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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The Road to the nose

Myself and Matt Barratt formally of Skye Guides are off to Yosemite for some big wall action this September, we have spent the last year begging borrowing and steeling anything remotely big wall related. We have also been doing a fair bit of fitness training, that and staring at pictures, guide books and YouTube so as you can imagine we are feeling pretty prepped...... I spoke to a hardened big walling friend of mine the other day for some advice on the trip:

He said you’ll be fine just make sure you get lots of mileage in with your partner before hand, so you climb as a tight unit where one knows instinctively what the other is thinking and doing even when you’re out of sight of each other...

I said the last time I rock climbed with Matt was over a year ago we did a route together on Gower?? And the next time will be in Yosemite....

Looking a bit awkward he said Well that’s ok just sort you systems out get ninja good at setting up the poterledge, while hanging in you harness do till you get your times down, do it in the wind do it in the dark.... do it lots.

I said the poterledge is on Skye.... Im living in South Wales

He raised his eyebrows and said well that’s just a small part, its hauling that important; sort your hauling out practice from a ledge, hanging from your harness, practice packing the bag so you know where everything is with your eyes closed

I said the haul bags are waiting for us in Yosemite we had them delivered there

He straightened up, scratched his beard a bit. His eyes glazed  over as if searching through all his big walling experience for another shiny pearl, he looked me strait in the eye and said you better be climbing like a spider monkey son or you’re going to be an article on UKC!

I said... Nothing

Despite this we have got some sponsorship for kit from www.shoothouse.co.uk to which we are eternally grateful, and I for one am feel rather optimistic. So please keep an eye on this blog as i hope to update it with stories and video for the big stone.

Please note: the “big wall” character in this story is entirely fictitious, his likeness was note based on a real life person, if you know someone like this good effort! However my part was based entirely on me and everything I said though probably poorly spelled was entirely true.

I hope you enjoy the blog, and that it maybe helps you in the future

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