English to French to Japanese. Nearby granite formations jut thousands of feet into the air. This isn’t just an American playground; it’s the world’s favorite climbing area.
Since the Valley is a rite of passage for every climber, I had to go. I left on my birthday, the last day of September. My muffler fell off in Massachusetts, my stereo died in New York, but I made the 3,000-mile drive in three days. I pulled into Yosemite Valley at 9 p.m. The stars were barely showing -I could only about a dozen. Then I realized they weren’t stars, they were headlamps: climbers on the side of El Cap arranging gear for the next day’s climbing.
These walls aren’t like anything in the East. It takes days to climb them. Sleeping bags, water, and food have to be hauled up the cliff. It is camping but in a vertical world.
Climbs have Roman numeral ratings, I through VI. Grade I climbs take an hour. Grade IIIs take a day. Grade Vs take two days. Grade VIs take four, six days, sometimes up to ten. A week on a wall is exhausting and dirty. A climb of this length requires a pulley to haul gear up the cliff, a bag to crap in so you can carry it off (no mud falcons-park rules), and a five-foot by six-foot hanging cot called a portaledge, a double bed for 2,000 feet up.
I recuperated for my first full day in the park. Sitting in a meadow watching parties slowly move up El Cap, I thought, “no way.” For hours they crept upward, often imperceptibly. It was self-evident I was not getting on a wall that big.
Yosemite also has grade IVs, or long day climbs, that only require an early morning start and a descent by headlamp. That’s what I wanted. A grade IV would be about eight pitches of climbing, or about 1,000 feet. 1,000 feet, no problem; 2,000 feet, no way.
I’ve gone on tons of grade IVs. They were phenomenal routes, with names like “The Central Pillar of Frenzy,” “South By Southwest,” “Serenity Crack,” and “Sons of Yesterday.” They were challenging but doable climbs. Day after day was perfect weather; day after day was a perfect route.
In the East, climbers learn to climb whenever the sun is out. It could rain for the next two weeks. In California, sun and good weather are self-evident.
Then something happened. Those huge cliffs, larger than skyscrapers, started to look smaller. My hands, by no means soft after a summer of climbing, were calloused in all the right places for the wide cracks of Yosemite. Most importantly, the prospect of jumping on something that might take days didn’t absolutely terrify me anymore.
My friend Jay was itching to get on a wall. I signed up, and we chose the Leaning Tower, the steepest big wall in the country. It has a fourteen-pitch grade V route, and it’s at 110 degrees.
The first day we did four pitches. The type of climbing, the amount of gear we had to carry, and the party of three in front of us all slowed us down. The belay ledges smelled like urine from 30 years of climbers relieving themselves on them, and the wall was too steep for rain to wash the stench away. We spent the night on the portal edge, head to toe, after eating a dinner of cold Spaghetti-Os. I’ve never slept so well; the 12 hours of hiking in, climbing, hauling, and hanging in a harness had left me worked.
I woke up at 5 a.m. and peered over the edge of the portaledge. Below was 1,100 feet of air. I’d been 1,100 feet up before, but not on anything dead vertical-much less overhanging. The trees looked tiny, like something off of a model train set. The environment was absurd, and we were living in it.
The rest of the route was relatively uneventful. I sang at the top of my lungs as I climbed above 1,500 feet of open space. One of the guys ahead of us asked how I could be so relaxed; Jay laughed: I only sing when I’m scared to death.
A day later we topped out. We hiked off the top and back to the car. My first big wall was a success.
A few days and a few routes later, I wanted it again: 1,500 feet between me and the ground again. Jay was up for it. We started thinking of an objective.
Half Dome is the most recognizable feature in Yosemite Valley. Look on the back of the newly minted California quarter and there is a depiction of the monolith. It’s exactly like the name says: a giant dome, cloven in half, with a dead vertical northwest face. It’s 2,500 feet, second in size only to El Cap. Unlike El Cap, which is situated on the valley floor, Half Dome is on the valley rim, seven miles away and 5,000 feet higher, and subject to sudden storms. It sounded perfect.
The Regular Route is a grade VI, with 24 pitches. It has 700 feet of chimneys, which are psychologically the hardest part of the route. A chimney is any crack you can get your whole body into. These chimneys are from four to six feet wide, meaning climbers have to spread their legs and paste their feet on each walls. Bellow it’s 1,800 feet to the ground.
It was self-evident that this wall was fucking huge. Three weeks earlier, I wanted nothing to do with something that size. Seven months earlier, I would have laughed if someone had suggested Half Dome. But we figured we’d go all out: we decided to do the route in one day.
There is a craze in Yosemite to do multi-day walls in one push, carrying less and moving faster. Climbers have been practicing the techniques with increasing frequency for years on larger and larger objectives. It involves carrying water, food, climbing gear and nothing else. No sleeping out, no long lunches, just moving nonstop as fast as possible.
Ideas like this had never occurred to me where the biggest cliffs are 1,000 feet. I had always known big routes would take days, but here, among these granite giants, such self-evident truths began to erode.
We did a few practice climbs, and our times were great. Thirteen-pitch grade IVs took four hours. We thought maybe we could pull it off. We hiked up to the shoulder of Half Dome and set up camp. The climbing would start at 5:30 next morning.
At 6:30a.m., we started up the wrong crack. As the sky lightened, it became obvious we were off route. We retreated and looked for the correct start.
We found it as the sun rose at 7 a.m. A party had already started and was four pitches up. I looked at Jay; to get caught behind someone on this route could mean a night out, something we weren’t prepared to deal with.
“What the hell,” he shrugged, “we’ll pass ’em.”
I bounded up the first pitch at top speed. I used every trick I knew to go faster, not caring about how I looked or what stylistic rules I obeyed, it was all about gaining altitude. Pieces of rope stuck out of cracks, sun baked and faded. I didn’t know what they were attached to, but I used them as hand holds nonetheless.
Jay came up after me, panting by the time he reached me. I shot off again. It was 7:20, and we had 2,350 feet to go until the top. No time to waste.
We caught up to the other two climbers on the fifth pitch. We knew them; we had passed them on South by Southwest several weeks before. They were trying to do the route in a day as well.
We passed them on the seventh and eighth pitch, which we were able to link. Normally, only one person climbs while the other minds the rope, but these two pitches were relatively easy, so we stretched the rope out between us and climbed at the same time, enabling us to do one less pitch. We got past the other two climbers and looked up at the chimneys.
The next 700 feet were easy but intense. I could see sleeping bags on the ground; they were the size of grains of salt. Speed was key, so I kept pushing as hard as I could.
At the top of pitch 17 was a big ledge where people spend the night when doing the route in the normal fashion. Our goal was to be there by 2 p.m. As I climbed up to it, I began to feel my body shake for lack of calories. I clenched my fists to steady my hands and continued upward. We sat down to eat on the ledge at 1:52. After eight minutes of rest, I took off again.
The next three pitches were the slowest of the route. They alone took two hours and ended in an uncomfortable stance lodged inside of a flaring crack 2,100 feet up. The sleeping bags on the ground were now invisible, and the other two climbers were nowhere to be seen.
Jammed inside the flare, my biceps began to cramp. I grabbed my wrists one at a time and slowly straightened my arms. After ten hours on the rock with nothing but Clif bars, energy gels and water, my body was shutting down. I popped another gel in my mouth and washed it down with a gulp of water. Only two pitches more until the summit.
Just before the top there is a ledge called Thank God Ledge. It is about the width of a sheet of paper, thirty feet long, with a two-inch crack in the back, and it allows you to skirt a 30-foot overhang. The choices are to walk across it, with a solid wall to the right and 2,400 feet to the left, or to crawl across it on all fours, with one arm deep inside the crack for a hold. I can’t remember which method I chose.
We topped out at 6 p.m. The sun was setting and the breeze picked up. We jumped up and down, hugged and snapped pictures with a cheap disposable camera. We took photo of the two of us with the Valley in the background, and then we hustled down the hiking trail back to our sleeping bags. We dined on Ritz crackers and canned sardines and felt like heroes.
Not that I believe we did it. Even now it seems self-evident that such huge rocks are not meant to be climbed. Certainly not in 11 hours by some punks from the East coast in their early twenties. Park rangers confiscated Jay’s tent for not paying for a campsite. They impounded it, along with the disposable camera we used.
I don’t have the stomach to get back on something that big again, and I’m not sure I ever did. Without the camera, I have no proof I really did it. Maybe what was self-evident is still the truth. But I have this vague recollection of my whole arm groping inside a crack for a hold 2,000 feet in the air as I crawled on my hands and knees…