Sheer Hell on the Lower 49th

July 11-14, 1997

by Richard J. Hughes

Leafing through Roper and Steck's "Fifty Classic Climbs in North America" (amazingly enough, a Sierra Club publication), Patsy set a beam on classic number 49, the South Face of Charlotte Dome in Kings' Canyon NP. This ten pitch 5.7 Grade III route ascends reputedly classic Sierra granite furrowed with cracks and covered with chickenheads in a spectacular setting.

Four of us were to climb in two sex-matched rope teams, the girl team comprised of Patsy and Alice Tseng and the boy team, myself and Carl van Herreweghe.

On the day we were due to leave, Alice e-mailed me, "I was just talking with my doc on the phone. He thinks that I have viral infection rather than giardia and he thinks somewhere near Yosemite wouldn't be the best place for me to be right now. But he said "Ok" after I told him I wanted to go. He finally said to take Emodium and drink Gatorade. I shall work on a quick recovery."

Carl, Patsy and I convened at our house. We asked Patsy if she had the permit. We're set. We hit the road and round about the border checkpoint on I15, I ask Patsy again if she had the permit. After some digging around though, she said she had left it at home.

I spun around and returned home, grabbed the permit and headed up north again. We reached the Marie Callender restaurant in Lancaster only half an hour behind schedule. For future reference, the fine for not having a permit is $100 per person, but the ranger will clear you if you really did apply for one and forgot it. If you lie to them though, they slap you with an extra fine.

We ate dinner, piled all the gear into Alice's 4-Runner and headed off to Onion Valley where we spent the night at the trailhead for a little preemptory acclimatization.

Next morning at the trailhead, everyone was awoken at 5.30 am by Alice's car's alarm, activated by Carl opening the door. A quick breakfast, split the gear up, a rope or a rack per person. This is a real suckers game, this fifth class backpacking/mountaineering. These packs were incredibly heavy. We reached Kearsage Pass at 1 pm and ate lunch. The hike to Charlotte Lake was easy, all downhill on good trail. But that was nowhere near close enough to the Dome for us. We had to get closer.

Carl had an old 15 minute map which showed a trail that contoured above the north side of Charlotte Creek at the 10,200 ft level. After some fooling around the outlet of Charlotte Lake, we picked up this good trail and followed it 3.5 miles to a bench NE of Charlotte Dome and camped next to the creek there. We were now within spitting distance of the Dome. It was 7 pm. Dinner and bed.

We woke at 5.30 am. Over breakfast Alice recounted her dream. She had overheard a group of climbers playing with their gear. The clink, clink of aluminum climbing hardware. They had sounded like a rescue team.

Shrugging off Alice's omens, we set off to the Dome but dropped too low, not realizing that a dike traversed the lower part of the granite apron. We wasted considerable time, water and energy negotiating the lower part of the Dome, but finally arrived at the toe of the south ridge. Carl and I third-classed a fourth class pitch and threw a rope down to the girls.

We all roped up and Carl led off. The climb was supposed to start with two fourth class pitches, but this was fifth class already. No problem. It was only 9 am and the rock was superb. Carl and I swung leads, but Patsy did all the leading on her team, Alice being less experienced. After the first four pitches, Carl and I realized that Patsy and Alice were considerably slower and it might speed things up a bit if we left the protection in place for Patsy.

The fourth pitch, which I led, was a traverse to the right followed by an ascent of a crack/knobby face to a ledge on which rested a glasses frame sans lenses. At least we were on somebody's route! Carl led up the fifth pitch, a continuation of the crack/knobby face to another good ledge. The sixth pitch was superb vertical climbing protected by letterbox nuts and chickenheads. Carl looked dubiously at the seventh pitch, which ascended a vertical chimney, and then went left past an overhang. "Sure you don't want to lead this?" Yeah, I was pretty sure. Actually I wasn't feeling all that great. My throat was sore, like I was really dehydrated. We had each brought a quart of water, except for Alice, who had brought two quarts. I thought I had been drinking an adequate amount, but my throat was really getting sore.

Carl led the seventh pitch and was making all kinds of noises like, "I haven't led anything this hard in ages ... this must be the crux pitch ... how'd I ever let you talk me into leading this". Carl is 67 years old and still as strong as an ox.

When I followed him up to the small belay alcove, I realised he was right, this was the hardest pitch yet. We were clearly off-route. I led off to the right, an exposed step-around to a narrow ledge with two horns on a slightly higher and even smaller ledge. "What about moving the belay up to that ledge", asked Carl. I looked around but there was no way. The horns offered the only protection and these were good for a downward pull only. A leader, falling from above, could yank the belayer upwards and the slings would come right off those two horns. No more belay anchor.

I negotiated a vertical step and found a bomber jug for a handhold that put me on a small sloping ledge. A thin crack led off diagonally to the right. I placed a #3 copper nut and led up. Higher up the crack I placed a #6 Wild Country Rock. A little higher ... this isn't 5.7 or easier. This crack was about 5.8 whether I climbed it as a lieback or a straight jam. I down-climbed to reconsider. Up again, looked around. The route was supposed to meander through a sea of chickenheads which, like capstans on a ship, you can tie a sling around. I couldn't see any chickenheads and the only cracks that I could see were way off to my right on what must be the Furrow Pitch. I didn't like the look of this at all. I down-climbed again and the #3 copper nut fell out. Now my throat was getting *real* sore. I figured it was a combination of fear and dehydration.

Patsy had come up to the belay stance where Carl was. They wanted to move over to the ledge on their right, the ledge with the two horns, but I told them again it wasn't a safe belay and they had better stay put. I liebacked up the crack for another look around but I still couldn't see any protection. To compound the difficulty, Patsy had by this time accumulated most of the gear from our two racks. Wow, this was shit scary and my throat felt raw. I came back down and said I couldn't lead it. Patsy's anyway a better climber than me and I figured she'd take a look (bail me out) but even Patsy wasn't keen to go up.

Carl says, "What are we going to do then?" It was 4 pm. I said we'll have to rappel, because I can't continue. Carl said we were already at the point where it would be easier to continue than to retreat. That was true (truer than we yet realized) but if no one would lead upwards there wasn't an argument. I said we could rap off the horns. "We're going to leave a lot of gear", noted Carl. By this time, I didn't care, I just wanted to get the &*%$ off this Dome. The question was how much faith did I have in the placement of the #6 Wild Country nut. Should I remove it and downclimb, always harder than climbing up, and risk falling onto the ledge, or should I trust the nut and rappel off it? I decided to compromise, leave the nut and downclimb. This is also risky because the further below the nut I climbed the bigger the risk if I were to fall and the nut failed, vis-à-vis the risk of downclimbing on belay without the nut. As I was downlimbing a hold actually did break off and I fell, but the nut held. This was the only hold that broke during our entire time on the Dome.

I belayed Carl and Patsy up to the ledge and we slung the horns. We all rapped down to Alice and pulled the rope, which hung up on a chickenhead about 30 feet above us.

Patsy volunteered to climb up (and then down) to retrieve the rope. On the next rappel, the rope hung up again, but this time about 90 feet up. Patsy again went up after it, this time using a prussik on the stuck rope in addition to placing gear, as extra protection. But the climbing was harder here and the daylight was beginning to fail. My throat was burning. I asked Alice to tell Patsy to rappel down the ropes once she had freed them, it was too dark already to downclimb safely. Alice has three younger brothers and is well-practiced in making herself heard.

After these two fiascos, Carl suggested we rap on a single rope to minimize the chance of having the ropes get hung up. I went down first to a sloping ledge which was punctuated by a crystal dike. I traversed this dike back and forth several times before settling on the crack on the right, more of a flaring seam than a crack, in which to build an anchor. It was really difficult to shore up this anchor. One, two Lowe tricams, a Metolius tricam, a #8 Chouinard stopper (which Carl had plundered from below) a #1 flex Friend and I was finally convinced that it was safe.

Carl came down and I asked him to double check the anchor. "Well, nothing's bombproof, but it looks akay". We brought Patsy and Alice down and this time the rope came down okay.

It was pitch black now, we could see the shapes of trees below, but had no idea how far below they were. The wind was whipping across the face, but fortunately we all had our wind jackets. I pointed out that the face immediately below us was shorter than the way which we had ascended, which lay to the right. One double-rope rap *might* reach the ground if we went straight down. Carl pointed out though that if the ropes didn't reach the ground, we would be stuck on a completely vertical face. The only way to tell was to go over the edge with prussicks and see if we could see the rope. Carl suggested I go, but I didn't have the strength to prussick back up the rope.

"Okay, give me your prussik then, and Patsy, you feed the other end of the rope as I go down". I swapped the lamp in my Petzl headlamp to halogen and gave it to Carl. "There, you'll be able to see a lot further with this". Carl started heading down but went off to the right where the slope was more gradual.

After about 30 feet, inexplicably, a figure eight in the trailing rope snaked out and lassoed itself over a chickenhead.

Carl started yelling up, "Hey, give me some slack". Patsy called down that the rope was caught on a chickenhead and she prepared to prussik down to the knot. Then Carl yelled up something about the headlamp. He'd been trying to focus the beam, had unscrewed the lens and dropped it down the cliff-face. Patsy started laughing hysterically, which pissed Carl off even more. Patsy finally freed the rope. After a while Carl called for her to go down. It was midnight.

Alice and I spent the next two hours huddled against the wind, hanging off those six miserable pieces of protection while Carl and Patsy were trying to build an anchor somewhere below us. I tried to sleep, curled up into the foetal position, but Alice, thinking that I was hypothermic, kept trying to keep me awake. Finally, a call from below. Alice went down first. I studied the anchor as she went down, analyzing which pieces were the most critical. It's always a toss up between frugality and security when you rappel and climbers are typically a frugal bunch, which is why rappeling is so much more dangerous than climbing. The uppermost tricam appeared to be taking almost the entire strain but I didn't trust it. I ended up leaving the Lowe tricam, the Chouinard stopper and the Metolius tricam behind. The price of security in this particular instance being close to $70.

When I reached the others they were hanging off another miserable anchor, a Lowe tricam and a small stopper in another thin flaring seam. I shored this up with another Lowe tricam and volunteered to rap first. The shorter rope *just* reached the ground under my body weight. The other followed me down. We had left behind at least $200 worth of gear.

Alice piled up rocks and made us a crude shelter against the wind. We huddled in there for the next two hours until dawn broke. The worst night of my life.

Alice woke us at 5.30 am and said, "Time to go". Alice was now the most lucid of the four of us and she took charge. She led us across the crystal dike. We reached camp, made a hot drink and slept until noon. We ate some lunch, went back to sleep until about 3.30 pm and then packed up and headed to Charlotte Lake. The mosquitos were about average for the Sierras. After some soup, I didn't feel like eating any more. My throat was still really sore and I was dog tired. I crawled into the tent and went to sleep, feeling like I was going to choke by this ball that was in the back of my throat.

Next morning I drank coffee and Ovaltine for breakfast supplemented with some chocolate. We reached Kearsage Pass at 1 pm but I couldn't eat any lunch. Instead I slept on a rock at the Pass. We reached the car at about 5 pm and ate dinner at the Two Sisters in Inyokern. The food there is just awful, but the carrots were so tender, overcooked to the point of being a tasteless orange carrot-shaped pulp, that even I could eat them.

Back home I examined my throat in the mirror. Both sides of the uvula were scored by vertical ulcers that ran its entire length, which was swollen to twice its normal size. The back of my throat, on both sides of the uvula, was also badly ulcerated. No wonder this felt like the worst "dry throat" I had ever experiencecd.

Next day at the clinic, the physician said, "That looks painful". Somehow I'd contracted a virus which was resonsible for the wicked ulceration.

Alice says she doesn't want to hear the clink clink of climbing gear for at least another two months.

Next time I'm going to pay more attention to Alice's premonitions. We were very lucky to be spared from being the objects of her dream.

Comments?

A Los Alpinistas story by Richard J. Hughes.