Blast Off

On Wednesday morning, we awoke well before dawn, and just as we had two days earlier, we drove in complete darkness to edge of El Cap Meadows listening to U2. We quickly hiked to the base of El Cap, donned our aid gear, and started the monotonous exercise of jumaring six hundred feet of fixed ropes in the dark. I went up first, and Aaron came up after me, dropping the first two ropes after he had ascended them. (Later that day, his parents hiked to the base and retrieved those two ropes.) The third and fourth ropes were our haul line and our lead line, the only ones we would need on the rest of the climb. After he had ascended the third rope, Aaron removed it from the anchor and brought it the rest of the way up with him. When he reached Sickle Ledge, we pulled the two ropes up and got ready to climb. Our tether to the ground, to the horizontal world, had finally been severed.

Aaron quickly re-led pitch 5, and I followed just as quickly, bringing us to the anchor where our haul bags were docked. At this point, the first light of dawn had just crept into the valley, so we removed our headlamps. We attached the brand new Petzl Swivel to the top of the haul bags, but we couldn't attach it correctly, so we had to temporarily put it on upside-down. We would be able to fix it later, as soon as we got to a decent ledge. We didn't think that this would be a problem, but as it turned out, we were dead wrong.

I led pitch 6, and linked it with pitch 7. Both of these were mostly easy free climbing. I did a few moves of “french-free” near the end of pitch 6, followed by a pretty big pendulum to start pitch 7, and a little aid at a wide section at the very end of pitch 7, but I freed the rest. The pendulum was the first real pendulum that I had done, and I really had to lower out quite a ways and run across the face to make it work. I also learned a valuable lesson here, which is to not place gear right after a big pendulum if you can avoid it. It will make it harder for your follower, and will make the rope run in a “Z” shape, causing huge rope drag.

(Note: This photo was stitched together from five pictures taken a few days earlier by Aaron's dad. The red line gives a very accurate indication of the route that we followed, starting at the beginning of pitch 5. If you zoom all the way in on this photo, you will notice that the red line is actually translucent, so you should be able to see clearly the actual features that we followed. If you know where to look, you can also make out some haul bags hanging at the end of pitch 5 or 6, and a climber on Eagle Ledge.)