Yosemite and the Diamond Part 1

The month of September was spent in Yosemite. I arrived on about the 7th to find Neil psyched out of his mind having just soloed Lurking fear (EFFORT! considering he can't tie his shoelaces). I, too, was ultra, mega, outrageously psyched and we decided that we needed to be up on the wall a-sap. So after a day of gathering cheap minimal food and water bottles we hiked the worlds heaviest bags up to the Base of the Tangarine Trip and climbed the first 4 pitches to under the roof.

Due to a massive case of retarded-ness we failed to sort the portaledge out before getting on the wall, this resulted in an almightly tangle-fuck and 2 hours of massive faf.

The next morning Neil was so scared he had a shit...

Then climbed the classic 5th pitch

Our good friends Bill and Dom decided to do the route as well. Below Dom just finishing the first pitch.

The route was really good and we spent 2 more nights on the wall taking it easy and really enjoying being back up on El Cap.

The Trip is realllly steep from the start all the way to the 2nd to last pitch, this make the climb pretty wild. The Aid was straightforward and the main difficulties came from the strenuous nature of the placement . i.e high stepping on the overhanging wall.

As the guide says, the Trip has many classic pitches and many..not so classic, which was very true. There are a couple of really long rivet/bolt ladders and a couple of loose sections.

So without too much ado we topped out mid morning on the 4th day. Another wicked climb with a great friend.

So warm up complete.............Mescalito time.

I remember hearing about this route 2 years ago on our first trip to the Valley, two guys had to bail off of it because their ledge broke.

I looked it up in the guide book and was hooked upon reading the discription, "Mescalito is steep sustained and exceptional. It is hard to imagine a better route up a more incredible wall". Well, this route had to happen.

The base sorting out all of our crap.

STANDARD!



After fixing the first 4 pitches and spending a fortune on beer and cliff bars we drank some free coffee and got on the wall.

Neil is cooking bitch this morning!!

The pitches 4-8 include the seagull traverse and a series of pitches following a corner system slanting rightwards. The seagull pitch was mine as I have superior paper, scizzors, rock skills.

The corner pitches are quite difficult as they have a lot of crap flared pin scars into which cams and nuts don't really want to go. I ended up doing move after move on shit cam hooks that kept skidding and on a couple of occasions upon testing, ripped and hit me in the helmet.

You would weight the damn things only to see them held in by a small grain of granite which was starting to disintegrate. Cam hooks are amazing things and when they are in a good cracks are bomber, but, in a flared shit pin scars you begin to lose confidence.

If we had hammered it would have been easy and much safer, but it goes clean you just have to man up and stop being a whimp. As I was filling my pants on one pitch inparticluar believing that if this terd ham hook ripped I would pull everything below me and land on Neil's head (in reality I was probably just being a pussy) a helicopter appeared and began rescueing someone off the Nose.

This didn't exactly help with the concentration levels.......those things are noisy when a couple of hundred feet away.

The next few days involved some really fun pulling on gear.. the molar traverse, and some long thin pitches linked by bad rivets and dowles.

Neil starting the molar traverse.

Pitch above the Molar Traverse

For the first 3 days or so we were always looking forward to arriving at the Bismark Ledge, which after not seeing a ledge for days is like sex, Christmas and drinking Double Hop all at the same time.

Once we reached it we cracked open the beers and turned up the Ipod.....

After one beer we were absolutely wasted..........we drank three.

Moving up the Bismark pitch the next morning.

Neil gets excited about the prospect of placing this cam.......up his ass.

The pitches after the Bismark are a notch easier than the one's before it. However, they are still almost all C2 or C2+, but pyschologically you feel better as the top is now within reach, only 8 pitches away.

Neil entering his first vagina 3 pitches from the top, damn those C2 awkward pitches!!

The worst thing about Mescalito was the hauling. For some reason, Neil insisted that we bring all his personal shit like shampoo, conditioner, hair brush, dental floss, anal floss...the list goes on. All this stuff ended up weighing about 200kg, so we had to haul 2-1, which was a nightmare. The hauling would take an hour a pitch.

Then, after a massive mincing session lasting around 5 or 6 days, we arrived at the top, as usual, completely blagging our way up the wall, with no idea what we were doing, but somehow learning on the job and having a small amount of fun at the same time.

Then a few days later after a beer and getting psyched watching the Real Rock Film Tour, we decided that we should climb the Diamond in November so as to create the illusion of a winter acsent. Therefore, coming accross to the average girl as way more hard core and sexy......