Waterfall Pitch
The pitch, as it turned out, was rather anticlimactic. It only consisted of about 10 ft of climbing, and a fall would only give you a 15 ft ride, unless you were unlucky enough to start sliding on snow. It was too short, awkward, and easy to bother protecting with a rope (there’s +20lbs that we could have left behind!). Snow had covered the bottom portions, and there wasn’t enough ice for tools to be useful. To be fair, the climbing was awkward and required some brute force. Joel climbed partway up it first while I cached out climbing gear, and he was stymied by the lack of holds. I could see that it was a series of wide cracks in a corner, so all that was needed was some jamming and scumming! I opted to give it a go and climbed into the cracks. They were just barely wide enough to swallow a leg, so I jammed a leg in, twisted, and stood up. I jammed my right fist in a crack to my right, pressing my fist against the cold ice that was still present. After some less than graceful heaving against the rock wall and jamming appendages into the cracks, I was soon on top. Not so bad, but the down climb could be more of a pain – luckily there was some webbing slung at the top that could be used just in case.
Joe followed up without incident and we continued on. I foolishly left my ice tools here as well, instead of my mountaineering axe. We climbed up the chute a short ways and then doubled back west along a ledge to begin our traverse to Corcoran.
As we crossed the ribs on broken ledges we could see an occasional duck, and in general, finding a path through the rock barriers was straightforward – the difficulty was in deciding when to climb back up!
The route description from SP said to cross two of the buttresses before reaching a large chute. This chute splits, and one was to take the right fork to reach a large chock stone. Well, we reached such an area, but one of the buttresses crossed was smaller and truncated, only partially dividing the chutes. The farther chute was wide and forked twice, but after climbing up it, we could see that there was no chock stone. We backtracked and tried the next chute over, and voila! Ahead of us was a steep tongue of snow, and up above was a large chock stone, wedged between two of the spires on the ridge. The snow was still rock hard and was very steep – perfect for some fun climbing with ice tools! Joel had brought his, so he led the way, and I followed using my one mountaineering axe. At its steepest the snow probably reached 50o as it narrowed.
From the chock stone it was clear sailing the rest of the way. Some easy class 3 along the ridge brought us to a final chute with some loose snow and gravel in it, taking us to the summit. After signing the register we admired the impressive view of Comb Ridge, which is the jagged ridgeline composed of Mt LeConte at its northern end, Mt Corcoran in the middle, and many other spires along its length such as Shark’s Tooth and Laughing Dolphin.
I headed down first, but down climbing with one axe seemed very precarious on the steep hard snow beneath the chock stone – I really felt unstable when I was moving the axe. After nervously descending some 20 ft, I traversed to some exposed rocks on the side to finish down climbing on some more secure terrain. I waited while Joel passed beside me on the snow, predicting a good photo-op. I snapped away and followed him down. Soon we were back at the Waterfall Pitch, and some straightforward class 3 scrambling up the chute brought us to our highest summit of the day.
Altitude Laziness Factor By the time we descended the Waterfall Pitch and ascended to the LeConte-Mallory Plateau, Joel and I were beat. We had been moving slower and slower throughout the day, and we were beginning to feel sick. I felt a much more pronounced and total fatigue than I was used to for mild AMS, and my enthusiasm for climbing Mt Mallory and Mt Irvine before heading back to camp waned. Joel was also beginning to feel lazy, and the temptation of reaching Lone Pine early enough to have dinner in a restaurant was more than we could handle – Mallory and Irvine will have to wait for another weekend. We had a fun 1,400 ft glissade back down into the cirque, packed up camp, and made good time huffing it out. As we hiked the last bit of uphill to reach our car, we both were feeling really beat – but what a climb! The weather had been perfect, the terrain wild, and the climbing solid. We congratulated ourselves for finishing such an ambitious climb, the experience of wilderness and adventure ended when two old tourists drove by. As we were stowing the rope, ice tools, crampons, etc. this couple, inquired:
“Excuse me, but could you tell us where we can find Mt Whitney?”
We happily pointed out to them that it was the tallest rocky mass rising up on the skyline above the road, and they continued on their way. We thought this first encounter with other human beings since we had left on our climb was a little strange, but I imagine the impressions of this encounter was mutual!
Sequoia/Kings Canyon NP
