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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Original Post - Nov 9, 2010 - 01:16am PT
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Truckin' My Blues Away
by Doug Robinson
Yosemite has been the focal point of California climbing since the early 1930s, when a handful of Sierra Club climbers came down from the high country and learned to handle a rope. Generations of climbers since have been spellbound by the Valley's beauty and clean rigorous climbing, so much so that they have never ventured further into the Sierra Nevada. A little over a hundred years ago, John Muir saw the Sierra crest shining to the east from the rim of Yosemite Valley and walked off to have a closer look. Since then, a few climbers of each generation have followed his lead and slowly climbed first the peaks and then the ridges of his Range of Light. The early Valley climbers returned to the high country with their ropes to climb the East Face of Mount Whitney in the southern end of the chain. Now, a few more of the faces - not large by Yosemite standards, but of good rock in an alpine setting - are being climbed. And lately this has led to the surprising discovery of ice gullies in some of the steep and shaded north-east cirques. From the Mediterranean latitudes of his mind, broiled so long in the Yosemite sun, the California climber has begun to conceive of ice near to home.
There is little wonder that the sunny Sierra has been so long neglected as a potential ice area: it has but few small glaciers and seems at times, and when approached from the east, the perfect desert mountain range. That such a range might contain good hard climbing ice had not occurred to California mountaineers, freshly home from the Canadian Rockies' slush or the Andean equatorial wallow. The rock climbers in their turn had just plain forgotten to look - they hadn't even seen the walls of fine unclimbed granite in the high country. A Climber's Guide to the High Sierra, by way of introducing itself, says that "there is seldom enough hard snow or ice to justify carrying crampons". I remember reading that as a young climber and then hopefully carrying my crampons anyway, hundreds of miles up and down the Range of Light. The closest thing to a sign of interest in ice climbing I saw in those years was crampon tracks in névé along the John Muir Trail above Tully Hole one June. Recently, on going to the east side of the Sierra, I have seen the light at last - streams and sparkles of it reflecting out of high steep gullies during the few minutes a day in which the sun passes their heads, or a deep blue translucence radiating from shady notches. It may be that the heat which made us unsuspecting of ice also made the ice. Spring snow melts and packs in the gullies, speeded by summer rains washing down them, until the sharp fall winds set this surface into the water ice that we found, sure enough, when it occurred to us to start looking in the right places.
October on the Palisade Glacier was a mountaineer's clear and cold dream of the high country, with a night rattling wind and the highly-contrasted lights and shadows of the day printed on our minds as if to impress us again and at last before winter took the edges off. The glacier, brittle underfoot, exacted tribute from ever-cramponed feet, and what had been summer's mere suspicion of crevasses were now widely skirted or stepped over. Across the glacier, the U Notch, midsummer highway to North Palisade, was out in full blue ice from head to toe and probably hadn't been attempted since mid-August, despite its less than 40º inclination. The V Notch, a few hundred yards to its left, glittered at us from deep between confining granite walls. Looking almost straight into this gully we had come to climb made it very steep in the mind.
The first pitch up the back wall of the bergschrund was the steepest. I put my axe in a pile of snow to belay and Yvon led off. This was Chouinard's first trip to the Palisades and my first outing on ice this serious; we felt a long way and many degrees centigrade removed from the kerosene-lanterned camp table in Yosemite, where this plan was gotten up only a week before.
Right away, Yvon got himself strung out on to the steepest ice just below the lip and was committed before he realized he wanted protecting. I looked from a forest of crampon points suspended in the air twenty feet above, to the pile of snow I had thought would be a good enough anchor, past it into the deep blue 'schrund, and back to the spiny sky. Yvon was having his own problems. The ice was so hard that his attempts to lodge an axe or alpine hammer to pull up on yielded either ice cubes or sudden opaque cones under the blade. Finally, he pulled up on delicate balance and blew out a long sigh: "I haven't been gripped like that in a while." With a belay thoughtfully anchored far enough to the side to increase my concentration, I started up into the hardest ice I have ever seen. After producing the requisite amount of fear, like a ticket of admission, I pulled up over the lip. I had been holding on too hard to run the inclinometer and was glad enough to forego the reading in order to stay out of the gullet of the blue meanie snapping at my heels. I kicked out over the crest of this wave frozen in the act of breaking into the glacier and looked over a pitch of foam up to a slightly choppy green sea leading 900ft. to the Sierra crest.
We French-stepped up a pitch of névé and started out on to the sweeping ice of the gully, zig-zagging across it to belay on rock, being after all still Californians. Soon we were running out of rope: the gully is so well-proportioned, presenting its full height in one gesture, that pitches shrink and seem to get nowhere. On the fourth pitch, I set a Charlet-Moser ice screw, noticing a slight feeling of stripped threads as it went in. Coming up after, Yvon pulled out the shank broken off above the threads. I hadn't felt it break, but was probably forcing it in too fast for the hardness of the ice.
Soon we were spaced out on our ice sheet surrounded by brittle green sea-smooth 50° ice, temporarily becalmed in a gully on the eastern wall of California in its flight back to the Pacific. Feeling like fish out of water on this flinty sea, we couldn't tell whether to laugh or shudder, frolic or grip. It seemed that I hadn't made a move over 5.4 in three pitches; I put my hand out to rest in the slab climber's absent familiar way - it skated off, and I remembered myself and tried again to decide whether I should be afraid.
Chouinard had developed a technique and two tools to help us up the gully without breaking the surface of the ice with a step. Dissatisfied with the grip of hand daggers in the right-hand Mendel couloir a few miles north of here during a boiler-plate autumn two years ago, he forged the back of a Yosemite hammer into a small-toothed pick with a sharp droop. Swung from the handle, this alpine hammer is driven into the ice with the force of the hammer head behind it. I have pulled my entire weight up vertically on a single well-placed hammer. He also designed a beautiful flat-adzed ice axe with a thin drooping pick. Both these tools were so shamelessly efficient that I thought them at least twice as good at their functions as any similar tool I had used, even ones made in Scotland. Not content to be merely master-craftsman, or because the efficiency of his tools forced him to it, Chouinard devised a technique for more relaxed front-pointing. Since the ankles and calves of an ice climber are both attached to his Achilles Tendon, he can rest this overworked organ in one leg at a time by turning that foot out and placing it flat on the ice French style as an intermediate step between the front-point stances of the other foot. Turning out first one foot and then the other in this fashion extends the range of front-pointing. We quickly locked into this technique, using it instead of stopping whenever we needed a rest. Our stops in the middle of pitches for protection stemmed from prudence rather than impending collapse.
Higher in the gully, with our technique sorted out to the point of confidence, we began to register impressions of our strange and beautiful surroundings. Nothing that happened here could quite be described in familiar terms. The steepness was right. but it was strangely slippery. Silence was almost recognizable, but too deep. The cold air seemed deader, or was it only thin? Ice chips went down with explosive tinkling sounds and disappeared to leave the granite walls of this sound chamber staring at each other across their bed of ice. I looked up to see vaporous cloud fragments blowout the top of the gully and felt the mountain falling away beneath me. Our voices took on such clear, deep and resonant tones that we could not talk and had to resort to laughing. The August high country that most climbers know was nowhere in sight. If I dug deep in my pockets for the meaning of all this, I only got my hands warm, which was quite enough of a holiday for eyes and ears until my end of the rope came up again and hands forgot their numb selves for the pleasure of moving over ice again.
We ran blocks along the ridge, the very crest of the Sierra, looking west into the low, golden-sun, peak-spotted wilderness, and turned down a loose face toward the long shadowed glacier. A perfect, breath less day. We moved down in a fast-paced, free but vigilant, wordless mountaineering that danced counterpoint to the careful footwork in the gully. We had spent our day scratching upon the steep surface of the Sierra Nevada with our crampon points - a foreign, embryonic feeling to a range of mountains that has felt every sort of drama on its rocks. Coming down the eastern flank of this two-hundred mile crest, which hides many remote north east cirques yet to be looked into by ice-conscious eyes, I dream of spending a few of the falling days of each year high in the Sierra gullies, truckin' my blues away.
SUMMARY
California, Sierra Nevada Range, North Palisades Group.
Ice gully climbing in the N.W. Corries. Yvon Chouinard and Doug
Robinson. August 1969.
Mountain 11
Sept. 1970
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seneca
climber
jamais, jamais pays
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Thanks the reminder
Bob
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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"Mommy, why is that be-cramponed man standing on his rope?"
I sooo remember this article. In my next lifetime I'm so coming
back with rubberized cartilage and ligaments.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Nice! Thanks Doug, Ed too!
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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reference:
keep on truckin', mama
truckin' all my blues away
keep on truckin', mama
truckin' to the break of day
and if you wanna eat crackers in bed, my friend,
well then you're gonna havta sleep with crumbs
keep on truckin', mama
truckin' all my blues away.
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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Bunping for DR and Mr. Coonyard. Some good history here. Out of curiosty, what do these snow fields look like now?
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Nice tony, now if it only had the accompanying R.Crumb illustrations.
[edit]
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Like the Do-Da Men....together, more or less in line he keeps Truckin' On.
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Fletcher
Gym climber
A very quiet place
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Dec 25, 2013 - 10:25pm PT
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An excellent tale for a Christmas Day. Thanks, I enjoyed that.
Eric
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Dec 25, 2013 - 11:13pm PT
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brittle green sea-smooth 50 degree ice, temporarily becalmed in a gully on the eastern wall of California in its flight back to the Pacific.
Brilliantly-lit wit.
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