This year's Needles expedition -- day 1

Reentry from this year's expedition to the Needles, with my friend Dima from Texas, has been the hardest yet!

At the campsite

We took off midday on Thursday, arriving at Kernville in time for some lunner and a beer at the Kern River Brewing Co, as is our custom. We made it to the Needles campsite before dark, which was just as well, since the dirt road had a couple major mudholes that we had to negotiate, so sunlight was definitely a plus. The campsite was quite full, and we snagged the last available official camping spot, as far away from the folks with the television in their Sportsmobile as possible. I slept in my car, as usual. Dima pitched his Nemo tent, which is extremely entertaining to watch. A single PhD does not qualify one to pitch a Nemo tent, no siree!

On Friday we racked up, and steeled ourselves for the long approach. We got to the notch by the Witch only to find several parties already there and racking up, and a party already on the route we wanted to do, Airy Interlude. A little taken aback, and psychologically unprepared to deal with people, we decided to head for another objective of ours, a route named Spooky on the Charlatan formation. Spooky can  be approached either from its base, by dropping down the notch between the Charlatan and the Djin, or by rapping the route from above. Initially we had a hard time locating the notch, and then we were put off by the allegedly 4th class chimney at the notch. Our beta said to expect rap slings at the top, but we found none, and we were not about to downclimb it, though we did see other parties who did later on in the day. (In the evening we spoke with Kris Solem, who is writing the new Needles guidebook, and he confirmed that indeed there are no rap slings, and that the chimney has gotten worse in the last couple of years since a flake broke off and a lot of soil eroded from the base making it deeper.) We set out to get to the top of the Charlatan to find the rap rings for Spooky, and finally succeeded after some time and a whole lot of scrambling. The top of that formation has to be one of the most spectacular spots on earth. There is a feeling of a whole lot of air around you that's absolutely breathtaking and incredibly intimidating at first. You do get used to it eventually, but initially it takes a real effort to walk around.

Me at the base of the second pitch of Spooky. Check out the crazy rock face!

The Charlatan is topped by a rock much like the headstone in J-Tree, but a little smaller, which has a crack on one side called the Lady of the Needles. This is rated 5.7, so we figured it would be a good warmup for the harder Spooky. It was indeed a very fun route, packing at least a couple interesting moves in no more than 40 feet of climbing. The top is very narrow, requiring the climber to either hang from the anchor or straddle it, which I thought was a hoot. The view is amazing!

The forecast had given us 15% chance of rain, and as we warmed up we watched the thunderheads slowly accumulate around us. None were too low or too close, though, so we decided to attempt Spooky. We were a little worried about the possibility of the weather getting worse in a rush, so we fixed our second line so we could bail very fast, if the need arose. We rapped the route, and started up. Dima led both pitches. The first, which goes at 5.8, was a solid hands crack for me, ending with a lieback section. It was a half a rope length long and I was loving every second of it! The second pitch, rated 5.9, starts with a 15 foot off-width, then continues up a sculpted face that looks probably like nothing you've ever climbed. Solidified waves is the closest description I can come up with. I could see that Dima was feeling rushed, and despite the fact that I had my eye on the weather and had persistently tried to take his mind off it, he wasn't paying attention to me. The off-width gave him trouble, and the demoralization from that made him uncertain in the face section of the climb. He finished the climb, but it was pretty clear that he hadn't especially enjoyed it. I couldn't figure out how to get into the off-width, so I started it as a lieback. That worked remarkably well until I got to the #4 camalot that Dima had walked up with him, about halfway up. I couldn't get that out while liebacking, so I tried to transition into the off-width, took a fall, and then thrutched around like a fish out of water for the rest of the off-width. At no point did I manage to regain any control or poise. Use it or lose it! I hadn't climbed an off-width in probably two years! After that I mostly enjoyed the face section, until I got to a spot where my way of doing it was very different from Dima's -- a common occurence -- but the way he had protected a traversing move made my way impossible to pull off. So I had to do it his way, which took a really long time to work out. No falls though! At least that was good.

My adventure mobile, bar and library in one

We finished the climb feeling a bit humbled and a little overwhelmed by the location, climbing and weather. On the hike out we stopped at the fire lookout tower and met the famous keeper, Margee, and Kris, chatted for a while, then hiked out with Kris. We had a beer and a burger at the Ponderosa Inn, not feeling quite up to cooking for ourselves, then read Ed Abbey and drank wine until we crashed.

(Pictures by Dima.)