We're Really Doing It

I think that Heath and I both assumed that at the end of each day we’d just be zombied out, totally drained, and just wanting to sleep. Not the case really. I think the biggest surprise after day one was that it wasn’t as hard as expected. Granted, we’re not the guys doing the lead climbing, but for what we were doing, it didn’t wreck you. One of the things that Timmy stressed was that if we wanted to make it we had no choice but to trust the gear. If you didn’t, you were going to be screwed.

Here’s Timmy telling us about someone he took up in the past:

If I had just walked up to the edge of this 3,000 foot face I would have lost my stomach, but starting from the ground makes things so much different, it takes the shock out of it. After only a few minutes you get high enough off of the ground to say “Alright, at this height I’d die if I fell. So from here on out, the consequences are all the same, I’m good with this.” It’s kind of like riding a motorcycle on the freeway for the first time. It’s such sensory overload to the part of your brain that fears death, but once you desensitize it for a while, it goes numb so you can move on. On the bike you just picture your body ragdolling down the road a few hundred times and then you’re good, on the rock it’s more of a tumbling and crunching thing. To be honest, my biggest fear was that I’d freeze up one day and not want to move, because I don’t think you know you’re one of those people until it happens. I’ve seen it before, they just go into this other mental state and nothing you say can snap them out of their fear coma. So, huge relief to find out I’m not that guy.

The first day sets the stage for really how much repetitive work you’ll be doing over the next several days. Timmy wasn’t kidding, you just jumar up, and then haul, jumar up, and then haul. The hauling is really hard work and it doesn’t take long for it to set in that you’re basically going to climb this rock twice. Once climbing to the anchor and another when you’re lowered down to haul and you climb back up again. You do this a bunch of times and the next thing you know the sun is going down and you finally get to just sit and rest.

Highlights of the day:

-Another guy climbing up 200ft to our ledge at night to offer the worlds biggest joint to us. Heath and I decided to abstain from the pot while we lived roped in.

-Heath and I whispering in disbelief that Dave wasn’t clipped into the rock, but was just connected by what seemed like a really small and simple knot. “God that looks so sketchy.” Then he turned around and told us he was going to lower us down to the sleeping ledge on that same knot. “Dude… are you joking?”

-Timmy walking around on the ledge at night and saying “Heath, you gotta stop bumping me man, I’m free solo” (no harness, no rope, no nothing)

-Last but not least, silverfish bugs crawling all over my arms and face as I tried to sleep for the very first time on a wall in a harness. Eventually I just turned my headlamp on and had a killing spree with my finger and did my best to reduce the local silverfish population.

Good night El Cap. I hope I don’t roll off this cliff in my sleep.

Day one: Up early, which wasn’t a problem for either of us for the few days prior to the start, we were always awake and waiting for the sun to rise. Awake, with that feeling you used to have when you were a kid and your mom dropped you off at the first day of little league. Nervous, a little cold, and wondering if you were at the wrong field.

We got my sister Julie packed up and off to Camp 4 where she’d wait in line and see if she could get a spot in the climber camp. With Dave’s van all packed we headed out to go bang on some tents and see if we could get one more helmet on loan. It only took a few minutes and then it was finally time for the moment of truth, get the haul bags on our backs and make our way to the base of the Triple Direct route, and start jugging.

We got our first taste of the change in mood when the bags were out and being sorted to haul at the base. You don’t really realize it, but Timmy’s demeanor kind of woos you and makes you comfortable. So, when he gets into business mode and Dave starts cracking down, you realize it’s time to get serious.

Sorting clothing. Pack a separate stuff sack with the food we’ll need for lunch. What do we need available on short notice? Where’s the sunscreen? How am I going to carry all of this photo gear on my harness? Stuff your pockets with bars and shot bloks. Am I hot? Am I cold? What’s the temp going to be like up there? Who’s going first? Are these ropes new? They look kind of old.

Dave was the lead climber for the first day, and after he quickly went up the first pitch, our lines were fixed and it was time to learn how to jug. Right jumar on. Right aider, or “etrier”, on. Left jug on. Left aider on. Carabiner’s are all locked? And just like that, Heath was off. As I look back at the video of us learning to jumar up the rope, it’s kind of funny how awkward we look. It’s a pretty basic concept that you get your head around in a short amount of time, so watching us jerk all over the place is a tad embarrassing.

Once you get going you’re like “ah, man, this is gonna be easy.” Jugging IS easy, when the rock is still at a nice angle, but when it over hangs it’s pull up central, a whole other story.

In order to give you the clearest picture of how a team of four go up El Cap, I think I’ve got to go over a few terms and some basic principles. We, just like you, hadn’t a clue how to climb as a team, especially a team with two additional haul bags disguised as human beings in flannels.

The basic order is that you have one lead climber and one person who climbs second and cleans the route of the protection that the lead climber placed. So if Timmy started, he would climb up a route, anywhere from 60-120ft and place small devices in the cracks every 10ft or so that would protect him if he fell. When he’d get to a belay station (two bolts drilled into the granite) he would clip in and pull up a tag line(smaller rope) that had the ends of three ropes. Two ropes for Heath and I, and one rope for hauling the bags. When those were tied into the bolts you’d hear “line fixed!” and then it was safe for Heath and I to go up. The last climber would then jumar up the rope and clean the pitch. This is where the real work came in, hauling the bags. When Heath and I neared the top of the rope, we’d get off our lines and get onto the haul line to use our body weight to pull the haul bags up through a pully. Make sense? It’s kind of a cluster fuck unless you’re there looking at it. But basically, Timmy goes up, then we go up, then we haul. Over and over and over again.

People ask us if we climbed at all. The honest and not so awesome answer is no. Turns out, if you’re not a rock climber, your ass is not coming near leading a pitch on El Cap. All the risk is placed on the lead climber and there was about a 0% percent chance of us putting that weight on our shoulders. So how do you ascend a rope? Well basically you have two of these things called jumars, or jugs:

They each clip into the rope and allow you to slide up and then they catch when you pull yourself up on them. Hanging off the bottom of each one is an aider:

Once you get the rhythm, you basically walk up the rope by alternating your hands and your feet. I know, all this info is kind of boring, but without having a basic idea of how it works, it ends up just seeming like greek.

The day before we left the ground I kept saying “I just want to start. I just want to get up there.” I’d seen El Cap, I’d met our leaders, I wasn’t scared of climbing, so I just wanted it to start ASAP. I was sick of being anxious.

Originally Timmy told us that we’d spend the whole day prior to departure learning how to ascend the rope and how to live on the wall. That went right out the window when different errands and tasks piled up with less than 24 hours to go. We were fitted for our harnesses, taught about our equipment, and we carried a load of some of the water we’d need to the base or our route, about a 20 minute hike from the road. Now came the moment Heath and I had been wondering about. What was he going to say when he found out that we hadn’t bought all the clothing and gear he told us to get. Climbers love synthetic clothing and nobody wears cotton up there, so you get a really original look on Timmy’s face when Heath tells him he’s going to wear a button down, slacks from Banana Republic, and a crossbreed of skate shoes and leather boots. And woops, I forgot, we really didn’t want to wear helmets either. The slacks eventually got the pass, but they said no fucking way on going helmet-less, so the helmet had to go over Heaths token black hat. Timmy just couldn’t believe that he’d sent me a half off coupon to the Patagonia store and all I’d bought was a flannel.

Clothing crisis averted, it was time to work on our food. Timmy and Dave took over here and we just watched them divvy up the most insane pile of heavy food I’d ever seen someone camp with. All these years as a backpacker I’d been taught to pack light and avoid unnecessary items, these guys went the other route. Since Clif bar is one of Timmy’s sponsors we had piles of Clif products. All that talk of shot blok love? That was handled with what you could call an all you can eat buffet of them, along with clif bars, powdered drink, and everything else that company makes. We also had canned fruit, bagels, peanut butter, salami, blocks of cheese, canned beans, coffee, precooked asian noodles, and a 12 pack of beer among other things. Now, to give you an idea of how much weight we were getting ready to slug up this mountain, water alone would be 21 gallons, about 168 pounds. A rough guess of all the climbing EQ, food, porta-ledges, and sleeping gear? Maybe 250-300 pounds split into three haul bags that we would soon call our flotilla.

Side note: When Timmy found out there was deodorant in my bag he couldn’t believe it. I think he thought I was joking actually. I just wanted to say “Dude, you just packed 9 pounds of beer!”

Here’s a short video of the day we arrived in the valley and saw our new adversary in person for the first time.

Damn! I’ve driven through the Winona tunnel and into Yosemite Valley a whole lotta times, but after picking up Timmy and heading north, this time was so much different. With some hindsight, El Capitan is way more intimidating to look at from a few miles away than right up against it. It’s almost like an optical illusion. It looks massive, dark, and mean from far away. It’s like it knows you’re coming and it’s laughing, saying “Really? You? No…fucking…way.”

On the other hand, Timmy is a really rad host. When you drive with him into the valley, you get the feeling he’s coming back home for the first time in a long time. I guess for people like him, it’s like his old epicenter because most American climbers, at least one time in their life, spend a huge chunk of time there. It’s the center of the world as far as rock climbing goes, and since Timmy’s had the speed record on the nose route of El Cap two different times, he knows the place like a college campus. This is when I started to get a little taste of a feeling that would stick with me until now. I felt really small and very intimidated. I’ve been to the valley probably 20 times, but all of the sudden I was lost and confused about where things were. Basically, for the next 5 to 6 days I was going to be 10 years old all over again. Not rad.

While you walk around the valley, the history starts to creep in on you. When Warren Harding climbed the nose for the first time in 1958, he did it in 47 days over a span of 18 months. Since then it’s been the yardstick of the speed climbing world and the current record is 2 hours and 36 minutes. The way it’s shaped, with the valley floor perfectly flat and those giant walls shooting straight up, you’re right in the middle of some modern arena for the most insane athletes in the world. A perfect place for an introverted skateboarder with no upper body strength and an uncoordinated photographer who stopped taking his shirt off a long time ago.

So at this point I have to rewind right? The nature of this adventure didn’t lend it’s self to being easy to document, and since it was much shorter than the last, by about 49 days, we’re pretty much forced to talk about it in hindsight. So here we go…

We started emailing Timmy back in March, but each response seamed to take weeks, if not months. It was almost like he knew just the right amount of emails, and how often, to keep me with a glimmer of hope in my eye. If you read the posts on the bike trip you’ll know I operate on that anticipation program that keeps me going, but I’m not sure why this particular thing seemed so important. All I know is that it sounded crazy so I didn’t want to give up on it.

By the time July and August rolled around I had pretty much given up, but wrote one more email, and like clockwork, Timmy wrote back. He was in Tanzania with a doctor friend of his. He was getting ready to climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro and he’ be back on the 26th of August. When an email came back from Timmy the texts would immediately start firing back and forth:

I ran out and bought climbing shoes and a rock gym membership even though it was still a huge maybe->

He bought a pull up bar ->

Tick toc tick toc…..

So on the 29th I wrote him (my email is below his in blue) and got this gem back:

I read it a few times in disbelief and then sent it off to Heath for a laugh. I thought “alright, we’re not doing this with someone boring, but this guy might be insane.” Two days later I got a text. It was on. We’d leave in two weeks and pick up Timmy at the Trader Joes in Fresno at 2pm on the 15th.