Hello hello! I'm proud to bring the long hexploits hiatus to an end with none other than the East Buttress of Mount Whitney! If you haven't heard of the East Butt, imagine this: you're lost and alone in a whiteout on a vast Alaskan glacier. Your exposed skin is frozen, your whiskers are clinking with icicles, and the next thing you know, you're falling through the ground. Everything is black and frigid. You wake up on a ledge deep in a crevasse, and a single diffuse cone of storm gray from the hole in the ceiling fades feebly into the abyss. You close your eyes in despair. Time passes. You wake up again. The light from the ceiling is gone, but a warm yellow rectangle lights the opposite crevasse wall. You turn around. There is an old wooden door, slightly ajar, framed by the ice. You pull yourself up on heavy legs, and with a shuffle and hunched back grope at the handle and pull. The deep chill of the bowels of the glacier are replaced immediately by the warmth of an oven baking autumn goods; you are engulfed and drawn into a grand, hardwood hall. There is a fireplace surrounded by couches piled with blankets, a magnificent rug, and a tapestry which adorns a staircase leading to warm beds. But the first thing to catch your eye is a plate heaped with cookies and a great mug of hot chocolate. That is the friggin' East Buttress man. It is friggin' amazing.
Alex Falk sent me an out-of-the-blue email a few weeks ago wanting to partner up for light and fast alpinism in the Sierra. After Google stalking him--sorry Alex--I started to get pretty excited! For one, it turns out he was one of the guys who helped rescue the dude who got pummeled by a rock last winter in the San Gabes, and besides that he'd already done the East Buttress a few months ago. Sometime last week, I realized that the weekend was approaching and I had nothing to do, so since Garrett and Kedron were probably busy I spammed the club list for Tahquitz partners. I CC'd Alex. Ten people wrote back to me wanting to climb there, and just when I'd resigned myself to a moderate Tahquitz repeat, Alex, bless his soul, sent me this:
"Whitney East Buttress? Yeah? Yeah?"
Alex, if you weren't taken and if I were gay, I'd have stalked you some more, found your address, and come to make out with you the moment I received that. But I digress. I sent a few apologetic emails and all of a sudden we were doing the East Buttress! After playing hooky with Kenny again (you're such a bad influence, dude) and knocking off Traitor Horn on Friday (god is that horn scary...) I met Alex Saturday morning deep in urban Los Angeles, where he lives, and we set out for the paradise of snow, granite, and sky that is the Whitney basin. After picking up some slightly overpriced but delicious tacos in Lone Pine, we were at the portal and gearing up!
Before we move on, I should note that the pictures are in black and white because Alex brought his film SLR and used black and white film. It's also because I'm too lazy these days to carry my camera anywhere. My instant reaction to our summit picture was, "oh cool, a picture of John Muir and his buddy." Then I saw our faces in it, which was weird. We both packed minimally, so with food, water, overnight winter stuff, crampons, axes, and all our climbing gear, our packs weighed 37 pounds each (32 minus food and water plus salt and other skin excretions at the end of the trip). We made great time to Lower Boyscout Lake (one hour twenty), and there we took a small break and were advised by older men heading down the trail that up high conditions were treacherously icy and slow, which turned out to be an exaggeration.
I heard from some guys camped near last year's Sufferfest camp that someone from Pasadena was farther up and headed to Iceberg, so I got excited about the possibility of seeing Pratyush. On we went, and three hours after LBSL we ran into them just below Iceberg. Turns out he was someone I didn't know from JPL:
Anyway, here's me being pretty excited about being almost at camp:
That night it only got down to 10 or 15, but thanks to pansiness we cooked from the tent. The altitude didn't making sleeping easy; we tossed around all night, and at one point I woke up squirming in a panic in my sleeping bag because I thought a monitor lizard on my chest was going to eat my face. My watch alarm finally fulfilled its purpose by making us leave the tent on time only because we were already awake when it went off. If I'm not awake its chirp is usually lost somewhere in the many downy folds of my sleeping bag. After realizing that I left the wag bags in the car, I ran across the small Iceberg lake basin and found a group of rocks who looked too haughty and snobby in their rocky little clique, so I forced a friend of mine on them. They might not get along at first because he's a little malodorous, but hopefully in due time they'll warm up to my little buddy. After that unpleasantly chilly episode, we started a short snow slog to the foot of the buttress.
The route normally starts on the other side of that buttress and the first pitch ends (or begins?) at that small tower, but we'd already approached from this side so we just went straight up. Alex braved the cold and put on his rock shoes right away, but I stayed in my boots for the first three pitches because at least one of my toes was still painfully rewarming. The first part of the second pitch was a runout 30-40 foot Tuolumne-style knobby face protected by two pitons which may have been from the first ascent eighty years ago. I had to girth-hitch these because their eyes were too close to the rock to clip; this section would be less psychologically strenuous with rock shoes. Slightly spooked, I wrapped up the second pitch and brought Alex up from a cold shaded belay on the north side of the buttress.
The next pitch was the coolest and steepest on the route. I won't spoil it for you; go do it! The fourth had three closely-spaced cracks, and I tried to climb the rightmost one, still in my boots. It was thin hands and dead vertical, so after moving up about one foot I gave up on the boot idea, fell into a pile of snow below the crack, and switched into my rock shoes. I dispatched the crack inelegantly, then wrapped up just right of the Sunshine Peewee. After seven pitches of the most atmospheric, airy, thrilling, and ass-cold climbing of my life, we simuled a short pitch, did a mantel, looked up, and holy shit we were right on the summit of Mount Whitney! A couple of main trail hikers took our hero shot:
After a mellow downclimb of the Mountaineer's Route couloir, which is spectacular, by the way, we plunge-stepped our way into camp, wrapped up, hiked out, and feasted on burritos before driving back to LA smog in weary euphoria. Woot woot!
Hamik