Yosemite National Park
Playin' Hooky on Mount Conness, June 2005
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6am. Saddlebag road still closed, but bcrider and jimw gave reports of dry road. I loaded up the pack with skis and boots, climbed on the bike and began pedalling up the road. Below Alpine Lake. Lots of snow still on White and False White The route. The right side plunges down to the glacier, so don't go that way. 9:00am. On the plateau, but it is still early and despite the prime weather I know the chutes will still be somewhat suicidal at this hour. But since I'm not going to North Peak today because of the report that it was sketch and not very fun, I decide to have some fun up on Mt. Conness while the chutes warm up. And down the length of it Entrance to looker's right Y-couloir. This entrance involves an initial hairy traverse across a no-fly zone rock band so is a bit more sketch than the other entry. Naturally I chose this one. Looking up to the summit. The path snakes along a fairly narrow ridge up to the top. Difficult to see from this photo, but the drops on both sides are fair to partly fatal. An easy scramble though, but don't slip. Especially not in ski boots. The bigger issue is the snowfield near the top. One slip here and you're a pancake at the bottom of the SW face. 10:30am. After farting around on the plateau and checking out the various chutes on today's menu, I'm on the summit. Lunch is served. Lyell and Maclure would be a sweet ski if it wasn't such a slog to get there. Looking back at the chutes du jour After a nutella sandwich, trusted fuel of all hardy mountaineers, I slip on my rock shoes and start talus hopping out towards the north ridge. This is a classic route up from the glacier. I climbed it last summer and it was one of my funnest days ever in the mountains. Tremenous exposure in an Alpine setting but with perfect granite and abundant handholds. My favorite description of the route is this, from Alpinistas.org: [T]he whole climb . . . looks tricky, but proves to be pretty easy, even with a pack. You move left, find the ridge and then just go on up. The whole climb is on extremely solid rock with many, many fantastic holds and whopping big exposure. If you fell off, you would die a spectacular death, but you will not fall off. Any climber who is comfortable on 5.4 should have absolutely no trouble with any of the 4th class parts of the route, which is to say, pretty much all of it. I admit that even though I had ascended this route, I was a bit sketched to solo downclimb it. But I was feeling great and knew my limits. So off I went. Typical huge phallic tower along ridge. For perspective, the squeeze chimney to the left where I went over the tower was a shoulder width apart. Found a random granite chicken head upon which to rest camera for self-timer. Route is not that steep here, but imagine if you slipped... Postscript: camera did not plunge down to the glacier and memory card was retrieved. 12:30pm. Hit my turnaround time just above the notch leading to the "second tower" along the route. I climbed back up, and what was a moderately sketch downclimb was a thrilling climb back up; as enjoyable as I'd remembered it from one year ago. Conditions weren't totally ripe in the top of the Y couloir, and I was feeling pretty tired from the sealevel -> 12,500' jaunt, so I took a little catnap on the rocks above the couloir. 20 minutes later, I dropped in. The top was super steep and a bit dicey to negotiate around the rock band. Snow conditions in the top 100' were "almost corn" -- you know, not totally frozen bulletproof, but somewhere between hard and soft snow with some refrozen corn shingles still lingering on top. After a couple of sketch turns, the snow magically turned into perfect corn and the chute straightened out. Jump turns morphed into slalom turns in the gut, then into GS turns onto the apron. |
