In early August, 1999, my old buddy Hans and two of his
climbing partners from Seattle, Bob and Ted, went on a trip to the Eastern
Sierras. The Sierras is one of my favorite places for alpine
climbing. The long, exposed routes up solid granite in magnificent
surroundings are almost too perfect to be true.
We left Sacramento early Monday morning, got packed in Bishop and drove up to the trailhead after lunch. We started hiking around 3pm. I knew that going from 500 feet to 10500 feet in one day was bad news. Sure enough, all of us were feeling the altitude, and we rested all Tuesday. Some of us did a bit of toproping and bouldering on the crags around Lake 2-3.
Wednesday, we got off hiking about an hour before daybreak. It's a surprisingly short approach from Lake 3 to the start of the route. Hans persuaded us to not bring ice axes, as the snow field looked short and not too steep from below. This turned out to be a problem, and the experienced mountaineer might wonder about this decision. The only thing I can say is that it seemed a good idea at the time.
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| In camp |
When we got up to the snowfield, it really wasn't that steep (about 30 degrees) but the snow was hard as ice. In fact, there were streaks of iced up meltoff. This was compounded by the fact that I was the only one wearing mountaineering boots - the other guys were wearing approach shoes and boots. I ended up 'leading' one pitch of snow. It's amazing what difference the ice axe makes in terms of confidence and, therefore, speed. I found myself kicking steps very meticulously. At some point, I even put in a small bollard with a long sling. What should have been a 15 minute breeze turned out to be 45 minutes of aggravation. This little situation slowed us down for more than an hour, but we were still pretty good on time.
I don't seem to get on with this TR, but here are some