More High Sierra Climbs

Firstly, an apology for not having updated our blog for such a long time. The reason for this is that for the past 10 days we’ve been in Utah, and we haven’t been able to find anywhere with both plug sockets and Wifi. The concept of the independent coffee shop where you can sit with your laptop seems to be alien to Utah. A woman we met from Colorado said (in a very dismissive manner) that this is because they don’t drink coffee in Utah. They also have a pretty strange attitude to alcohol. If you want to drink anything stronger than 4% beer, you have to go to a “State Liquor Agency”. These buildings seemed to be designed to make you feel like a criminal just for going inside.

However, the purpose of this blog is not to talk about Utah but to tell you what we did before leaving California. After climbing Mount Whitney we did three more Alpine routes in the High Sierra. The first of these was on a mountain called Temple Crag. Again, we had to camp at the base the night before and do the route on the second day. The route was OK, but was slightly marred by there being a lot of mosquitoes where we camped and us not taking enough food, so being very hungry.

Temple Crag

The route we did was called Venusian Blind and went up a long arête on the left hand side. It had some good climbing on it but the rock wasn’t as good as the other routes we’ve done.

Innes high on Venusian Blind

Then we decided to take a few days off from the high mountains, and went to a place called Mammoth Lakes. This is a town on the east side of the Sierras, which is a very posh ski resort in winter. It reminded us a bit of places like Chamonix. The reason we went there is that there is good climbing at around 10,000 feet, so we could escape from the heat. The most exciting thing that happened there was that we got to see some black bears. We were walking around a lake to go climbing when we spotted a mother bear with two quite small cubs. They were coming our way, and so we just moved to one side and let them pass. They must have gone within 30 yards of us. Strangely enough it wasn’t frightening at all – the bears were obviously aware that we were there, and were completely uninterested in us. If the bears had been grizzlies it would have been a different matter, but black bears are a lot smaller and less likely to attack people. It was great to see them so close.

Black bear coming our way

Bear cubs

Our next route was on a mountain called Bear Creek Spire. We did the North Arete, 5.8. We did this car to car in a day, so it was fairly tiring. The route goes up the obvious arête leading straight to the summit which is catching the sun.

Bear creek spire

The climb ended on a very satisfactory summit, not big enough to stand up on. I have to admit that I wasn’t brave enough to climb up and sit where Innes is sitting in this photo, as it was very exposed and there was no way of protecting it.

Innes on summit of Bear Creek Spire

After this we headed north about 100 miles for our last stop in the High Sierra, a mountain called the Incredible Hulk. We were excited about climbing on the Hulk, because it has been featured in the climbing media quite a lot and we’d seen a cool film about it on Vimeo. As you can see from this picture, it’s an impressive piece of rock.

The Hulk

We planned to do a route called Red Dihedral, 5.10b, which takes a corner system near the right hand side. We camped in a really nice spot at the base, and got up before sunrise to make sure that we had enough time to do the route.

Hulk at dawn

Unfortunately two other teams of climbers had got up even earlier than us and beat us to the base of the route. This wouldn’t have been a problem except that one of the teams was really slow. After watching them for an hour, during which time they made little progress, we decided to cut our losses and climb an easier variation so that we could overtake them. We didn’t fancy being stuck behind them and getting involved in an epic not of our own making. This was a bit of a shame, because the variation that we climbed missed out a lot of the best climbing. Never mind – we’d been lucky up to this point, as we’d had all of the other routes we’ve done to ourselves. The next day we said goodbye to the High Sierra, and started heading east towards Utah. We took a day and a half to drive across the Great Basin. This is the bit of Nevada which is in between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. It’s called the Great Basin because no rivers flow out of it. It doesn’t get much rainfall, but any rain that does fall either evaporates or soaks into the ground. This means that it is an empty, barren landscape, punctuated by the occasional salt lake. It was pretty freaky to drive across – you really wouldn’t want to break down or run out of petrol. Our destination was a place called Maple Canyon in Utah. Attentive readers of this blog will notice that we’ve been there before, at the end of our last trip. We were exhausted after climbing in the mountains, and fancied going somewhere familiar where we could relax and not have to move for a few days.

More soon about what we’ve been doing for the last week or so – we’re now in Moab, where I’m writing this in an RV park. We decided to treat ourselves to an evening with Wifi, and the first showers that we have had since 24^th July (disgusting I know, but then I always was a soap dodger).

Best wishes

Ruth