Tresidder Peak
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Eight hours before we broke trail, however, our plans were quite different. We left Palo Alto thursday night, planned to do the walk-in thing at Camp 4 in Yosemite Valley. Kim had a couple friends who were scheduled to meet us on friday, so we had to have a normal campsite. We planned to do a day climb of Mount Starr King on Friday, hang out with the friends in camp, then hit Tuolumne Meadows for an undetermined day of hiking or climbing. While our plans weren't as well-laid as they could've been, we were unprepared just how scrambled they would become!
It gets even better! Although we did not have our large packs, we had almost all of our camping gear, so Kim wanted to get a backcountry permit for Cathedral Lakes, so we could salvage the trip with some climbing and relaxing in the Cathedral Range. We did pretty well in the morning; second in line for permits. As luck would have it, the chump in front of us picked up three spots for Cathedral Lakes, leaving our party of two with one permit. The idea of trying to avoid rangers by walking separately, with one person carrying the camping gear, was simply too much for me. "$%^& this bull$%^&. Let's go climbing."
Bob Burd had gotten his initial motivation to climb Tresidder from my earlier failed attempt. He made a gutsy free-solo ascent of the south arete, and though I remember that his trip report boasted an excellent route description, I neglected to bring it with me or read it in detail before our trip. After all, the main course of our visit was going to be Starr King! So in finding the route, I was effectively on my own, since in true form, Secor's description was...minimal: "The south summit is the high point, and the south arete is class 4."
I scouted the prominent south arete from the southeast, and quickly decided that a direct ascent of the east face was out of the question. Upon seeing the south face of the south arete, I decided that this was the way to go. After all, this was supposed to be "class 4". Accounting for sandbags, I figured that this could mean anything between actual class 4 and 5.4.
The real climbing starts on top of a large boulder, but I anchored Kim below the boulder, since it offered the best vision of the climber. Although quite light in color, the granite here was a bit crumbly. Rather than chickenheads and knobs, sharp feldspar crystals jutted out of the rock, providing good, if a bit unstable footholds. From the base, the route is very foreshortened. What looks like a 40-foot ascent is probably closer to 80, with a lot of rope wasted on horizontal movement. While in the aggregate, the route is slanted at 45° or so, if you look closely, it is made up of near-vertical blocks.
From the base boulder, the climbing immediately felt harder than class 4. I marginally protected a groundfall with a micro-nut, then began stemming my way up a 25-foot dihedral. One side of the dihedral crumbled under foot pressure, while the other was slick and polished. I placed a wobbly hexcentric in a crumbly, untapered crack, praying that it would hold as I gently worked my way up the rock, tenuously glued to the surface only by the counter pressure I applied with my four limbs.
Eventually I was able to reach a good anchor point, but I had a problem: my gear had almost run out! Medium nuts seemed most useful, and my tiny rack contained only a couple after I had anchored Kim to the rocks below. My gargantuan size 10 hexcentrics seemed to mock me with their uselessness as they loudly clanged together. Though I was probably only 40 feet above the ground vertically, I decided to belay Kim up from a decent anchor point.
From the anchor, things looked even harder. Straight up, nothing but overhanging chockstones and thin hand cracks. I peered over to the east face, and it looked even worse. After a short consultation with Kim, the order was given to abandon ship. Making unsweetened lemonade from lemons, I tied a runner around a convenient chockstone and added a biner to make a pretty good rappel anchor.
We went "around the corner" from the base of our climb to the west and ascended some class 3/4 slabs to attain the summit ridge. From there, we took in panoramic views of our surroundings, and unfortunately, also views of a pretty intimidating traverse to the summit. It didn't take much debate to decide to throw in the towel. We quickly descended the shallow snowfield to rendezvous with the JMT, but not before taking in wonderful views of Columbia Finger and the Clark Range, not to mention of mean ole' Tresidder, which doesn't seem to want us on his summit.
On the long drive back home, we remarked that getting tangled in red tape and not making the summit can
still be pretty fun!
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Department of Geophysics Stanford University |
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