Snake Dike with my son TR 10/15/11

A funny thing about our society is that we assume that we will raise our kids and they will move away. They will go to college in some other town and then probably get a job somewhere else as well. Where is the sense in that? I have one son who lives in England and one in Hermosa Beach, both a long way from Berkeley. Wendy and I try to see them as much as we can but that is not often. I started to tempt my younger son, Pete, into coming with me on a climb. He is not a climber but he is a fine athlete who trains for and races in triathlons. I thought he would have a good time and we could spend some time together. We drove up on Friday morning. We top roped the Goblet on Glacier Point Apron a few times to give him a sense of 5.7 friction. Saturday we were hiking by 5:00 from Curry Village. We ran into a couple of deer on the Happy Isles Bridge that were uninterested in moving as we walked within a few feet of them.

We approached between Mt. Broderick and Liberty Cap, which is mellow. The trail is pretty well burned in if you have just a little bit of route finding sense.

Here is a pic of the old man on the approach.

Here’s Pete enjoying the slabs

You can see it is a glorious day.
We ran into nice couple from Sheffield, England, who were spending several weeks climbing in the Valley. Here they are on pitch 1.

I was surprised there were only two parties on the route. This feeling turned out to be well founded. There would be fourteen people before it was over. I wasn’t too worried about how Pete was going to do. I would lead and he would follow. I still had him clip in with a daisy as well as the tie in at each belay just for an extra precaution. Here’s Pete approaching the P2 belay.
The crux of the climb is a short section on P3, which was as interesting as I remembered. Pete stepped out and back a few times until he found a good sequence and the hardest climbing was over.
Here he is on P3

About this time a party of three decided to simul-climb through the three parties already on the route. I had a hard time getting my mind around this. It was still early in the day. Maybe they thought they were on the Eiger or something and they were going to die if they didn’t top out immediately! The thing is that Snake Dike is a beginner’s climb. It has to be one of the wildest beginner’s climbs in existence. I know it was the first climb I did in Yosemite Valley. I had just started leading 5.8 and I looked in he guide for the biggest adventure to be had that I could reasonably do and came up with Snake Dike. I’m going to guess that on any given day half to three quarters of the people on Snake Dike are beginners. To simul-climb through many parties on Snake Dike is not only an obnoxious, self-entitled, disrespectful move that intrudes on the climbs of many other people, it also has the potential to be dangerous as well. It must be nice to go through life thinking that golden carabiners rain from your butt.

I decided not to let their irritating behavior ruin the day. When the party behind us decided that simul-climbing must be the normal way it is done and changed from belaying to simul-climb through us on P6 I was cordial and polite to them. You might think with all this passing we were very slow on the route but it took us only 3 hours15 minutes to do the route. The route has been done car to car in about that time so this is no record breaker but it is certainly plenty of time for everyone behind us to get back to the car in daylight

Here is Pete enjoying himself somewhere around P6

After the roped climbing I slogged up the slabs. The views are incredible.
Summit shots

We ate the Degnan’s sandwiches we had bought the day before and enjoyed our selves on top. After a leisurely reviving lunch we descended the cables.

We were both out of water now so we made a bee line for the drinking fountain at the Vernal Falls Bridge. Here’s a pic of Nevada Falls, still cranking this year.

Here’s a pic of Vernal Falls.

We were back at Curry at 5:30 ready for showers and a beer.
The next day was another beautiful day.

Thanks for the great weekend Pete!
Climb on,
Zander