This year's Needles expedition -- day 2, attack of the carabiner

Saturday morning found us sleeping in, so we decided to forgo the hike in to the Needles and opt for the lower elevation and shorter approach of Dome Rock, on which we had an objective, the Anti-jello crack.

Anti-jello crack starts with the easy first pitch of the Tree Route. The second pitch is a 5.9+ fingers-to-tips crack, which I suspect was tips-to-nothing for Dima. He led almost all the way up it, and when the feet ran out, the crack thinned to almost nothing, and the protection got really tricky he had to hang and aid through the last bit of it. It only takes a sentence to say and justify that, but the process of making the decision and carrying it out is actually quite emotionally wrenching and time-consuming. I tried to be a good partner and give him all the time and support I could, but I never quite know whether to speak up or shut up. In any case, I was in the shade of a tree and quite comfortable. Dima finished that pitch via a right-trending variation that took us back to the Tree Route.

As for me, I think that pitch was possibly one of the best pitches I've ever climbed. The size was very suited to me. I had to stop and hang twice while cleaning nuts that were really stuck, as well as liberating a booty nut that someone had clearly used to bail on the route. Another bailing nut was fused and stayed in. During the second "take" to clean a nut I had a little accident. The draw on the piece above the one I was cleaning got jerked violently in the take, the biner at the end whipping around and fluttering and eventually taking a nice big bite out of my left bicep. It took a good chunk of flesh out, and made a giant bruise around it. It hurt a lot, but I was in the moment and didn't pay much attention. Later, at the top of the route I stopped to disinfect and bandage it.

At the top of the second pitch we switched to me leading up to the anchors of the last pitch of Tree Route, since I had the whole entire giant rack of tiny gear on me. It was fun to be, however briefly, on the sharp end. I think Dima either doesn't trust me, or is so concerned about me getting hurt and screwing up his climbing plans, that he almost never lets me lead. He certainly never asks if I want to. The silent arrangement suits me, however, as he is a lot more willing to get on harder things and flail than I am, as a leader.


The last pitch of Tree Route -- in fact the whole route -- is super fun. It's a lowish angle slab, with a single bolt in the middle, a bit like the last pitch of Angel's Fright/Fingertrip on Tahquitz, but easier. Above that are just slabs to the top. We hung out on the slabs, licking our wounded egos and arms and enjoying the incredible view. A lovely breeze had kicked up, really helping in the 80s temps and full-on sun. Eventually we walked off the rock, I took a nap, and Dima went back to the base to retrieve his gear. We finished our day with another visit to the Ponderosa, where the service sucked and the food made us both quite ill. But more about that on the next day's log...

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.)

White Punks on Dope

As the dear reader may recall, one of the objectives of Dima's and my last trip to the Needles had been to climb White Punks on Dope. But we had failed, since the approach took too long, and it was far too hot a day to be starting up a serious climb with as little water as we had. So we had backed off, but turned on GPS tracking on the way down, so we could do the approach with less hassle in the future. 

Well, on Friday we returned to Voodoo Dome, to give WPoD one more try. We began our trip with the customary stop at the brewery in Kernville, then proceeded up to the road-side bivy on Needlerock Creek, only to find four cars parked there! We ended up crashing at the turnout just before the creek, so that we could still walk to the trailhead, instead of the campground, from where we would have to drive.

We woke up around 6:30am Saturday to an absolutely perfect day. We took our time puttering about for breakfast and racking up, then started up the trail. We didn't turn on the GPS from the start. This time we knew not to miss the left turn that takes you to the climbs -- if you go straight you're now on the descent path, but going up. Nevertheless, at some point, despite all our efforts, we ran out of cairns to follow. That's exactly why we had the GPS track with us, and it was time to use it. As fate would have it, however, my phone with which I had fiddled extensively to ensure that I had the right apps and everything would work, could not acquire a GPS signal in the woods. We moved a little approximately in the right direction, and at every clearing I would give my phone a chance to acquire a signal, and every time it would NOT. T-mobile had pushed a GPS firmware update the night before, and I was convinced -- and furious! -- that it had simply broken my GPS, which I had gone to such pains to prep. Eventually we found ourselves in a rocky gully with cairns, but it was clear that it was headed for the notch between Voodoo Dome and the Dome to the west. From there we could see that we had to bushwhack N-NE to find the base of our climb, and so we did. Eventually we intersected the rocky gully that does lead to the base of WPoD, and scrambled up to the base. It was 10:10am, and by 10:30am we were on the rock. 

Dima led all the pitches in this climb. The first pitch was a cool, rope-stretching crack in the middle of a face framed by dihedrals. We had shade for half of it, and it ended in an alcove below and between big broken sections. It was a gorgeous climb, and the belay was in a really cool spot. At the end of the first pitch we had a yelled conversation with a party of, I think, 3 who were planning to start up the climb behind us. 

The second pitch has a vere bouldery start. Dima placed a cam and a nut above the anchor before testing the move and falling on the nut. On the next try he pulled the move just fine. When it came time for me to follow, I was dismayed to find that the nut he'd fallen on was pretty jammed, so I had to spend a whole bunch of time extracting it. The next belay was also in an alcove beneath a big chimney. There was a weird constriction in the rock that was going to make the next pitch really tricky, so we broke up the easy terrain into several "pitches" with hip belays. The top of the chimney was very very cool, and that soon brought us to the base of the fingers dihedral that is the hardest rated pitch (at 5.9) of the climb. 

Dima led up the dihedral, huffing and puffing, protected the exit into an offwidth lieback with the #4 camalot, as planned, and started belaying me up. I pretty much hated life in that dihedral. My Achilles tendons were killing me, and the sides of the dihedral were in an acute angle, meaning I couldn't get much rest. It was slick and messy. The fingers crack, at least, was good. By the time I got to the #4 I was so ready for offwidth! I underclung the thing and made it out. This was a legitimately hard pitch, but far too long and awkward for me to pretend I enjoyed it.

The next pitch was the most fun for both of us, I think. It's a slab pitch, with one placement to protect right above the anchor, then 4 bolts in 165 feet of climbing. It's rated, I think correctly, at 5.8. Dima grumbled and climbed, and then I followed. The crux, I think, comes right after the first bolt. There is a completely improbable traversing move necessary, and both Dima and I thought it was the hardest. But it was so fun! 

The slab pitch ends at a big ledge, from which we chose to head to the summit via a 5.9+ finger crack. It was a very nice climb, but Dima kept me on a lot of tension, so I wouldn't deck if I fell at the start, and I felt like I was essentially pulled up the climb. It was 5pm when we got to the top, so we didn't waste any time finding our way off the formation. We rapped down the North side, from the slings at the very top, and then tried to find a trail off. This time I knew we'd have to lose a lot of elevation to clear the buttresses ringing the rock, so we didn't hesitate to head down. Eventually, and almost magically, we dropped down the notch between Voodoo and Gremlin. From there we could see the road, and we had a general idea of what we were looking for. We were back at the car by 7pm, before headlamps were even necessary, and we really felt like we'd gotten away with something!

The GPS, by the way, finally got enough satellite signal at the ledge below the summit. And the climbers we heard start behind us... we never heard from them again. They must have bailed. And we never did find out what all those cars were doing at Needlerock creek...

Dima's gallery

Captain Kirk at the Needles

Before leaving on my previous climbing trip to Tuolumne I emailed Dima, the guy who originally taught me how to climb cracks two years ago, for beta for that trip. He mentioned his school year was about to start for earnest but that he barely had time for one more trip, and we concocted a plan to head to the Needles for two or three days. Dima flew into LA and we were going to meet in Kernville on Sunday afternoon. As it turned out, not one but two rental cars crapped out on him, so he was running a couple hours late when I arrived at Kernville and parked my butt at the Kern River Brewing Co. I was wearing my new Supercrack t-shirt, and a couple of folks at the brewery had apparently just been talking about the Supercrack, so we struck up a very pleasant conversation. Between reading my book, catching up on beta and drinking, time flew and Dima arrived. We had dinner and took off for the high campground, where we had a quick ceremonial libation and crashed asleep.

The next morning found us not too hurried. While I had only climbed on Voodoo Dome, Dima had been to the top of the Needles before and gotten hopelessly lost trying to find Magic Dragon. So he had decided that we should start by trying to climb Igor Unchained, the shortest, but also hardest of our objectives, since he expected we'd spend part of the day lost. As it turned out, we didn't get lost at all. We hiked in to the base of the tower, then took the trail that traverses the North side of the Needles, then dropped down the notch between the Witch and the Sorcerer, and BLAM! Igor on the left! Atlantis on the right! Figurative climber hard on!

Igor Unchained looks as beautiful and intimidating from the bottom as it does in pictures, but steeper. The backstory is short and sweet: in spring 2009 I was looking at Needles pictures on Mountain Project when I noticed Igor. He took my breath away. I wanted to climb him. So I made a date with my then partner to go to Igor in May 2010 and lead all three pitches of him. In November I was stronger than ever, and it all seemed like it might work out. But then Ben and I stopped climbing together, and in February, and then again in March I tore my rotator cuff and labrum. So my plans to climb Igor, or to climb anything, really, were put off for months. Fast forward to Monday: Dima is rearing to go, and I am at the base, having promised to follow him up anything he cares to lead (and thinking, based on prior experience, that that was a safe bet). I am shaking in my boots in the presence of Igor. What on earth is 5.9"+"? I've researched this climb extensively and I know that people say the "+" is for sustained. To me that means strenuous, and I'm out of shape. We're at high altitude and it's supposed to be hot and I haven't climbed with Dima in two years and I'm thinking, I better not break down and cry, or worse, pee myself now...

Dima racks up and off we go! The first pitch is a left-facing dihedral that requires the leader to make the same move over and over. Dima luckily has doubles, even some triples, in the right sizes, so he slowly-slowly makes it almost all the way up the pitch. Instead of belaying in an alcove, he is forced, through lack of appropriate gear, to build a hanging belay a little lower. I start following and I'm learning quickly. Lesson #1: Dima actually believes he might fall, because he's setting the nuts *really* well. Every time I have to remove a nut I lose skin off one, sometimes two, knuckles. Lesson #2: what is happy hands for Dima is a little wide for me. I'm sometimes on the verge of slipping out of the places where he's placed a #2 C4. I'm camming my wrists in that shallow crack in new and painful ways. About two thirds up that interminable dihedral I have to hang. I call a take and try to catch my breath, massage some blood back into my right hand, recover the use of my left Achilles tendon. Then it's back at it, and I arrive, panting like a dog, at one of the most uncomfortable belays in memory.

The next pitch goes even slower for the leader. There is a bizzarre tiny roof with a wide crack to get over, then some more wide stuff, then a fingers dihedral. Dima overcomes them all methodically, though I can't see him from my vantage point for the second half. In the meantime I'm devising increasingly more acrobatic ways to hang in my harness. I finally start up. It turns out that the beta for me to get over the little roof with the wide crack is completely different from Dima's. Where he could jam his thigh, I can fit my whole hip. I come up with a way to do it that seems like a child's solution to a boulder problem. It involves a heel-toe-hook, the bastard lovechild of a heel-hook and heel-toe jam. By then Dima is insistently providing "belay assistance", though I haven't asked for it, so the whole exercise is a little ridiculous. I get to the dihedral and I finally relax. Fingers dihedral, I know how to do this. Turns out that was the part that had sketched out Dima. Go figure. We're on a ledge now, and there's a place to sit in the shade. It's practically palatial!

Dima agonizes a little about how to rack up for the third pitch, but the printed beta is pretty clear, fingers and hands, so off he goes. I'm belaying him seemingly forever. He runs out of rope and I yell up at him, but I can't hear his response. I don't take him off belay until I can tell he has me on. I break down the anchor and off I go. This is the pitch that had me nearly peeing myself at the base. It's completely vertical. I'm climbing and it's really strenuous, but really really good. After I seem to have climbed a pitch's worth, I start thinking, this may be the best pitch I've ever climbed. But then it keeps going. Another of what seems like half a pitch later, I'm starting to bargain in my head: if you end now, I'll still call you the best pitch I've ever climbed, but if not... It's vertical, so I can't see over the top, and I don't know how much further. I'm having to stop and de-pump my hands every chance I get, which is not often enough. Man! What is this?! I slip and I catch myself. Damned if I'm taking a fall now! Finally, the angle eases off and I pant to Dima. Holy shit! We are both mumbling in ecstasy, telling each other about our mental process, him leading, me following that pitch. We agree that it may be the best pitch we've done. And it's *exactly* 60 meters long.

The view from the top of the Witch, whom we've now earned the right to call the Bitch, is spectacular. We spent a lot of time up there taking pictures and enjoying the breeze. We rapped down and started on the trail back, and somewhere about a quarter of the way back to camp my internal battery ran out of juice. I had to scramble and hike back extremely ... very slowly. But we made it, of course. We headed out to Ponderosa for beers & burgers, but found it had just closed. We drove down to Needlepoint Creek, our bivy on the low road, since the plan for the next day was to do White Punks on Dope, which is on Voodoo Dome. On the way we saw two beautiful brown bears. Over dinner we looked up at the Needles in moonlight.

The next morning we got up at 6, and probably left around 7. We coudn't find the trail, eventually made it to the base of Voodoo, and then followed the base around to White Punks. The heat and bushwhacking misery of this could not be overstated. We got there at 10am, and the sun was already beginning to bake the world. We were destroyed from the approach, and decided we no longer had enough water or time to do the climb and get back with the desired margin of safety. We turned on Dima's GPS tracking and followed the cairns downhill, making a track to the base of the climb on the way -- a little community service, if you will, and a pre-requisite for a future successful attempt.



View White punks on dope approach trail in a larger map



With Dima gone to points North to climb, and the camera with the photos of our trip still with him, I returned home. I've slept at home for two nights since the trip, and I have never slept so soundly in my life. I did not know such depths of exhaustion could be plumbed.

Voodoo Dome and Dome Rock

Ben and Davide at the top of Summer Sojourn
Originally uploaded by slampoud

This past weekend Ben and I were joined by Davide, a friend who was amongst the first people I started climbing with at the UCSB gym about a year ago. Davide has since moved to Antibes, France, and he's been doing a lot of limestone climbing there, so Ben and I wanted to show him some of the wonders of California granite on his visit back. Initially Davide had proposed Yosemite, but I redirected us to a less crowded place. Ben and I had been planning to get on Summer Sojourn and White Punks on Dope, so we invited Davide to join us for that. This was going to be Ben's and my first time on a longer moderate multipitch together (the previous longest having been Cat in the Hat, at 5 pitches of maximum 5.5, if I recall correctly, which we'd rocked), and we'd decided we wanted to swing leads. Thus I was slightly apprehensive about doing it with a group of three, but I knew that Davide was a stronger climber than I am, even if he didn't know how to lead on gear and had never climbed on granite or cracks in general before.

So we drove out to near the base of the Needles on Thursday night and camped in the dark, woke up the next morning and moved our campsite closer to the base of Voodoo, and figured out where the trail up to the base began. We approached with our gear only, no backpacks, knowing that we may or may not descend to the base of the climb. The approach was barely a trail, marked by occasional cairns which truly saved our asses. It took us a little under two hours, and mercifully, we were under treecover most of the time. We'd decided that Ben would lead the odd-numbered pitches, and I'd take the even ones, because 1 and 3 were supposedly the crux pitches, at 5.8. So Ben started up, trailing the second rope so Davide and I could follow more or less at the same time, with me cleaning. Our scheme went well, and we made it to the base of the second pitch with no issues.

The beginning of the second pitch is described as a "striking dihedral". That it was, and more. It was 40 or 50 feet of sheer off-width. I had said I was going to lead it, so, despite the fact that I was obviously intimidated as hell, off I went. I plugged in a #4 camalot and walked it up between knee jams. I stuck in a rigid friend a little further up and led up above it. I groveled, cursed, tried to jam my feet and slipped, but somehow held on. Nearly at the top of the dihedral, the crack gets even wider, but all of a sudden another face appears on the left, maybe 4 or 5 feet away. I traversed left onto that face for a rest. For a few minutes I -- and I suspect Ben, too -- thought I'd really screwed the pooch with that rest, and wouldn't be able to make it back into the crack, which was really the only way to continue. In the end, reversing my moves exactly got me there, and I grunted past the even wider section. From then on the climbing got easy, on two parallel, well-featured sections. The pitch was pretty long, so I had time to relax into the last section and get my flow back, before setting up my anchor and belaying the guys up, grunting, one by one this time.

Ben led the next pitch, which was a fun, but unremarkable crack. The 5.8 crux was really getting on it from under the little roof at its base. Davide and I followed up simultaneously. The fourth pitch, my lead again, was a lot more interesting. The crack we'd been following ran out 10 feet above the belay. I plugged in a #1, and led off to the left, where the beta directed me to look for a placement in a bowl-like section of slab. When I got there, already run-out, I couldn't see a placement. So I started hunting around for one on nearby sections of the slab. I finally found a placement for the golden, I think, TCU. Then I continued up and left, following a seam in the rock. The further away I got from my TCU, the more sketched I became. The climbing was not hard, but there was definitely an "are we there yet?" loop playing in my head. Once I was once again severely run-out above my gear, I started thinking really really hard about where I was putting my hands and feet. Aside from my own rope, I was also trailing Davide's, and I had clipped it into the pro to protect his traverse. The ropes had a ton of friction and were pulling me down at every step. Every move had to be calculated. I was moving so slowly and tentatively, and with so much tension because of the ropes, that I started getting pumped. So then I started worrying about shaking myself off the rock. I found a stance and stopped. There were no placements in sight. I took a minute off and continued, and found a pocket in the rock that I thought might work for a tricam placement in passive mode. So I plugged that in. It was still far from my anchors, which I could now see above me, and the slab was becoming more vertical just below them. I had visions of lunging for the anchor, going for it with one finger and breaking it off as I weighted it. So I didn't. I went up very very carefully, moving left and right off the center seam, as necessary to get the best holds. When I got to the anchor I discovered one bomber metolius bolt flanked by two sketchy rusty hangers on rivets. I built my uncomfortable hanging belay and got Davide and Ben up, one by one, because they were moving so fast on the slab. Three pieces in 150 feet!? The first within 3 feet of the anchor?! Holy shit! That is the very definition of severely run out. I am so impressed that I did not shake off the rock on that one!

The rest of the climb wasn't much to write home about. Ben's next pitch was more slab, but this time there were bolts to clip! Kiddy slab. Then I did a 70 foot lead to the worst-placed anchor I've ever seen. Then Ben finished it off with another short and trivial crack-to-slab lead, and we walked off the easy slab to the top, where the view was amazing. We'd started out at 11am and finished at 6pm sharp, for an average of 1 hour per pitch. Not bad, under the circumstances.

The descent... now that was another matter altogether. I'd been warned by the San Diego experts not to attempt to walk off Voodoo Dome, but rather to rap down a route. But the Mountainproject beta suggested walking off, so that's what we tried. We misidentified the gully we were supposed to go down (and misidentified it again later, so that we really have no idea where the proper gully is, even though I looked for it from the summit of Voodoo) and had to rap a couple times. Then it got dark, and we only had two headlamps for three people. We had to rap a whole bunch later, and finally we made it to what seemed like steep, but not rocky ground. From there we found the original trail in the dark, which was a miracle, and made it out in a whopping four hours. All told, it was a 13 hour day, with 7 hours spent climbing in the sun, and four hours descending, so I was burned, my calves were shot and we were all generally a little dehydrated and exhausted.

The next couple days were spent on Dome Rock, where it was too hot and sunny to get on any of the exposed multipitch routes. We messed about on the first pitches of a couple things on Saturday, and the amphitheater on Sunday. On Sunday afternoon we dropped Davide off at Corcoran, where he caught the train for Berkeley to attend his conference.

We learned a bunch of lessons:
* Ben should have learned to always bring a headlamp, but knowing him, he probably hasn't
* on adventure climbs, when you think you're bringing enough water, bring more -- we got this right
* we probably should have followed the beta given us by people we know rather than the website -- I was arguing for this, Ben against it, I think, given our experience, I win
* 5.7 is the scariest grade; it has no honor or sense of propriety and will trick you into all sorts of stuff -- we all agreed on that
* R in the Sierras is really R; it could mean anything from four placements in 200 feet to no placements. In my 5.6 case it meant two (excepting the one right above the anchor), the second of which was questionable
* swinging leads works really well for us. I find it psychologically helpful to decide in advance who's doing odd and who's doing even
* I can't belay two people up a 5.6 slab at the same time in guide mode. They usually move too fast