Voices in the Night

The Wong Climb was pretty fun.

The first pitch is an enjoyable, secure, hand crack. The second pitch, probably the crux pitch, was a rather grungy squeeze chimney which you are forced to exit in a couple of places owing to chockstones. This pitch took us a while, especially Mark, who found it difficult to get his John Long-like build, plus a pack, wedged into the crack. After two pitches, Wong Climb joins Long Climb. The next two pitches of Long/Wong follow a crack past a couple of roofs.

The first ascent of Long Climb was done by Royal Robbins and Don Wilson in '52 and the fifth pitch is another Robbins' beauty. At the 5.8 crux you must move around an arête which ends in a spike. You can't see past the arête for possible holds until you commit to the move around it, with the possibility of a nice pendulum fall back to the other side. We had the advantage over Robbins in knowing that there was a 5.8 solution waiting for us on the other side. The final pitch was easy after all that excitement.

All of this put us on top late in the afternoon. With darkness rapidly approaching and having no lights (after our first epic descent I swore I would never again climb anything on Tahquitz without a headlamp, but how soon one forgets), we decided to descend by way of the Friction Route rather than the North Gully. Although this meant walking most of the way around the top of and then later round the bottom of Tahquitz, none of us had ever descended the North Gully route and we worried about getting lost on steep rock in the dark.

Soon we met up with a couple of other guys who had just topped out and had no idea how to get down. It was pretty dark by the time the five of us made it back down to Lunch Rock.

Jean mentioned that she had poor night vision.

We continued working our way carefully and slowly over to the scree field which leads from the base of the North Face to Humber Park.

Jean said there might be a flashlight in her pack.

I headed up to get both of our packs while everyone waited in the scree field. Finding no flashlight, I started back down to join the others. It was about that time that we heard yells for help coming from somewhere up on the Northwest Buttress. The yells were coming from two guys on White Maiden's Walkaway who had no light and only one jacket, but were not injured. They asked to be rescued and we shouted back that we'd alert the rangers.

With only starlight, we slowly worked our way along the scree field leading down from the north face. Save for Jean, we could see fairly well; the light-colored rocks contrasting against the enveloping dark. We were making our way down fairly easily. I began to enjoy the descent. With no flashlight to focus our attention to a tiny spot, the feeling of the surrounding rocks and forest suffused into us.

Near the bottom of the scree field the boulders began to diminish in size and soon they were interspersed with patches of dirt. The usual path avoids this slippery section by heading north into the woods then, after crossing the creek, heading back south to the parking lot. Since I was sure that we'd never find the trail in the dark, I suggested that we keep heading directly for the parking lot. The parking lot was still discernable by the occasional car headlight or engine sound. Nevertheless, I worried that at the rate we were descending even these guides would disappear long before we reached the parking lot.

The slippery section was not as bad as we feared and we were soon in the forest, where it was indeed pitch black. We stumbled along in near-total darkness, often sliding down the mixture of pine needles and loose dirt, with only the sound of the rushing creek to guide us now. Slowly I became aware of singing, singing?, and a strange light coming from where I though the parking lot ought to be. We headed toward these new and mysterious clues.

Soon the sound of the rushing creek drowned out the singing. We couldn't see a thing! I had visions of pitching off a ten foot boulder into something akin to the Kern in flood, the sight of which had petrified me from the safety of a car window on the way back from the Domelands earlier in the year. Inching forward, I slipped off a foot-high rock into very cold, but thankfully only ankle-deep, water. After scrambling up the far bank we were on the trail. We soon reached the parking lot, although it was so dark by this time that I could barely distinguish the parking lot from the trail. The singing continued from somewhere near the top of the lot.

We ventured towards the singing only to find a group of Marines partying around a large bonfire beside the parking lot. As a measure of thanks for their guiding us through the darkness, I went to my car to bring them some more beer but tripped over a log on my way back to them and scraped my shins. Thus I managed to sustain the only injury in the entire epic.

On hearing of the people trapped on the White Maiden , those Marines who weren't already huddled around Jean suggested that we go up there and rescue the guys. Not wanting to be anywhere near the top of Tahquitz in the dark, especially with people who had been doing some serious drinking, I deferred to notifying the authorities.

At that very moment, up roared a firetruck. Seizing upon the opportunity to get a rescue going for the stranded climbers, I and about five burly Marines surrounded the cab. The firemen didn't emerge immediately but instead stared down at us for some time. When one rather nervous-looking fireman did emerge, we simultaneously blurted out the rescue request. The fireman said, well okay, he'd notify the park service. But what they were really out there for was to make sure that the illegal bonfire was extinguished.

With the fire out, we drank some more beer, I bandaged my shins and we waited for the ranger who arrived about 20 minutes later. After hearing that the climbers were not injured, the ranger's opinion was that they should be left to a possibly well-deserved cold and miserable, but not life-threatening, night rather than risk the lives of the rescue team. I agreed with this, although I wasn't freezing my butt off, tied to a rock several hundred feet in the air.

Later we heard that the climbers were indeed rescued, although not until about 3am.

Also later ... we discovered that there was indeed a flashlight in Jean's pack!