Monday morning we woke at 5:00, hit the trail before 6:00, and we were climbing just before 7:00. I led the first pitch, a really easy one, then I linked it with the second, which involved pulling a pumpy little 5.8 roof. Aaron then linked pitches 3 and 4, and chose a lovely 5.6 straight-in hand crack over some awkward 5.7 liebacking. This brought us to the base of pitch 5, the crux pitch, with me lined up to lead, and it was barely after 8:00. So far, we were making great time, so we could take the hard pitch slow if we wanted to. I really wanted to give this pitch a shot. It would be the hardest thing that I had ever led, but because the bolts were solid and close together, I wasn't worried about falling, and I knew that if I got stuck, I could just start pulling on draws. The pitch involved tricky and delicate face climbing, straight up, for about twenty feet or less, followed by a few 5.9 moves around a roof. This was the only part of the climb that was even above 5.8. I started up, and after one small move, I backed down, realizing I needed to be a bit more clever. The climb seemed to stay mostly right of the bolts, and the guidebook indicated this as well, but to get there, I decided to move left for a move or two, then work my way over to the right. This trick worked, as did a few other clever, balancy, tricky moves later on. I made it through the whole section cleanly, albeit slowly, though at the very last move I did pull on a sling a little as I was doing a tricky mantle. After that, I traversed left easily, and placed a few pieces of natural pro before pulling the 5.9 section. The key move here also involved some trickiness, stemming my right foot way out to the right to take advantage of a small indentation. My left foot almost slipped at this point, and I thought I would fall, but I managed to hold on and pull through it. Near the top of the pitch, I spotted two nuts in the crack I was climbing. One was buried deep, and appeared thoroughly stuck, but the other came loose easily, and with a bit of finesse I was able to maneuver it out of the crack. It was a DMM Wallnut, #11. “Booooooty!” I shouted, and continued climbing. Aaron followed the pitch, and actually fell somewhere in the crux section, which surprised me.
The views from this part of the climb were spectacular, especially of El Cap. We could see the whole face of the big stone, west to east, and since we were well above the meadow and the trees, we could see everything from the top to the bottom pretty clearly. The climbing routes on Middle Cathedral probably provide the best views of the captain in the whole valley. The rest of our climb was easier, and relatively uneventful. Unfortunately, the views got worse as the valley filled with smoke from a nearby forest fire. At one point, on pitch 7 I think, I got slightly off route and ended up climbing a very dirty and loose section for thirty or forty feet. That was scary, but I lived through it. As Aaron was leading the last two real pitches, he dropped a few nuts. This is really surprising, because in nearly a decade of climbing, he has never dropped anything off a route. Apparently the DMM Wallnut that I had just bootied had a secret desire to be free, and this time it decided to take my #11 stopper with it. It almost took the #12 too, but fortunately that one came to a rest just below Aaron, and he retrieved it. He bought me a new #11 later that day. (Ironically, Corinne found a #11 stopper hanging in a tree a few days later. And guess where... at the base of Middle Cathedral. But it wasn't near the base of this route, and it also wasn't anodized, so it couldn't have been the one we dropped.)
When we reached the end of the route, we unroped and began scrambling up the scary third and fourth class gullies to the Kat Walk, our descent route. One of these gullies we dubbed the “Dirty Gully of Death”, because it was dirty and thus slippery, and if one slipped and started sliding, one would certainly go over the edge and die. When we finally reached the Kat Walk, we rested and ate some food, then started the long descent. The Kat Walk took us around to the back side of the Cathedral, where the view of the massive north face of Higher Cathedral Rock was incredible. We were now in the Cathedral chimney, a huge notch between the Higher and Middle Cathedrals, and the exposure and the echos were intense. The smoke and the smell of forest fire were also thicker now, but as we descended, the air cleared up a lot. We worked our way down the gully, with a few short rappels and a lot of boulder scrambling, and eventually, we found ourselves back in the talus covered gully that we had started the day in.