Geoff and I were super stoked to hit the Valley last week for our second annual brothers' climbing trip. Last year we did some of the easier, long classics (Snake Dike, Royal Arches) as well as a few shorter, more difficult climbs (Higher Spire - Regular Route, Central Pillar of Frenzy, Super Slide, etc.). This year we wanted to try stepping it up a notch to see if we could knock off some more challenging routes.

On Thursday we set our sights on the East Buttress of Middle Cathedral. An early start enabled us to be first on the route.


After a few pitches of fun and relatively easy climbing we were at the P5 crux, a thin but very well bolted face.



We made it through with a touch of French-freeing at the final bolt.

Overall the climbing was great and offered a wide variety - liebacks, cracks, face, traverses, etc.


At the top we finished with the 5.9 fingers/thin hands variation that went left and looked more fun than the 4th class chimney.


The descent included some spicy (exposed) and wandering third class to the awesome chasm between Higher & Middle Cathedral.


We felt great after this climb and ready to up the ante the next day by trying the East Buttress of El Cap, which was our stretch goal for the trip. We dropped the car at the Zodiac pullout and started hiking up the talus in the dark at about 5:45. Its straight up for 45 mins or so and you gain a fair amount of vertical so we were sweating like pigs by the time we reached the start...


After grunting our way through the squeeze at the top of the chimney we swapped leads and I started on P2. The thin face moves traversing up and right off the belay combined with the great exposure make for a heady start to the pitch! I nearly blew off, but managed to stick it and then worked up an awkward, but fairly secure groove.





Pitch 11 was pretty spicy - an interesting traverse around an arete (where you lose visual contact with your partner), over and down then up a highly exposed, runout face! Unfortunately we didn't take any pics. Too focused on finishing the climb.


The climb went a lot faster than we expected and we topped out about 1:15pm. So given that we had the afternoon open we decided to take the long way down by hiking out and connecting to the Upper Falls Trail descent. That proved to be a mistake. It was a long slog up very hot slabs to the trail at the top of El Cap. Out of water and 8 more miles of hiking to get back to the Valley floor it became solid Type II fun... Though we recharged with a water refill at Camp 4 and then celebrated with beers at the lodge before passing out.

The next day we attempted North Dome. We hiked in from Porcupine Creek trailhead along 120. Due to a navigational error (thinking we were at North Dome, we started descending a drainage prematurely), we found ourselves a dome away from North Dome. After swimming through the some manzanita and picking our way across some slabs we righted the approach and found the base of the South Face.


I linked the first two pitches together, though as Geoff arrived at the belay we were hit with a brief rain shower. The forecast had called for stray thunderstorms and forbidding clouds over Half Dome gave us pause. We ultimately decided that given the exposure, North Dome was a bad place to be caught in a thunderstorm...not to mention that lieback/friction climbing on wet rock didn't sound so sweet. So we rapped down.


Then the sun came back out and for the next hour we felt like complete pussies for having bailed. We trashed our way through more manzanita (salt in the wounds), back up the drainage to the top of North Dome. Then the real storm hit. A solid 10 mins of heavy rain, followed by hail vindicated our decision... All in, we figured we hiked about 10 miles for two pitches of climbing. Oh, well.

Feeling glad that we made the right decision but still a bit short-changed from our interrupted adventure the prior day, we decided to hit one more climb on Sunday on our way out of the park. Geoff was itching to hit a solid crack so we picked the Direct Route on Reed's Pinnacle. The first pitch was sweet hand jamming up to a tree belay. The second pitch was significantly harder, following a wavy crack. The jams were solid but the climbing was not as straight-forward and it finished with a gnarly off-width section.


We decided to do the tunnel-through behind the flake. Awesome pitch and I'd highly recommend this finish. It was super tight - at one point I had to exhale to fit through, my helmet scraping both sides of the chimney! Geoff ended up getting stuck for ~10 mins, had to remove his helmet, sunglasses and move a bunch of gear from his harness to the rope in order to fit through. Too many slices of pizza the night before I guess...


After that it was a fun and pretty mellow hand to finger crack then step around to the top. A few raps later we were on the ground and enjoying the short hike back out to the car (after our epic hikes the prior two days). We felt really lucky to have had four awesome days and to have packed in several amazing climbs. We can't wait for Bros Climbing Trip part III next year!