Let the climbing commence!

On Monday morning (September 5th, Labor Day), Aaron and I awoke before dawn, and left his parents, sleeping in the comfort of their sleeping bags in the housekeeping camp, to begin our climb. We drove in complete darkness, listening to U2, our traditional pre-climb music, as we went. We parked at the edge of the meadows, donned our harnesses, packs, ropes, and rack, and started hiking to the base. We left the big pig in the car, but brought Little Miss Piggy, temporarily re-packed with two extra ropes and a little water and food for the day. We hiked quickly to the base, and carefully scrambled up the fourth-class terrain that we had scouted the previous afternoon to reach the base of pitch 1. We arrived just after daybreak, and began climbing almost immediately.

This photo shows Aaron leading pitch 1. He free-climbed the first third or so of the pitch, then started aiding when the climbing got more difficult. After a few minutes, I started hearing voices from below me. “Great,” I thought, “We're not going to have the route to ourselves after all.”

Eventually, one of the guys I had heard arrived at my belay. He was pretty friendly, and didn't seem to mind too much that we were ahead of him. His name was Brendon, and he informed me that his partner had the same name. Before Aaron had finished the pitch, the second Brendon arrived. We chatted a bit, and I found out that they were both from Salt Lake City, and that one of them was an engineer for Black Diamond. He had a bunch of new Black Diamond gear that hadn't been released yet, including some pretty awesome TCU's that I hadn't even heard about.