Friday – Mat and I had been plotting some kind of outdoor climbing activity around Thanksgiving for a couple weeks. It had been kind of rainy, but a quick call to the rangers at Pinnacles told us the weather was good and it had been sunny today and would be sunny Saturday. We’re a go, except for I woke up this morning with a major back spasm; no way could I climb today but after a couple massages and a heavy application of Deep Heating Rub (thanks, Carol!) I could tell Mat I’m 75% sure I’ll be a go tomorrow. We’ll touch bases at 7:30 a.m.
I think the spasm was induced by this week’s leg session where I was doing Bulgarian Split Squats with my front foot balanced on the Indo Board – the extra strain of balancing may have done it. Or, I may have hurt my back reaching into the beer cooler on Thanksgiving day. The former sounds studlier than the latter, so I’m sticking with that…
Saturday – 7:30 a.m., the phone rings, it’s Mat. “How is it?”. “Let me just bend over and see. Hmm, that doesn’t sound right.” Anyway, I judge I’m good to go (worst case, I can be a belay mule) and we agree to “try to leave by 9 a.m.” as Mat has to roust his late-sleeping buddy Dan K., whom it later turns out works in Finance at Hitachi having started there 3 months after I quit. Small world. We discuss mutual acquaintances during the day.
Carol gets up; she’s got something nasty looking going on with a tooth, long story short she chooses to stay home and attend to that rather than go with us.
Car packed, it’s approaching 10 a.m., off we go. Mat’s driving Dan’s car, Dan has to get more sleep on the way so reclines and is fairly soon asleep, snoring peacefully. It’s a good hour and a half to Pinnacles NM on ever smaller and twistier roads. The more Mat flings the car around, the louder Dan snores – rocking the cradle, I guess. Snoregasm came to mind.
At the parking lot, roust Dan, last minute packing and other business while we’re near bathrooms, and off we go, guide book and vague agenda in hand. We stop and look across the creek at the Tourist Trap crag, but with a limited number of climbs, especially of easier grades, we move on and find the Discovery Wall. So have maybe a dozen other rope teams.
We wandered along the East Face, trying to get oriented, finally making our way to the North Face, but don’t find anything that looks good. Back to the East Face, The Cleft is currently available, so after discussion with Mat, I sign up to lead it. Doesn’t look too bad having not been on Pinnacles rock for 20 years (and not knowing a lick when I was), I don’t understand that this stuff is slippery compared to the granite I’ve been on most recently. 25-30 feet up, there’s a move I need to make without good feet and with a big rack; I keep at it until the flop sweat becomes too much and then back off. Mat takes the rack, climbs (“This is funky rock!”), makes it look easy, and then I followed and cleaned on top rope. Dan then climbed on the rope I was trailing. Success.
We made our way back down off the crag (climber trails are nicely marked, Pinnacles is definitely climber-friendly on that front) and arrive at the North Face. We stop to look at The Roof and all agree we should give it a shot. Mat will lead; Dan will belay. Dan gets some schooling on how to belay, I’m backing him up. Mat gears up, takes my biggest cam off the rack, and heads up. First thing he needs is my biggest cam – oops – but he climbs more, finds a smaller placement, and makes do. Then “I found the first fixed piece”, he declines to use it but takes a picture for posterity. It’s a beauty, a rusted 1/4″ bolt with an ancient hangar angled such that if one were fool enough to clip it and fall on it, the hangar would crowbar the bolt right out of the rock, assuming the rusted bolt or threads didn’t just fail.
All hail to those that climbed before us and figured out how to do it right.
Making his way to the right under the roof, Mat moves smoothly to the anchors where the plan is to set Dan and I up on top rope so we can follow. Unfortunately, one anchor is good, but the other is a real relic. Another 1/4″ bolt with a square nut (!) and 1/4″ of bolt exposed behind the “classic” hangar. Maybe the anchor is OK for lowering (not recommended, however), but we’d be fools to top rope from it. There aren’t any good gear placements nearby either. After some discussion of options, none of them good, Mat down climbed the whole thing whilst removing all my gear he had placed. Major kudos to Mat. Disappointed we can’t all try the climb, but safe with all gear (and Mat) retrieved, we head back to the East Face.
This is the second trip in a row where I’ve been a part of finding bad anchors at the top of a climb. It’s almost as if I (we) need to prepare for this in the future.
Back at the East Face, Swallow Crack is available; I gear up to try another lead. This one goes better. I did notice that I’d overcammed a piece, but I kept climbing. It got a little exposed toward the top, with some fun moves that had everything that could pucker puckered, but I got on top, set up a belay, and Dan started climbing. Dan couldn’t get out the overcammed piece; he left it for Mat. Mat followed Dan up, and despite working on that cam for what seemed like 10 minutes or more, it was stuck. On top, as we were packing up, dusk hit. By the time we got back down to the start of the climb and packed up the rest, Mat had his headlamp out. Fortunately, the trails are good and we made it back to the parking lot without incident.
On the way home, they’re having their Christmas Parade in Hollister – on the main drag – without much thought as to how to reroute traffic. I saw a lot more of Hollister than I’ve seen before.
We stopped for “food” at an A&W in Gilroy. I don’t know how many years since I’ve been in an A&W, but I do know why. The root beer was tasty but otherwise, yack (well, Mat and Dan did savor their root beer floats to the point that I was wrong not to have gotten one). They were pushing “Corn Dog Nuggets”. Number one, is there anything Americans won’t bread and deep fry? Number two, what part of a corn dog is the “nugget”, anyway?
It’s a bad day for America when rock climbing is safer than eating.
And, boo-hoo, I’m out a cam, but now I get to drool over those BD C4’s in pretty colors with double axels and extended range of placement. AND, it says they’re harder to get stuck by over camming, which seems like a real good thing for my style of climbing (when in doubt, panic and cram it in)…
Many thanks to Mat and Dan for a great outing! Let’s do it again soon…
P.S. – Dan, buy yourself a brain bucket – remember those falling pebbles, the head barking on rock overhead – and the cam whistling in the wind as it plummeted toward Mat’s head? ‘Nuf said…