9/2/16

After a four day trip to the Palisades, Leo and I were pretty beat — though not so tired that we couldn’t do anything. We were up for attempting something, but neither of us was in the mood to carry gear. We had a pretty late start, and ended up driving to the North Lake Trailhead to walk over to Emerson and give it a shot. This is another peak that has a fouth/easy fifth class route to the summit. It’s a much shorter approach than anything else we had tried. So, we figured we’d hike up to the base of the route, give it a shot without any gear, and turn around if necessary. We hiked in for 1.5 hours, and found the base of the route. It looked pretty awesome, and potentially do-able without gear. I gave it a shot first, but found that it was too difficult for me to do confidently without any gear. So, we turned around and headed back to the trailhead — instead just enjoying our short hike on our “rest” day. Emerson will have to wait for another day, but it looks like a nice peak that I’m looking forward to.

That meant that we’d have more energy to take on something harder the next day. We had talked about doing Humphreys earlier in the trip, but we thought it might be too much to do in a day. But after such a long overnight, we were determined not to carry heavy overnight packs with gear again for the rest of the trip. That meant that if we wanted to do Humphreys, it would be in a single day push. I was nervous, but we decided to go for it.

We spent the rest of the afternoon back in Bishop, getting ready for the following day and grabbing a shower at the laundromat. We picked up some groceries, had an early dinner in town, and then started the long drive to the trailhead. The trailhead is down a 4WD road past the Buttermilks. I navigated as Leo handled the driving. We definitely made use of Tioga the Taco (Leo’s truck) 4WD and high clearance. I got nervous at times, since I’ve only done a bit of four wheel driving, but Leo did a great job getting us there. We made it to the end of the road a bit after it was finally dark. We were both surprised to find another car there on a Thursday night, and wondered if we’d see the owner on the mountain the next day.

Morning light on the hike in. (Photo by Leo).

We took a few minutes to pack up our gear for the next day, and then went to sleep. You’d think we’d get used to these early morning wake up times, but they’re all still very hard. Another 5:30am start for us.

There is supposedly a trail we can follow right from the start, but only for about five minutes, so I didn’t even take the time to look for it. We headed west up a drainage, and then started to veer southwest towards a ridge that then veers towards the saddle between Humphreys and Peak 12,241. The instructions were a bit confusing, and we thought we were supposed to cross the ridge and descend a bit, but only after studying the map a bit more (Leo caught this error), did we realize we should actually stay on this minor ridge, heading more north west.

To correct this error, we trudged back up an awful sandy slope that also had some unfortunate bushwhacking, but then we were back on track. The terrain was definitely sandy and steep, but not too miserable, and we were able to gain elevation reasonably fast. Both Leo and I were surprised at how much we were feeling the elevation. Both of us would become out of breath pretty quickly — after just a minute or two. We both would have thought that after having been at elevation for so long, even up to 14,000 ft on Mount Sill, that we’d be fine, but nope. This was the day that both of us struggled the most.

The ridge petered out and turned into a broad, large bowl shaped by Humphreys and its adjacent, unnamed peak to the north. We took low-angle sandy slopes up until we finally reached the low point of the saddle, which is the start of Humphreys’ east arete — our chosen route. We reached the saddle just before 8:30am — a bit under three hours from the trailhead.

Looking at the other side of the ridge, leading up from the saddle to the adjacent peak. (Photo by Leo).

From there, the fun begins. The route consists of a very exposed ridge the whole way up. We put on our climbing shoes and headed up, doing our best to stay to the ridge. We didn’t rope up yet, because the route is so long that it would be slow for us — so we planned to only rope up when necessary. In a number of spots, I felt nervous by the exposure and like the moves might be too difficult for me to do confidently without a rope. This meant that for a good amount of the climbing, I actually stayed down to the south, just below the ridge. We missed out on some of the fun climbing because of this, but I also felt I needed to do that to be safe.

Ridge climbing. (Photo by Leo).

The route rises and goes over a minor peak, nicknamed Peaklet. The route climbs over the top of it and then descends to a low point. This section was probably the spookiest for me. The route is super knife-edge and exposed here, which really gets you thinking, especially when down-climbing. At one point we placed some cams when downclimbing one section to aid on for a worst case scenario. Otherwise, we didn’t bring out any gear and just proceeded carefully. The going felt very slow, but better safe than sorry. One of the spookier parts here was crossing over an engine-sized boulder that sits perfectly on top of the knife-edge ridge. I was relieved when we finally found our first rappel station that fully lowered us down to a notch.

Crawling over the engine-sized boulder. (Photo by Leo).

This notch connected to the sandy gully that would be our descent route. We re-grouped and checked in on how we were doing, to see if we wanted to continue, since this would be an ideal bail point. We were both still getting out of breath quickly, but felt like we had the energy to continue. We decided to consolidate our gear to one pack and continue up. I carried the rope on my back will Leo carried the pack with the rest of our supplies.

We continued up the next section, which is another pinnacle that needs to be climbed and then rappelled. Only after we rappelled this section did we realize that we dropped the pack one notch too early, and that we’d have to traverse back to get it afterwards — oh well. As we continued up, I noticed that we could see two people high above, coming down the route. The next section was mostly easier class two/three scrambling, so we headed on up and eventually met up with these people. A women had just rappelled a class five section, so I said hello and asked her about the climb. She had hired a guide to go up with her, and seemed a bit sheepish about this fact. I told her that she still made it up, she should feel proud! Soon after, her guide rappelled down as well, so we said hello before going our separate ways.

We were now at one of the two sections we actually needed to pitch out. We headed left around a corner, and Leo led up an easy crack and set an anchor. I followed him up, and we coiled the rope up once more for me to carry. There were a few more slightly tough scrambling sections, and then we found ourselves on a sandy, low-angle plateau. It was nice to be on different terrain and continue on up. As we got to the edge of the plateau, the summit finally came into sight.

We scrambled across a steep slope until we finally got to the last wall up to the summit. This was the other section we needed to pitch out. It was once again easy fifth class, and Leo led it quickly. I hurried on up, and there we were, both at the summit! We made it there around 2:15pm.

Summit panorama. (Photo by Leo).

While the weather had been mostly nice all day, there was a ton of wind on the summit — and we were both quite cold. We did our best to scarf down our food and peruse the summit register quickly. The views were, of course, gorgeous, so we did our best to enjoy them despite the wind. I realized I had taken so few photos the whole day since I’d been so out of breath, just trying to keep moving safely.

Leo on the summit.

Leo was quite cold, so we started to go down. We found a rappel station for the last section of fifth class we did, so Leo rigged it up. As we got ready, I started to feel a really awful stomachache coming on. Lovely. To this day, I’m not really sure what caused it. I guess it could have been the altitude, but that seems unlikely. It was probably something with my sandwich. Who knows. In any case, I felt pretty awful as we were descending. We did the first rappel, scrambled back to the plateau, walked down and scrambled over to our next rappel station, where we had encountered the two people before. Leo set the rappel as I rested and tried to let my stomach recover. No luck. I could tell this likely wasn’t going away soon. To help, Leo insisted on taking the rope from me after we did the rappel.

View of the Humphreys Basin from the summit. (Photo by Leo).

From there, it was some more climbing down of scrambling sections. I was so happy when we finally made it to the notch. This meant easy, sandy slopes for the next while. Unfortunately, we still had our second pack over at the first notch. I offered to take the pack that Leo was carrying from him while he went to recover the second pack, but he just shot off anyways. I was really thankful that he felt okay and was willing to get the pack. We met a little ways down the slope, where the two chutes converged.

Leo rappelling.

By this point, we had been in our climbing shoes for many hours and both couldn’t wait to change back to our hiking shoes. Leo took a breather while I started down the slope, since I would be much slower than him anyways. I was really thankful to be on much easier terrain now. We made it to the bottom of the slope a little after 5pm, and then were rewarded with a talus field. Lovely. I was pretty slow on the talus since I didn’t feel great, but we were making decent progress. While my stomach still hurt, the average amount of pain had decreased, so that was nice.

Interesting formations across the talus field. Will a geologist please explain this to me? (Photo by Leo).

After the talus, we walked on some steep forested slopes for a while, heading past huge granite walls. There were various annoying obstacles to pass: a creek that had tons of bushes surrounding it to cross, and some bushwhacking while heading up the last ridge we needed to cross over. Now that we were so close, I was pushing through and forcing myself to go faster, so excited to make it back to the car. We were treated to some beautiful sunset light as we crossed over the last minor ridge, and then headed back down to the original trail that we had barely started out on many hours before. We hadn’t known if we’d make it back in time to make it worth it to drive back to Bishop for dinner. But as we got closer to the trailhead and realized we’d be back at 7:30pm, we decided it would be worth it to do the drive out. We even had a bit of cell service, so Leo made sure that there would be decent places open to eat by the time we made it out. We had forgotten that it was a Friday night, since we had been on vacation for so long.

Granite walls lining our hike out. (Photo by Leo).

We even jogged the last little bit back to the car. We took off all our gear as quickly as possible, changed our shoes, grabbed some Aranciata, and started driving. We wanted to do as much of the drive as we could with what little daylight we had left. We didn’t have any problems with the drive, and shaved off about 10 mins from our drive in the night before.

Sunset light on the hike out. (Photo by Leo).

Getting to Bishop and going to the Mountain Rambler was a dream. We both felt pretty accomplished at our long day, another awesome peak down. By the time we finished eating, we were both pretty beat. We drove out to the Buttermilks Road again to sleep for the night.