turtle on the tempest

         I dedicated my November to climbing the Tempest (A4+), on El Capitan. An unanticipated storm rolled in and I spent 20 nights in the sky by myself.  I want to remember everything, it's hard to condense this into words. Countless crucial lessons, so many moments of beauty. The climbing, the movement, the systems-they were all in sync with my wholly encompassing need to keep moving up. Solitude and time turned physical climbing into the most powerful metaphor for life I’ve experienced so far. 

          I started this route by fixing one pitch a day, approaching with caution and curiosity. The climbing felt scary, hard, and real, but my desire to find out what was above me consistently won out over my fear. Breathing, singing, making peace with a nest of yellowjackets, learning to hook more confidently and clipping more copperheads than I ever have before came with the relief of touching the ground afterwards. After pitch 2, I took a break to climb Native Son, a pre-existing plan with a friend that fell through after pitch 3. But I got what I needed. The bail was amicable (it felt like it bolstered our friendship), I climbed my first A4 pitch (the crux pitch of NS felt chiller than the Tempest so far, maybe because I had a belay and a friend) and I learned an important lesson about using better ropes (we core shot both of ours). So–back to the Tempest.

          With 4 pitches fixed, I wait out one day of rain while trying to think of all the things I might forget and babysitting my friends’ 5 year old, which feels so weirdly normal that it helps lessen the gravity of my last day on the ground. 

Haulbags tucked in for the rain

          The next morning is fresh, a beginning washed clean by rain. I press both hands firmly into the gravelly dirt at the base of the huge alcove that looms over me, soaking up this last horizontal solidity. I do this every time. Goodbye ground. See you soon. Start moving. I jug up my first fixed line, a freehanging 70 meter jug, a flimsy, wavering stanchion into the sky. I haul all day, straining against a load that weighs almost three times my body weight. 

          Memory is a funny thing, diaphonous and unreliable. Now, writing safely from the sunny riverbank of the Merced, I remember- a plan that was executed smoothly, feeling at ease in the portaledge, the Cathedrals illuminated by the almost full Moon. My journal entry belies this. The first day was hectic, exhausting, strung together. I am quivering with doubts and the efforts it took to haul that much weight, scared to go up and scared to go down, questioning why I’m even up here. The moon is a floodlight in my eyes, I’m too activated to eat, and I can’t get the ledge perfectly flat.

          My next morning is arrested when I drop the stuffsack containing my puffy and charger pack. I sit staring at the winking yellow on the ground, fuming. I pack up and get ready for the next pitch, tie all my ropes together, and float in indecision. Waste precious time and energy, entertain the risk of seesawing my rope on this edge as I’m jugging, or buckle already and call for help? I had paused my messaging apps and set the intention of not talking to anyone while I was up there, was only going to use my phone to check the weather. I weigh expectation, self-reliance, and avoidable risk against asking for help. My friend once told me he thought I’d rather die than ask for help. I sit there for longer than I need to and then I phone a friend. 10 minutes after, I see two people on the approach and I’m able to yell down to them to clip my stuffsack to the ropes, please. 

          (Photo by Tom Evans)

          The days are short. Everything takes me longer than I expect. I keep my watch on the old daylight saving’s time, get up early every morning and am caught and devoured by the dark every night. I switch between a 2:1 and a 3:1 hauling system but my bags are an anchor and time is slippery. The climbing is tricky-scary, thoughtful, reachy. The wall rears up over me, steep and intimidating. Every time I think I might be having fun, I get spooked by something while climbing, or I rage at some stuck thing, or I tangle systems, or I forget to eat and get slow.

          On pitch 6, I come up against an expanding feature that feels more loose than expando to me, even though I see hammermarks around the edge. I take a good size fall trying to hook around it, ripping a baby beak and falling past 4 pieces below the large beak that catches me. Eyes open, I’m screaming as I fall, tilted sideways and weightless, until I rebound on the rope. I pull myself back up shakily, slump against the rope, try to slow my heart rate down. Monkey calls and whoops from the right side of the mountain help bring me back, I’m ok. The catch was soft, the Avant Climbing rubber shock absorbers work (Brent gifted my a whole set up in the parking lot-incredibly nice). I place a camhook and give a little tug, and the whole flake flexes. No. As I wiggle the camhook out, the flake breaks off above me, a mass the length of my torso falls past me, barrels to the ground faster than I think possible, narrowly misses my flagged ledge. The ensuing explosion of rock silences the whole side of the mountain. Someone shouts up to me, asking if I’m ok, and I shout down yes, affirm that no one was on the ground below me. 

          I’m terrified. I could have killed someone. Or myself. The cleft where the flake belonged is smooth and seamless. Despair is in my throat. I try to voice my thoughts but I don’t sound brave talking out loud. I fall again trying to hook above it. This time my scream is terminated with a loud expletive, and I get mad instead of scared. I dither, waste time, but eventually I tape a hook to the tip of my telescoping mini stick clip, which extends my reach by about 8 feet. I get as tall as I can on the baby beak and go fishing for an edge. I feel like a puppeteer, pulling the strings of this ridiculous hook stick. The hook bites. I inch up my daisy, stopping to breath between each miniscule movement, pretend I don’t exist. It works. I move up.

          I complicate much of the climbing by never having quite the right amount of gear on me. I play with tagging up a bag on a Fifi hook but it takes too long to reset. Backcleaning is the penance for poor planning. The topo calls for 40 beaks, which I reluctantly clip to myself for only the crux pitch. Time delays have started to feel more consequential. I’m racing an atmospheric river. The storm is due Wednesday night and I need to be at the Lazy Day Ledge at the top of pitch 12 before then.

          Tuesday I head out on the crux pitch, weighed down by my gear, my apprehension of the difficulty of this pitch, and the time stress. I get lost. Lured left by a line of rivets and old tat waving in the wind, I can’t figure out the start. I’ve done some tricky climbing to move left, and now every direction feels wrong. I crumble. I’ve been moving nonstop for almost a week. My nerves are floss, my hands are on fire, I can’t do it. I’ve kept repeating-I’m indefatigable, time doesn’t exist, pain doesn’t exist. But I’m exhausted and I’m running out of time and my right hand barely works. I’ve never cried soloing before but I’m sobbing into the rock. I can’t be tough anymore, I can’t climb anymore, I’m scared and I’m alone and I don’t know what to do. Crying doesn’t help but I can’t stop, and then I realize that it does help a bit, because I can splash my ultimatum of “you have to be tough” all over the wall. I call a friend. I text two others for directions. I don’t care anymore. I have to figure it out before the storm. I forgive myself for the tears, for the phone usage. It’s my first A4 route. It’s nice to hear someone else’s voice and eventually, comparing the color of the rock to the picture in the book, I figure it out. 

         Ironically, once I’m in the right spot I don’t find the climbing to be very difficult. I thought many of the other pitches on this climb were harder and more consequential. I hold on to this experience–don’t make assumptions about pitches and grades and psych yourself out. 

          I make it to the ledge the next day, having wasted too much time lost in Space. The next A2 pitch has a hook move off the anchor so reachy that I’m tiptoing and pushing the hook up with my fingertips, followed by three more hook moves to a dubious offset cam. I don’t understand these grades. On my way up, I understand why removing distractions like the phone is so important. I climb past plants for the first time and fall into the color green, the patterns of the leaves, the wonder of life growing in the sky. I’m enraptured by a bug, its markings so intricate, they seem more meaningful.  I’ve never felt so zoomed in before. Up higher I eat lunch with a fly that can miraculously contort its legs behind its head. These are the first living things I’ve seen up close in a week. I feed the fly a crumb of cheese. 

          I get storm ready. The wind portends the storm to come and turns the portaledge into a windsail. With mounting anxiety I organize the anchor and my gear. I recognize this feeling, it's how I felt when I got hit by a storm last year, my first time up El Cap. My body is locked, my teeth are fused, tunnel vision, like the world is screaming ‘danger’ at my very being.

continued in comments;

          Cold and rain are the prelude to the storm. That night the wind gets so bad I think the fly is going to get ripped off and sucked into the void. The wind howls, the fly bows in, the ledge pitches up and down even though it’s tied to the rivets underneath me. I vaccillate between staring at the fly to will it in place and trying to stare at my book. All of a sudden, my vision flashes bright white, horizontally, and then cuts out completely. Time feels strange. I know it couldn’t have lasted long but I have enough time to think and accept the thought-I’m blind now, and feel perplexed, when a giant boom of thunder explodes. The thunder is so immediate and complete that I feel suspended in the middle of it, I feel it in my body, feel humming in my belly. It growls for a long time before it dies off. 

          It takes me forever to remember how to breathe without thinking about it. Lightning strikes twice more, but further away. I'm so scared and tired that I don't comprehend the proximity of the lightning strike until the next day. The wind continues to rip relentlessly at the fly. The rain is intensely loud. I try to remain watchful but paradoxically, the aggression of the storm makes me want to go to sleep. Fight, flight, freeze, snooze, I guess. 

          I spend a total of 11 nights in that spot, 8 pitches from the top. In the beginning, time stretches out unbearably. My world takes on the red hue of my ledge fly, shrinks into a slightly tilted, damp pyramid shape. The weather report just looks worse and worse, for days, and when I think about how long I’ll have to stay here, I feel very small. I count the days of the week, gallons of water, and meals on my fingers out loud, over and over again. I hesitate to start my book because I don't want to finish it and then have nothing to read. I feel suspended. To have no control over anything, no way of going up or down, to only be able to lay down and wait–I’ve never been good at waiting. This is a big lesson in accepting. 

          It rains and snows and during breaks in the weather I try to fix pitches. My new mantra: unfailingly positive. I’m camped under run off and live in my own personal rain storm even when the sky clears up. I wake up some mornings encapsulated in ice, the fly frozen solid. Drips and condensation ensure that nothing is every fully dry. I'm in a liminal space, stuck in the place I dream of. I think of it as enduring. It gets better though. I never spend more than 2 days sequestered in the ledge. I drink little more than a liter of water the first two days when the weather report looks hopeless, and when I fix pitch 13 (baby beaks marching up a thin wet seam above a ledge, a breathless hook to get around a ripped out head, so focused on outclimbing the rain I forget to clip the rivets!) I feel terrible. After that I drink 2L/day in the ledge, more if I’m climbing. Fixing that pitch, upward movement and a respite from my horizontal refuge was the glimmer of hope I needed. 

          I scheme endlessly on how I’ll divvy up my food and water. Eventually though, when the weather looks like it's getting better at the end of the week, I can relax a little about supplies. I feel more comfortable in my little nook on the side of this mountain. I truly feel sheltered by the mountain, feel that if I can step up to this challenge, I’ll be rewarded with safe passage to the top. The time in the ledge is good for my hands. I recover some dexterity and the numbness and tingling goes down. I nap a lot. I read, I write, I wonder about the world. I play crosswords, eat snacks whenever. I watch the storm and the valley. Hope grows with conviction. 

          The fog is beautiful. One day I lay on my belly and watch a rainbow that plays through coalescing clouds, dancing in the evening sun. From the higher pitches I can see Half Dome, and when I look at the High Country I start to cry. I can’t believe I get to spend so much time here, not just on this mountain but here in Yosemite, in this community. My first meltdown loosened something in me, and tears flow for all sorts of reasons. You can be brave and cry. I still feel like it’s a privilege to be up here, even though I’m cold and I want to get down. 

          It takes me two days to fix pitch 14, which feels very discouraging. It seeps terribly. I get soaked after the second half, leggings, pants, triple upper layers becoming a hypothermic trap. As I’m rapping back to the ledge I chatter, ‘you’re gonna be ok’ on repeat out loud, interspersed with admonishments to not drop my grigri. I sound like a lunatic. I’m so cold. I get hung up on the fly getting into my ledge and I lose it. I’m screaming at the ledge, screaming at the mountain. This is panic, the collapse of any boundaries I have left against terror.

           Once I’m stripped of my wet layers and zipped back up in my sleeping bag, I’m embarrassed about my freak out. I wonder if anyone heard me. I doubt it. I think I'm the only one left on this side of the mountain. This situation is real, more real than anything I’ve ever found myself in before. So these emotions are real too, and they need to come out, they need a voice. I’ve stayed mostly calm and collected, breathed it all down. And now I realize, kicking and screaming will work too. I’m getting to the top of this mountain and I’m going to fight like hell to get out of this, I will not go gently into the night. Kicking and screaming becomes my new mantra.

          On pitch 15, I hook around a hollow sounding flake even though I see hammer marks. I’m learning. I stay at the Lazy Day Ledge an extra night because I need sunshine to dry my clothes out, and because I’m practicing ultra-patience to not get wet again. I’ve finished one of my books and misread an Emily Dickinson quote in my book as “Hope is the thing with bright red feathers”. From then on, I imagine bright red feathers out of the corners of my eyes, winking brightly on this sea of granite, winging upwards. Always upwards. 

A very unlikely hook!

          After 12 days in one spot, I leave the ledge. I feel very vulnerable leaving my spot of relative safety to ascend into the unknown. I haul 4 pitches, lead and haul the fifth, and set up at the first good ledge of the route. The last pitch involves another hook taped to the stickclip. Exciting. The next day I want to fix up three pitches to the top. I had read about a rescue in 2005 on the upper pitches because the run off there is bad, so I don’t want to move my camp up. Why I assume the climbing will be easier as I get closer to the top, I don’t know, but it's not easy and I should have gotten up earlier. I can’t figure out the start to the last “C1” pitch. I hook right, swing around off the anchor, and rail against the new topo. As the sun sets too early again, I’m hanging on the rope, frustrated and lost again but I interrupt my own diatribe to admire Yosemite. Half Dome is bathed in purple light. The wintry high country is accented with fresh snow. Stars blink on as the light fades.

          The old topo indicates a copperhead seam, which the new topo points to with an arrow saying “no”. I see no fixed heads in the seam and I left most of my beaks at a lower anchor because I thought it was going to be C1. But I want the top more than anything in the world, backing down is not an option. I feel like I’m having an out of body experience. My mind is resistant but my body is already moving, ready to bump 2 baby beaks if that’s what it takes to get to the top. My friend says you literally can’t die within 10 feet of a bolt-so what’s 20? Baby beak, baby beak, and a medium that holds a downward pull. Just like ice climbing but worse. I reachy draw a fixed cable (it’s a beak!), I lasso the edge of a horn when I can’t mantle up (I don’t care anymore), and finally-finally-I’m chugging up an actual crack. I reach the ground, oh ground thank you, tie myself to the first tree I see, and plunge back into the darkness, back to the security of my shelter. The ground is too windy, too open, too cold. 

          2 days after my departure from the Lazy Day Ledge, I haul my things up to the summit tree. It’s already late afternoon, the bags kept getting stuck on the last haul. I am so grateful. I sit hugging my haul bag and holding my turtle and crying happy tears. That it  was hard is an understatement. I hug the summit tree and press my face into the fractured bark.    

          I find a nice bivy spot and eat my last dinner.  I sleep one final night on the mountain, this time listening to the trees instead of the distant sounds of the Valley. I’m awakened early by a ringtail, boldly trying to steal my food. I enjoy the mammalian interaction though. I’m snuggled up in my sleeping bag, propped up against a rock, and watch the sunrise. The hecticness of every other morning melts away. As the colors wash through the sky, I read my book, drink coffee, and feel intensely peaceful. My second book, an Alan Watts book about Zen, talks about the illusion of the self, and I’m glad I didn’t read much of it in the ledge, glad I kept a hold on myself, didn’t get lost in nothingness and non-doing. It is important to keep going.

 The adventure wasn’t quite done. I epic’d one more time trying to hike my 3 bags down in one day. I ended up leaving 2 clipped to the second rap station in pure frustration on the East Ledges and tottering down in the dark to a dead truck battery and a camper that had been completely taken over by mice. Wall climbing, baby! But to experience such a spectrum of emotions and events in a day, in three weeks, and be welcomed by friends with open arms at the end of it the night before Thanksgiving– I wouldn’t trade this for anything. 

(almost done!)

I was simultaneously scoured away and strengthened, dissolved in fear and reforged into a new version of me. Survival, I chalk up to a combination of neurotic planning, trying really hard, and luck, and most importantly believing–in the mountain, in myself, and in red feathers. 

Thanks for reading!

***Shout out to Runout Customs. My ledgefly was bomber and my ledge is in great condition even after I flagged her up most of the mountain. 

horizontal beak!

my ringtail friend

me and lolly, finally on the summit!

Wow. What an amazing write up! ❤️💯

Outstanding

Thank you for sharing this amazing experience❤️❤️

So badass, thanks for the writeup!

Hot damn, what a great read. You are quite the climber and storyteller.

 So much respect. Thank you for sharing!

Amazing adventure and incredible report, one of the best Ive ever read. Thanks.

Super inspiring.

Holy smokes!!  Strong work!  Way to hang.  And way to write it out well :D    This experience makes you way more resilient and unfazeable on the ground.  Calm like a bomb.  

Bigo KUDOS!!!

Outstanding account of an amazing experience. Read every word (which doesn’t happen often with me with these trip reports). This wasn’t really a trip report; it was a story of a metaphysical journey. Congratulations. 

So, so, so good!

Such a great trip report and badassssssss climb!! Love this so much thanks for posting! 

Amazing report - that seems like an epic experience! Crazy that you’ve soloed Zodiac in a day and Tempest in your first year of climbing on El Cap!

a stunning and brilliant report of digging deep and sending victoriously! 

Beautiful, thank you for sharing. Of the million emotions you must have experienced up there, a humble, grateful voice sounds as clear as a bell in your telling of the tale. 

I remember coming off of higher cathedral late one quiet afternoon in November years ago and stopping in the meadow before our drive back to Oakland. Caldwell and Jorgeson were up on the Dawn Wall; Tom had them in his mega lense and we could see them in the golden light, not another soul on el cap. What a show. The whole wall glowing, shadows moving across the face, a ribbon of dark just beginning to gather over the high country. November is a great month in the valley!

This!! Thanks for sharing! You’re my hero 😍

What an epic vision quest and great write up! It was a real pleasure to read:)

Excellent writing! This is what it’s all about. Thanks for sharing! El cap keeps giving 🙏

You have a gift for writing and for climbing and I envy and admire both, incredible work!

Incredible. thank you so much for sharing!

Gotta say, getting battered by a storm on "The Tempest" is pretty cliche. It's been done! (lol) . Seriously though, major respect for pushing through. Getting wet is scary up there, but you were prepared and persevered! And El Cap never looks prettier than draped in cloud after the storm!

..

P.S. I realized you were climbing on the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, November 10, 1975. The ship was hit by 50-foot waves roaring across Lake Superior, all hands lost. The captain's last words on the radio were, "We are holding our own."