After I got in on Thursday, the first place Julia and I climbed was a desert site called Benton crags. It was fun climbing with her again; we hadn't been out together since going to Lover's Leap several years ago.
The Minarets from Minaret Vista, at the top of Mammoth Lakes. Now Julia lives and works here, but I think we both first saw this view at the beginning of a backcountry ski trip we took here in Mammoth almost two and a half years ago. Showing this photo to a friend in Palo Alto, she remarked, "exactly like Mordor" except for the bluebird skies.
The next day we headed to the Rock Creek drainage to climb Bear Creek Spire. As we started hiking around 6AM, this was our first view of the spire (the mountain on the left) in the morning light.
The rock creek drainage begins from the aptly-named Mosquito Flat (none in the morning but they were vicious on the way back) and climbs gently past a number of stunning lakes including this one.
Unimaginably still water.
Here's the best view of our route (East Buttress of Bear Creek Spire, 5.5) from a point about a mile past where we cut off trail and began hiking through the talus and trying to avoid snowfields. The route goes up the prominent buttress of the peak--it's not the left skyline but the gentler slope blelow the skyline that angles up past two towers and joins the peak just left and below the summit. Most of the route was fourth-class scrambling but about where the ridge joins the main peak, it steepens up and we roped up to pitch out the last few hundred feet.
A closer view of the route, you can see the towers a bit better.
From the beginning of the route looking down the Rock Creek drainage.
The view south-west down the opposite side of the buttress was much more alpine but still very beautiful.
Julia at the base of the route.
Now a bit higher on the route we have a glorious view of the valley below us. The lower mountain range behind in the background is in Nevada!
Right before we began climbing. The first part of the climb was just talus scrambling, like all the rock around me in this picture.
Most of the way up the climb, now, but still before we roped up. I wanted to take a picture of Julia with the strange rock formations in front of her which looked like dragon's spines.
Julia following a pitch going up and over one of the pinnacles on the summit ridge. The last two pitches of the ridge were almost all climbing of this type, simple, beautiful, clean and very exposed.
Julia rappelling from fixed anchors near the summit. The summit is the block on the right, accessible by an exposed but fun 5.6 move up to straddle the block. After this rappel we scrambled down a whole bunch of loose talus and choss to head through Cox notch and slide down some unpleasantly suncupped snowfields.
At the top of the last rise before heading back down into the valley and meeting up with the trail. Now the lakes are much closer (but so are the mosquitos!).
The next day I was a bit tired and sore (OK, my knees hurt a lot, mostly from the talus hiking the day before) so we walked about a thousand feet uphill to Crystal Crag--this beautiful mound of granite--and did some sport climbs right around where sun meets shade on the arete.
Sirius Black (Julia's friend's dog) and Sammy (Julia's housemate's dog who accompanied us almost everywhere except to Bear Creek Spire during the trip) frolicking on a snowfield just below Crystal Crag.
The next day I headed back to the Bay Area through Tuolumne Meadows but Julia and I stopped in the Meadows for the morning to climb Hermaphrodite Flake to the Boltway (5.8), a classic climb on Stately Pleasure Dome (to her left).
Hermaphrodite flake is the large plate of rock in the middle of the picture that looks like the horizontally flipped twin of California. We climbed up the blocky, fun stuff underneath it, then up its left-hand top side (5.4), and then headed directly up the slab above it to the top of the skyline (5.8). On the right, the massive corner is the Great White Book, and the faint corner to the left of the second pitch of Hermaphrodite Flake is West Country, site of my second lead ever with Chuck Booten, now three years ago.
On the drive from Tuolumne to Palo Alto, looking north from 120 into the Yosemite high country, alone in a rented car. A gorgeous end to a beautiful trip.