Our trip was going swimmingly, we had done a load of free climbing including a fantastic day out on royal arches a rather straight forward 19 pitch route (after the 1st pitch chimney) involving everything from cracks to face climbing and a pendulum thrown in for good measure, all this with the impressive back drop of half dome. It came to pass that blindly assuming everyone from boulder Colorado
Anyway on this particular day we checked the weather forecast which to our delight gave only 30% chance of storms. We had our sights set on a few single pitch aid routes at the base of El cap this was all part of our master plan of getting on a big wall (lurking fear) by the end of the week. Off we trotted like good little school boys up the path to our days education, today’s lesson ….. YOU KNOW NOTHING!
After a few false starts on awkward ground that really we would have freed had it been on a route, we set off up a rather steep thin corner crack/ chimney thing, the aid proved delightfully thought provoking and profanity inducing, two and half sweaty hours later Matt arrived at the belay fixed the ropes for me to clean the pitch. We both flirted with the notion that our preparation for this trip may have had the odd weak spot, if challenged we could have defended this conclusion with a compendium of amusing anecdotes that had taken place over the past few days. Anyway we decide that Andy Kirkpatrick’s approach of “fail… fail again better” was our best course. So I set of up that same pitch after cleaning it with the sole purpose of learning from the difficulties I could see Matt had encountered and to improve on his time even if just by a second.
Things were actually going to plan; I felt that I had dispatched the awkward chimney with relative speed and minimal swearing, and seemed to be making progress on the corner above… than Matt muttered the immortal words “I think you might want to come down mate?” that was my 10 minute warning before Thor himself unlashed his full fury the captain. Later while running like our lives depended on it back the to the car it became evident that we were not the only ones have a bit of an epic time, it began to rain climbing equipment, teams high on the face in the teeth of the storm were clearly in a fight for survival and were dropping all sorts of kit in the process (crabs, nuts, aiders).
We felt morally obliged to collect this kit and to claim it as our own, so that we would remember these warriors and tell their tale! It turns out that earlier in the day Matt had been chatting to a local who had told him if the forecast says 30% chance of storms it means 100% chance of storms!
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