Diary of an idiot Part 4

30% of the time…. It rains every time!

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 1^st 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 can move fast on rock, was an error that added a number of hours to the outing and saw us racing a storm of biblical proportions down fourteen 60m abseils. We literally were pulling the ropes through on the last abseil as the cats and dogs began to fall. Deciding that this wasn’t cooking under the stars weather we opted for the all you can eat buffet (and got our moneys worth!). We later found that the storm had buried the entrance to our tent in a foot and a half of debris (my how we laughed in the darkness while digging away the mud with our bear hands in our flip flops)

                                                  the last abseil

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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Diary of an idiot (Part 2)

Are you drunk sir?

After a sizable American breakfast, we were off just 40 minutes to the Yosemite national park…. Its on!

Thoughs who have been to the park know, that as the road comes out of the trees and you get your first glimpse of El Capitan you instantly turn in to a camera swinging, giggling tourist, and Matt and myself with out world travelled experience…. Were no different. After asking passers by to take our photo and dramatically high fiving each other (and strangers) we settled down and headed in to the park to try and sort out accommodation.

So our luck continued, at the camp reservation hut we were told at 14:30 that the fabled camp 4,( where climbers sleep in a the dirt outside the office to get a space for days) there was availability just head over and book in SWEET!!

Booking in walking around the camp and the valley for the first time was like walking amongst celebrities, there’s El Cap, there’s Half Dome, lost arrow spire.. That is the boulder with mid night lightning on, Andy Kirkpatrick has stayed here, John Baccar, Royal Robbins, Ron Fawcett, Tom Frost, Yvon Chouinard…… Everyone, climbing royalty from every country in the world, this is it we are here we have the kit, I’m feeling fit there is not much that can stop us now! (How wrong was I??).

Camp sorted time to get food, in our hast to get to the valley we had not bought food outside the national park (don’t do this the valley is expensive). Matt was feeling the strain of having driven all the way from san Francisco so I offered to take over for a bit, I was quite excited to get on the rock so I was rather …Hasty? With my driving I figured the quicker we buy food the quicker we would get a route in!! This state of mind was swiftly accompanied with flashing blue lights from behind…..

At this point in the story it’s important to point out, that when renting a car from Budget car hire it will cost £X for one driver to hire the car, to put a seconded driver on the policy the number doubles! So before the trip we talked it trough and decided to save money we would only put one driver on the policy, which was fine except that driver was currently sat in the passenger seat!!!!

After me trying to open the driver’s door to get my drivers licence from the boot, and after the police officer trying to pull out his gun to shoot me for being a terrorist who keeps his driving licence in the boot. We got on ok…. Well he accused me of being drunk, I apologized for my erratic driving style, he then read our insurance documents, at this point Matt and I were trying to work out if driving with no insurance was a fine a prison sentence or both? The officer was still rather excited from my act of terror and did not seem to read the documents properly, handed them back to us and sent us on our way. From here on things got a bit out of hand…..

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Diary of an idiot (Part 1)

This is a quick rundown of my recent trip to Yosemite, it all seemed so easy! Found Matt at the airport with no problems, we then sailed through baggage submission with nearly 50kg of kit each and no one batted an eye lid. A comfy seat with more videos than I thought possible to watch in one sitting! (It’s possible).

                                               Matt the lightweight alpinist?

There we were before we knew it in the Promised Land (through customs even though we had to lie about our U.S address... we actually had a harder time getting into morocco a few years back!!!click here to like my picture from that trip) car up graded to a frisking monster truck and we are trucking. With no map we followed our noses out of San Francisco heading roughly in the direction we thought Yosemite was (and it worked). Found a motel for the night and recharged the batteries. In the morning I called Jodie (my wife) it felt good and bad all at once, Harvey is only 5 weeks old and even though Robyn is 9 she is finding sharing the house and mums attention very hard. stay tuned for the next instalment...

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