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On Friday night Hamid any I made the weekly pilgrimage to the Valley, and joined Alan, Chris, Jesse, Mei and Eric at their campsite. We rolled in pretty late, under cloudy skies, and crawled into our bags. For some reason, I couldn't fall asleep, and when I did, it was only to be awoken by rain drops. For a while I tried to ignore it, but it eventually picked up, so I bit the bullet and set up my bivy bag. I was woken up again at 6 by Chris, who needed to move my car out of the way, so I gave him the keys and went back to sleep. Eventually I got up, and joined Hamid for breakfast. We had decided to start off the day on Moratorium (5.11b). We drove over, and as we were getting ready to go, Dan showed up on a gear hunt - his rack was on the thin side and he was looking to fill it out. I lent him a few large pieces, selfishly hoarding the smaller stuff. At least this way I knew we wouldn't be going up Chingando. As we hiked in, we encountered a French party of 3 who were also heading for the Moratorium, and we tried to pass them by going on a slightly different trail. Did you know that the East Buttress of El Cap in fact has two buttresses? Yes it's true. Moratorium is on the west buttress, and the trail I took us on went around the east.... So we hiked up, and up, and up, and nothing looked right. After about an hour, we decided to turn back and see if we had missed it right at the start. Of course when we got all the way down, we saw what we had done wrong, and immediately spotted the climb in all its glory. Luckily by this time the French guys were up on P2, leaving the way clear for us.

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The Moratorium, and Hamid racking up

Hamid took P1, which is pretty sustained. Lots of lie-back and stemming moves, with a couple of good rests here and there. The finish is rather in-your-face too. I took P2, which was considerably easier, right up until the 10d crux at the end, where it gets really thin - I protected the last section with a #2 nut. Of course I did it the hard way, liebacking the microscopic crack and desperatly slapping for slopers on the left, instead of casually stemming like Hamid did when he followed. P3 was more of the same - relatively moderate until the 11b crux, which was slightly wet. At least this time it protected well, and the crack was more positive. Though Hamid violently disagrees with me, I actually thought it was easier than the crux on the 2nd pitch, but that's 'cause I did P2 wrong..... We decided to rap from the top of P3, where a cluster-fuck was slowly developing. The "anchor" consisted of a bunch of ratty slings around a rock and a fixed nut. Yikes. There was a Japanese soloist who was already there, and as Hamid was coming up, the party of 3 above decided to come down despite my suggestions that they wait. So we had 6 people hanging off a marginal anchor. The Japanese guy, who thoughtfully had backed up the anchor with a couple of cams, told us to go first, so we happily went. Pulling the ropes was hideous, with rope drag up the wazoo. Luckily we had help from above. More of the same at the next set of anchors, with the French again not waiting for us to clear out. We were pretty darn happy by the time we reached the ground, and celebrated by having lunch. Hamid was most impressed with the sandwich I had made, but I think it was just the hunger talking - he had left his in the car. We spent the rest of the day at Pat and Jack's, where we did Sherrie's Crack (5.10c), Desperado (5.11d), and that bolted line that start off in The Tube, then continues out right around the arete. We did dinner on the pizza deck, where we ran into Dan again, then returned to the camp site, where the rest of the gang was having dinner. Mei and Eric had done Astroman in 7 hours and some number of minutes that Mei tried to make very clear, but that I've now forgotten. Astroman sounded really good to me, and I worked hard to convince Hamid that we ought to try it on Sunday. He eventually agreed.

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Hamid leading Sherrie's crack, and on Desperado

Alan, Chis and Jesse had also thought of doing Astroboy (5.11c) (first six pitches of Astroman) on Sunday, but come the morning they decided to go cragging at the Cookie instead. Mei and Eric were going to do the Rostrum. So Hamid and I went off by ourselves - at least this time I knew the approach and we didn't get lost. Hamid took the lead, and linked P1 and P2. Which gave me "The Boulder Problem" on P3. What fun! I slotted in a nut from the ground, got up a foot, put in another, then came down to rest. Wow - thin an pumpy! I went back up, tried to put in another nut, chickened out and aided my way up to the pin, then came down and did it clean on TR. I almost continued up the ridiculously thin crack above the pin, before realizing the error of my ways and going right. Then it was the Enduro Corner. Holy crap - thin hands, overhanging dihedral, smooth face, that just goes on and on and on. I made the mistake of trying to place far too much gear, then leapfrogging it, which caused me to pump out about half way up. I tried stemming, but it wasn't very productive, so it was mostly going straight in, and liebacking. About 3/4 of the way up it gets a bit thinner, into red and yellow alien territory, but you can get a nice stem rest there before punching through the thin stuff to the chimney, which is pretty trivial, even for me. It's definitely worth it to continue past the belay in the chimney, as there's a beautiful ledge 10 above. I have never had one pitch tire me out so much. I'm sure it was because of my lousy technique and gear wussiness. Next time, I'm running it out. We hung out on the ledge for a while to recover, then did one more pitch before rapping for the ground. So I guess we didn't even do Astroboy, as we only made it up 5 pitches. So what's that, Astroboy-let? Astrobaby? Astroputz?

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The Enduro Corner, before and after

We pigged out in the parking lot with some smoked salmon and beers, then drove back home, but didn't stop at the Taqueria in Oakdale! Oh the shame! Hamid is trying to convince me that the taqueria in Manteca is better, which is where we went. It's good, but it's soooo much further when you're hungry, and it's not full of climbers you know, so the social scene is definitely lacking. There's a lot to be said about tradition.