Sunrise on the summit

Once we reached the summit, our first priority was to strip off all the gear that we had been wearing continuously for three full days. I hadn't even taken off my tape gloves! We started to just pile all the gear together, but there was so much that we had to start making several piles. And this was just the gear we had on us! I finally took off my harness for the first time since Wednesday morning. Standing on level ground without a harness felt so weird... I kept losing my balance and almost falling over backwards.

We got out our sleeping bags and pads, and set them up on the most level spots we could find. Then we got all of our remaining food out of the mini-pig, and proceeded to have a feast. We had most of our lunches and snacks from the past two days, a lot of left over MRE packets from our dinners, plus one complete MRE and a bag of “power putty” that we had brought in case of emergency. Aaron put on some music with his MP3 player, just like the previous two nights, but this time we both immediately knew what to play: Coldplay, our traditional post-climb music. We split up the contents of the MRE and snacked on a bunch of the other food, while we went over our favorite moments from the last three days, and revelled in the successful completion of our biggest climbing goal.

We went to bed early, and planned to get up at sunrise to start the long hike down. I laid awake in my sleeping bag for a while, watching the stars in the clear night sky.

The next morning, we had a new seemingly impossible task before us. How the hell would we get all this gear back down? We ate as much of our remaining food as we could for breakfast, and packed away the rest as efficiently as possible. We put our harnesses back on, along with a minimal set of gear — our belay devices and jumars for rappelling, one daisy chain each for clipping ourselves in, our self-rescue kits, and a few spare carabiners. Aaron packed most of our climbing hardware into Little Miss Piggy. He would carry that, along with the portaledge, on the hike down. Meanwhile, I packed everything else — sleeping bags and pads, bivy sacks, clothes, the leftover food, the rain fly for the portaledge, and finally both ropes — into the great white whale, and prepared to hoist the giant beast onto my back. The worst part was that I wanted to leave the ropes, probably the heaviest items I had, right on top, so that they would be accessible in case we needed them for a rappel. So the whole load was horribly top-heavy. But all in all, we had divided the weight pretty evenly I think. Aaron's load might have been a little heavier with the portaledge, but it was much smaller, and not so top-heavy.

We had four remaining bottles of gatorade, and one of water. We left behind the water bottle in case some party reached the summit dying of thirst, but we emptied two of the gatorades, figuring they might spoil. We took the last two gatorades with us, one for each of us for the hike down. At about 8:00 AM, we departed the summit tree and started the East Ledges descent.