From "The Trad Climber's Bible"

Just finishing a book with Peter Croft (The Trad Climber's Bible) and this is a story (unedited, 1st draft) from that book (due out in 2013.

East Buttress, El Capitan

The East Buttress of El Capitan ascends the far right margin of the monolith. The real business is out left – home of the most celebrated big wall climbs on earth. An ascent of the East Buttress cannot earn you bragging rights to having climbed El Cap; but you do mount some 1,200 feet up the Big Stone, top out and descend via the fabled East Ledges, the very same as if you were climbing the Captain for real. So in a kind of flanking maneuver, you do in fact climb El Capitan.

The East Buttress was a likely challenge early on in my Yosemite career. I had done a handful of longer free routes but had yet to climb the Nose or Salathe or any of the proper trade routes up 3,000 foot-high El Cap. Like many before and after, the East Buttress was a stepping stone to the big time looming, I hoped, in my future. But looking past those stepping stones is a sure way to fall off them, as I would soon discover - the hard way.

One of the boons of trad routes is learning how your ascent fits into the continuum. Once you’ve scaled a legendary climb, you do a virtual lap every time you remember or read your notes afterwards – and the notes of others as well. In this regard the history of the East Buttress is rich and worth mentioning.

As it happened, Yosemite pioneer Al Steck, emboldened by his victories on Sentinel (1950) and Yosemite Point Buttress (1952), quite naturally looked to El Cap. In 1952, the main face out left was far too huge and steep for the gear and mentality of the time. But according to 60s Yosemite climber/historian Steve Roper, “the beautiful black-and-gold buttress on the far eastern flank showed distinct cracks and chimneys on its lower section. Higher, the prospective route blended smoothly into the wall, but here also the rock looked broken and perhaps climbable.”

Steck’s initial effort with Bill Dunmire, Bill and Dick Long, ended when Dunmire took a “zipper” fall on the first pitch, ripping out a string of pitons, nearly hitting the ground and ending up in the Yosemite hospital minus a few quarts of blood, with a bad concussion and a bruised shoulder. Steck returned with Willi Unsoeld (of future Everest fame). The pair battled half way up the wall before rain and waterfalls drove them off. Steck returned a third time, with Unsold, Bill Long and Will Siri. Bivouacking twice on the route, and using lots of aid, they reached the summit on June 1, 1953. Eleven years later, Frank Sacherer, “Father of modern free climbing,” along with Wally Reed, “freed the entire route with hardly a pause.” Ever since, the East Buttress of El Capitan, Grade 4, 5.10, was a Yosemite free climb’s on every hardman’s tic list.

I snagged my Idylwild friend Dean Fidelman (aka, Bullwinkle) and we hitchhiked down to El Cap and marched up to the Nose and another twenty minutes out right along the base, quickly gaining altitude on a narrowing ramp ending at “The Edge of the World." From there, the East Buttress ascends directly up a prominent, symmetrical bombay chimney. Go twenty feet past this start and you pitch off a 1,000ft cliff.

Back then the Yosemite ethic was safety and efficacy, which some of us interpreted as, "Use the least amount of gear humanly possible and climb just as fast as you can." Fools considered this the boldest strategy, and for a time, we tried to outdo each other. Dean and I brought one rope, several slings, about eight assorted nuts and no pack, no water and no food. Aside from swami belts and chalk bags, we had nothing else whatsoever. I didn’t even wear a shirt, nor drag along sneakers for the long hike down.

I shot up the first pitch and stemmed right over the 5.10 at the start of pitch two, not bothering to place protection. Up above the route wandered from crack to flake to shallow corner. I was counting on a load of fixed pins; there were none and the few nuts I brought along were mostly the wrong size so the pro was thin to lacking – two or three pieces for 150 foot pitches. I got eaten alive by piss ants at the belay tree atop pitch two, and never found those hoped-for fixed pins till pitch 6.

But this was great climbing for sure, way out there on that face and so high off the deck and pretty continuous. We could never rap off the thing with one rope and eight nuts, half of them wires, which added excitement to the effort.

In a couple hours we were nearing the top. Right around pitch 9 or 10, we ran into the famous “Knobby Wall.” I had grown up looking at Himalayan hero Willi Unsold pulling up this steep dark face with the great sweep of the Southwest buttress of El Cap towering behind him, and I was onto those knobs like all get out. It was glorious, and I thought it all wrong and cowardly that, evidenced by a string of rusty ring angle pitons, the route veered off right when the knobs kept on straight above. I took the direct line, of course, feeling like Hermes, loving life and climbing and all of creation when all at once the knobs ran out, and there was no crack and no pro, and I was out maybe forty feet off a fixed ring angle peg from old Willie Unsold’s very rack, and down below Bullwinkle was belaying off a bunk wired nut and antediluvian soft iron peg that would probably blow if I took the big one.

If this were a narrative, I could write five pages about our close call, and the ghastly experience of down-climbing to slightly better holds, finally pulling a sketchy traverse, by the skin of my teeth, to escape off the holdless wall and back onto the normal route. I had made a jackass, rookie error way off the ground, and I knew it.

Thankfully, while rapping down the east ledges to the valley floor, I understood in a flash that there was no crime in making a mistake so long as I immediately course-corrected. And if this trip report illustrates nothing more, it underscores the danger of going off half-cocked, mistaking raw climbing ability for mastery. Probably because I had the daylights scared out of me, I came to immediately appreciate that long, trad rock climbs of any grade or angle are deadly serious affairs. Route finding, placing adequate protection, building bomber anchors, minimizing risks and managing time and enthusiasm are much more the marks of mastery than running the rope into a dead end and having to perform last ditch heroics to save the team.

I wouldn’t have been the first to die for such impudence.

That day on the East Buttress was when I started to grow all the way up as a rock climber, where my cockiness, another word for recklessness, ran its natural course and my childish gusto blossomed into respect. I would go onto climb El Capitan many times after that first foray on the East Buttress, but I never came so close to disaster as on that Knobby Wall. And I would never again underestimated the seriousness of a big rock climb, or assume that if holds were there I could simply pull on through, no problem.