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K3-Hem -> Artiklar -> Going Back Going Back to a Place by Rick McGregor (rmcgregor@hotmail.com)
Sometime after midnight the track spat us out into the Bridal Veil Fall parking lot and the car. We had made it down from our first wall climb in Yosemite - Martin's first ever wall, and my first for twenty years. There's something about going back to a place that has meant a lot to you, seeing it again as though for the first time. My three earlier trips to Yosemite twenty years ago, and especially my first in 1979, are probably my most intense climbing experiences ever. I had always intended to get back there but never managed to until last year. Going back after twenty years of mentally reworking the climbs I did there in my youth... We drove into the Valley from Mariposa, past Briceburg and El Portal (which had special significance for me, as I'd fallen in love with a woman who lived there on my first stint in Yosemite), and stopped the rental car just past the Arch Rock entrance to the National Park. Up-valley across the Merced River, Elephant Rock stood big and grey against a dark blue late summer sky. As Martin took some photographs (on his first visit to the Valley), I broke a leaf off a road-side bay tree and crushed it between my fingers. Memories of climbs two decades before, when my only occupation was "Climber" and before daily life in the real world caught up with me, came flooding back with the unmistakeable scent from the dark green leaf. Rental car. Yes, that was one of a number of differences from my earlier visits. Another was the massive new parking areas near Yosemite Village. When I was last there there were plans to exclude all car traffic from the valley, but they have obviously come to nought. Another thing that had changed showed itself when we tried to check in to Camp 4. (The Park Service have finally given in and abandoned their attempt to rename the traditional climbers' campground "Sunnyside Walk-In Campground".) We found that the camp was full. The rangerette told us that the camp office opened at 8.30 in the morning, "But if you want to get one of the sites that will be available then, you want to be here at least two hours before that". "Where can we camp tonight?" She consulted a colleague. "There's space at Tamarack Flat half-an-hour's drive away." Of course, being climbers, we chose the cheaper option. We did a short climb on Manure Pile Buttress to shake off the jet-lag after our trip across the Atlantic from Sweden, cooked some dinner at a picnic area, and then once darkness fell we drove down the road to El Cap Meadow. We parked the car amongst those of the many people up on El Capitan, and not wanting to get caught by any roving ranger, grabbed our sleeping gear from the back of the car and headed quickly up through the conifer forest towards the base of the wall. A few hundred metres up the slope we found a clearing beside a granite boulder and could kip out for the night with the black presence of the mighty SE Face of El Cap looming above us, and the clear, star-filled Californian sky. The SE Face of El Cap. I'd never been down to the Meadows and looked up at it at night before, or if I had, there'd been very few people on it. Looking up at it now, we could see at least fifty headlamps like little yellow glow-worms all over it. From a climbing point of view, the biggest difference from twenty years ago is the number of climbers who are doing walls. Personally I attribute it to the greater availability of portaledges, and the greater affluence amongst climbers which means more can afford to buy them. When I was last in the Valley, most people stuck to the standard routes, the ones with bivy ledges: South Face of Washington Column (with Dinner Ledge); West Face of Leaning Tower (with Ahwahnee Ledge); The Nose on El Cap (with Dolt Tower, El Cap Tower and Camps Four, Five and Six); the Salathé (with Heart Ledges, El Cap Spire and Long Ledge); the West Face of El Cap (with El Cap Arms). Only the big guns got up on the walls where there were no ledges. We warmed up with a couple of long day climbs, the East Buttresses of Middle and Lower Cathedral Rocks, before it was time to get up on our first wall. We chose the West Face of Leaning Tower this time for much the same reasons as it was recommended to Len and me as our first wall first time round: it's a manageable two-day climb with a good bivy ledge half-way, and it's overhanging all the way - which makes for easy hauling and lots of exposure. I figured that if Martin's psyche could handle this one, it would handle the other climbs we had planned. And the Leaning Tower is an excellent climb. For all the shit people have tried to chuck at Warren Harding over the years for excessive use of bolts on Yosemite walls, you've got to give the guy credit for putting up some of the Valley's absolute finest lines (The Nose, Astroman and Leaning Tower - not bad!). So how did it go on the wall? Martin's worked underground, he skis the steeps and he's not easily phased, so he did really well on the Tower. But I think he would have liked a little longer between walls to mentally rework them. I remember from my first visit to Yosemite that it took ages to psyche up to go up on a wall, it was hard to sleep the night before starting, and then it took a week or more to wind down from it before wanting to do another. The whole time on a wall, I find, one part of one's mind is screaming "This isn't natural, I shouldn't be here!", while of course as a climber and adrenalin-junkie another part of one's mind is lapping it up. The more walls one has done (or the longer one has had to rework it all mentally), the more the latter part of the brain dominates over the former. Now, I'd had 20 years to mentally process the experience - we only had four weeks and wanted to do as many walls as possible, so I was highly motivated.
It wasn't just Yosemite that I was renewing acquaintance with after two decades. I hadn't seen my old mate SP since our unsuccessful exploits in the South Face of Watkins (hey, Harding was on the first ascent of that one, too...), but he'd been living in California most of the time since. We arranged to meet in Camp 4, and as he came wandering down the path towards Site 24, I said to Martin, "I'd recognise that walk anywhere." He was over from Bishop (on the eastern side of the Sierras) for the day, to do a climb and to drop us off some gear - including a borrowed portaledge. Martin and I had taken a rest day after the Tower, but Martin wanted another, so SP and I did the Central Pillar of Frenzy together. Ah, a portaledge. Now that makes a big difference on a wall. Admittedly we made sure on our next climb (The Prow on Washington Column) that we made it to the ledge system at Tapir Terrace so we had somewhere to stand while we assembled the thing, but it didn't matter that we were caught well short of any ledges when it was time to get up onto The Captain, on Lurking Fear. We just hung the thing off the belay on a vertical wall and set up for the night. The first time we climbed onto it on The Prow we were as cautious as hell, both getting on simultaneously, and not daring to move without warning the other, scared that it would turn turtle and pitch us into the depths (admittedly tied in to a length of rope, but still...). I remember Nick Cradock's stories of climbing Excalibur with a portaledge that kept collapsing in the night - he'd wake up screaming in a mess of nylon and aluminium tubing. There was a full moon while we were on Lurking Fear, and the nights were magic - lying in the pit on the portaledge looking into the depths, the valley floor glowing silver grey in the Californian late summer night. After three nights on the wall we felt like portaledge pros - no major struggle to assemble or disassemble the ledge, and no worries at all about standing on the edge of it, pissing into the abyss. Hell, I felt totally at home on that ledge - I wanted to take one home and hang it in my apartment so I could sleep on it whenever I wanted to recreate that Yosemite feeling. That Yosemite feeling. For me it's made up of so many different things:
(Published in New Zealand Alpine Journal 2001) |
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