Southern Man Trip Report 4/25/09
If you want to have adventure you have got to be ready. Say you are in the line at the grocery store, standing next to a climber you barely know but you believe to be solid. You start chatting and the person says, “I’m thinking of doing Mother’s Lament on Porcelain Wall this year.” You must be ready. Casually you say, “Yeah, I’ve been looking at that line. I sharpened half my hooks and cut teeth into the rest thinking about it.” It helps if for the last ten years you keep asking for presents from your mom for Christmas that make her say as you open them, “ I paid 80 good dollars for those five pieces of wire??!!” Mom, you are saving my life here.”

So anyway, I’m in the checkout line at REI with some BD aiders in hand, got to spend that dividend you know, when I start talking to supertaco’s own Melissa who’s there too. I explain how I like my Fish ladders for aiding but I’m struggling to jug with them so I’m buying standard aiders to try out. She tells me the Yates ladders have a piece of elastic that holds your foot onto the step when jugging. Then she says, “I’m thinking of doing the Salathe this year.” (See above) Casually I answer, “ So am I.” In my defense I did take a very abortive trip up the first part of Free Blast last year, just to imagine doing the route. Next thing you know we are on our way to do Southern Man as a warm up.

Melissa has the rack she prefers and we go with that. The only pro I bring is a set of HB brass offsets, a set of DMM peanuts, three loweballs and #1 and #2 BD stoppers. (Thanks Mom!) This time I even go up to Cragmont, the local 40 foot crag, and practice jugging with my new aiders, before the trip.
Melissa’s Jay helps us carry our load to the base, thank goodness.

By the time we rack up and reshuffle the bags it’s after 9:00. I take the first pitch, which has a short bit of 5.8, and we are rolling. I pull all the slack out of the lead line and clip it to the chains. Then I get a little paranoid and put in some slings too. When Melissa comes up she say, " listen when the line comes tight it’s got to be ready to jug, without a doubt." I’m learning already. I’m finally getting the body haul thing down and the hauling goes pretty well. Here’s Melissa jugging P1.

P2 is 5.11 or C1. Here’s a pic. Melissa made short work of this pitch.

Here’s a pic of yours truly trying to get both of us in.

P3 has one short section of 5.8 that caught my attention but pretty soon we were at Dinner Ledge.
Here’s a pic of Dinner ledge with Clouds Rest in the distance.
Note the little cloud on Cloud’s Rest.

The threat of rain had scared everyone off, I guess, and we had the ledge to ourselves. It was about 12:30. The plan was to leave the haul bag behind, fix three or four pitches before nightfall and rap back to the ledge to bivy.
Here’s a pic of Melissa on the P4 bolt ladder.

Meanwhile some guys from the UK, Nick and Andy had come up and were fixing one pitch of Skull Queen. I took some pics of Nick doing the Kor roof while Melissa was on P4.
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.html?topic_id=849880&msg=849880#msg849880
She climbed P4 without fuss to the anchor and continued right into P5.
After a few bolts the route climbs up a flake and there is a tricky C2 move left to a crack. She worked this move for a long time and just couldn’t get it. She came down and with a bit of trepidation I went up to give it a try. I put in another piece behind the flake for grins and I stepped gently onto the hook, my first hook move ever. Actually it was bomber. With my few inches more reach I was able to run my fingertips up and down the crack until I found a parallel section 1/2 knuckle deep. This is where I began to realize that climbing on an unfamiliar rack takes more time. I had never really climbed with Aliens before so I had to look at every one to see what size it was instead of just knowing like I do with my rack. Anyway I found an Alien the width of my finger, got it to stick and stepped onto it. This was my one real contribution to the weekends climbing. Now I was moving up the C1 crack. I was slow. About 30 feet from the end of the pitch I ran out of small gear. We had left one biner of Peanuts on the ledge and I had used up all my small offset nuts. I had just put in the #1 and #2 BD stoppers and finished with a low ball. I could see I needed more small stuff. I chickened out and tensioned over about 15 feet to the right to the South Face bolted anchor. I pulled up most of the slack and while Melissa went to set up the bivy I rapped back down and left to my last good piece. I put in a couple of more pieces and set up an anchor there too. Here’s a composite pic from the next morning of the whole mess I had just completed.
What I should have done was lowered to my last piece and set up the anchor there. We could have hauled from there. The next day Melissa said it covered more square feet than any cluster funk she had ever seen. Oh yeah! It was now dark and I cleaned the pitch by headlamp.

Basically, we had not fixed enough pitches and I had proven to be very slow so we were not going to make the top the next day. We decided to just climb as far as we could and have a good time. We ended up climbing some pitches of the South Face. Here’s the pics I took the next day roughly in order.


Glacier Point

Looking down valley







We spent the night again on Dinner Ledge which is just a great place. We ended up chatting with Nick and Andy and enjoying ourselves.

Dinner Ledge

Thanks Melissa for going up there with me. I had a blast.

See y’all on the rock.
Zander