After a little over two months in Chamonix and nearly a month in India, I'm home. For unknown reasons a summer full of climbing whet instead of appeased my appetite for the High Sierra, so a few days before my flight I started to scamper around for partners for V Notch. My friends were busy, so I e-mailed the Caltech and Stanford lists and posted messages on SuperTopo, SummitPost, Mountain Project, and the Whitney Portal Store forums; I probably shotgunned nearly all the active alpine climbers in California. A day later I got the PM which set the ball rolling: I was set to do V Notch and traverse the Palisade Crest to Starlight starting with the drive to Big Pine at 6 am eleven hours after landing at LAX. Not optimal, but awesome. Within 48 hours of standing in front of glaciers in the French Alps, I was standing in front of the biggest glacier in the Sierra of California.
Before I left Chamonix I decided I aught to take a few pictures of town and my gite. Voila my room at Gite le Belvedere, where I stayed when I wasn't in a hut or at a bivy. The second picture looks out my window midday.
And here's a picture of downtown Chamonix. Unfortunately I missed the relevant places, like Office de Haute Montagne and my favorite sandwich joint, but alas this is all there is: the Chamonix drag on a gloomy day. Well, and an interior shot of what is possibly the biggest physical gear store in the world, Snell's.
To a Californian alpinist that selection of boots is dumbfounding. In LA we have to order four pairs of the same thing online, try them all on, and send three back (or all of them if the boot's last isn't quite the right fit). They were also surprisingly cheap--meaning the same price they are at home.
After my photos of town, a last baguette with delicious goat cheese, and a final night of the most bizarre sleep schedule the permanent gite residents had ever seen, which I synchronized with California deliberately over four days, I was off to Geneva for my flight! I was pleased to find that my worries about lost gear other than my sunglasses, normal glasses, and towel, which I knew were missing, were unfounded: when they weighed my less-full-looking and less-heavy-feeling bags at the airport, they came to within a pound of what they were out of India. Packing efficiency and strength +1! I still haven't found anything missing, so it looks like I'm really only down five hundred bucks for the eye wear. That's probably average for me for a quarter of a year so it's not too depressing.
The flight was pretty dull and sleepless, as expected. I was too tired to read, since I had been up for 21 hours when the flight started, but not tired enough to fall asleep in economy class. So fifteen hours and a few bouts of too-brief unconsciousness later, I landed in LAX. Fortunately I was on the port side and couldn't see the devastation of my beloved San Gabriels due to the Station Fire, but I did get to see San Gorgonio and San Jacinto, which was kind of cool. For those unfamiliar, these are mountains about an hour and a half from where I live, and though they might not make for great climbing (with the notable exception of Tahquitz near San Jacinto), they are a great place near home to play in the snow. For some perspective, the vertical difference between the valley floor and the summit of San Jacinto is roughly 10,000 ft.
I landed at 7 pm and was home by 8:30 or 9. Then the unpacking and repacking for V Notch started; I was planning to meet Pavel and Justin at the trailhead the next day at 11 am. Went to sleep at midnight, woke up at 6 am, and was on the road by 6:30. Waited at the trailhead for an hour or so, then we started the approach. The hike to the glacier takes maybe 5 hours for a fit party with moderately heavy packs--say, 35 lbs--but Justin and I both got enormous heel blisters more or less right out of the trailhead thanks to warm temperatures and stiff mountain boots, and Justin seemed to have some trouble with the altitude, so we took a little longer. Some of the approach is cross-country over a talus field, which adds to the time, especially when your 1.5 inch diameter blister threatens to pop and tear with every step. Anyway, we made it to a nice meadow in a narrow valley flanked by a lateral moraine of the Palisade glacier on the left and cliffs on the right, where we set up camp. I was expecting it to be warm because the forecast basically called for a heatwave, and the first night was in line with my expectations: it got just cold enough overnight to freeze my water bladder hose, so not less than about 28. I would never have expected it to be in the mid 30's at 14000 ft the next night, though.
The next morning we set off at 6 am for V Notch. Basically we had to boulder hop up this valley for a while then cross left over the moraine onto the glacier. It's funny how even on a tiny glacier like this, you can observe nearly all the usual features of its larger cousins: there was a fairly clear snow line, there were tiny crevasses, there were bergshrunds, and there were even seracs calving into a terminal lake. The snow line was rather high, so most of the approach to V Notch strongly resembled the lower half of Mer de Glace in the Mont Blanc massif.
Fortunately, there was a snow bridge over the bergshrund so we didn't have to climb the near vertical shrund wall or do some awkward cramponed rock climbing to access the couloir. The rest of the couloir was half neve, half water ice. Pavel led everything because it takes a lot of time to untie and switch leaders in a party of three, but it was still good fun for all. Here are some choice shots, perhaps more to come later when I get pictures from my partners:
We topped out at noon (3.5 hours in the couloir), and took a leisurely lunch until one, when we started the climb to Polemonium. An exciting ridge later...
...we summited Polemonium and starting the descent (two or three rappels and some downclimbing) to U Notch. From there we took the Clyde Variation to North Palisade, which we belayed traditionally with Justin tied in a couple of meters beneath me. I would have preferred to solo or simul it, but as a rule simuling harder stuff with people you don't know is bad and putting the rope away takes time, so we belayed. At this point I started to get nervous about the time: it was already past three and we still needed to descend from North Pal into the notch above Clyde Couloir, then ascend to Starlight, then descend again to our descent gully. Voila the infamous summit of Starlight, the Milk Bottle:
Anyway, we arrived near the decent gully in between Starlight and Thunderbolt at sunset. We didn't want to grope around in the dark for a way to get around a gendarme separating us from the main gully, so we started to set up a rappel down a loose, subsidiary gully which merges with the main one. When I traversed over the edge to the rappel station, however, I knocked off a small boulder which started a terrifying rockfall beneath us and filled the rappel station with dust of smashed rocks. I asked Pavel and Justin what they thought about waiting for sunup; they both agreed that it would be better to avoid this loose couloir, and since we didn't want to traverse the gendarme or downclimb and look for rappel stations under the new moon even if we did, we put on all our clothes and hunkered down for ten hours of shivering, hunger, and thirst. I tried at first to sleep on my side with my empty pack as a pad, but I had nothing but thin pants on my legs so my rear got unbearably cold and I was forced into the sitting fetal position. I forced myself out of half-consciousness every hour to warm myself with squats and push-ups. It may have been remarkably warm for an open bivy at 14000 ft in September--the coldest it got was 35--but even with a down jacket that's still chilly! I wish I could have taken better pictures of the bivy ledge, but I was so cold in the morning that I just wanted to get out of there. Here's Justin that morning:
The descent and hike out went uneventfully. Even with nearly two hours of lounging around and packing at camp (in the sun!!) I got back to the car at 2 pm, having left Justin and Pavel at camp because I wanted to finish the drive home before sunset. And now I'm home back in the real world. After East Buttress of Whitney next weekend, I might just have to settle down to the all-consuming routine that is life at Caltech. Therefore, this may be the last or second-to-last update in a long time, perhaps all the way until the Second Annual Thanksgiving Sierra Sufferfest featuring turkey jerky. May others have awesome adventures in my stead for the meantime. Over and out.
Hamik