August 14-15, 2010 I went climbing in Tuolumne Meadows with Kristian Eide and Marie Cardenas. We drove in Friday night and camped, and Saturday climbed 10,280 foot Tenaya Peak. Kristian and Marie had climbed it with Larry Wright two years ago, and I was eager to try it out. Here's the peak seen from the approach. The climbing route is up the northwest buttress, which in the picture is the left ramp with the light shining on it.
I brought my GPS watch to record our route. After the approach (which apparently took 33 minutes), we started the climb itself. This picture was taken around the start of the climb. There are 14 pitches in the SuperTopo guide, but the first seven are very easy, mostly 3rd and 4th class, with a few low fifth class moves, so we just soloed up this part. Apparently there are moves up to 5.4, but either they weren't exposed or we bypassed them, because even I felt comfortable doing this section unroped.
There were a couple other guys ascending this part with us, although they went ahead of us at some point.
We reached the top of the 7th pitch at 10:25am, after only an hour of climbing. Everyone was roping up at this point, and there was a traffic jam of several parties ahead of us. We were at a nice ledge, so we rested there for 37 minutes to wait for the jam to clear, enjoying the view of Tenaya Lake. This break paid off as we never had to wait again.
From our ledge we took about 20 minutes to move up to the first belay station and get ready to climb. Here's the route, and if you look closely you can see the other parties on it. We set our belay at the bottom of the crescent-shaped crack system, which is what you climb for the 8th pitch (5.6). The lowest party is at the next belay.
There was a view of a beautiful ridge in the distance. My best guess is that this is Falls Ridge.
It took us a half hour to climb pitch 8, and then another 40 minutes for pitch 9 (5.5). Kristian then goaded me into leading the 10th pitch, which I finally acceded to doing, and it turned out to be the perfect pitch for me. Apparently 5.4, but I probably did an easier variation, and the climbing was easy and fun. I put in 4 pieces on the pitch (Kristian and Marie put in 1 to 3 pieces on their pitches). There was an wonderful big ledge at the top of my pitch to relax on as well. Here is Kristian belaying Marie up. This pitch took about an hour, and it is 1:15pm at this point.
Tenaya Lake from this ledge.
More of the view.
Looking up at the remaining four pitches. It's getting steeper! Pitch 11 was 3rd or 4th class, and I can't remember if we belayed it our not--maybe we just soloed up it. In any case we started up up pitch 12, which is a 5.4 lieback, around 2:30pm. I love liebacks and this was my favorite pitch of the climb.
Pitch 13, also 5.4 with some big blocks, was also great fun. Here's Marie at the top of the pitch. The time is now 3:15pm.
The final pitch. You can see the rope, and Kristian was either at or near the top at this point. We had missed the turnoff to the easy 4th class finish, and decided to try this harder variation (they'd done a different harder variation last time). Apparently up to 5.7, it was fun and probably not that hard, but the crux was having to crawl along a ledge for a few feet because there was a tight roof right over you.
The last pitch was short and Marie and I were at the top by 3:30pm. It had taken us 6 hours to climb the main route. We unroped and then made it to the summit (a short easy scramble) by 3:45pm. Here's the first of many summit photos.
Marie taken from the summit.
Closer up.
It was cool that we had a superb view of Clouds Rest and Half Dome, both of which we hiked up earlier. I've also climbed Half Dome via Snake Dike (on the other side) and Tenaya Peak, although quite different, was every bit as enjoyable. One of the top handful of climbs I've ever done, I loved every minute.
Clouds Rest and Half Dome.
More scenery.
Surprisingly the other climbers were gone when we got to the summit, but there was a couple there who had hiked up the descent route (the hard version, not the one we did). That was nice since they could take our pictures.
Finishing the 360 degree counterclockwise rotation.
Me on the summit, with Clouds Rest and Half Dome in the distance.
All three of us.
Around 4:15 we left the summit and headed down the west ridge. Kristian had his map GPS with a track of their descent from 2 years ago. They had gone right too early and got into some dicey terrain, so our plan was to avoid that. The GPS helped enormously on the descent, which would have been very confusing otherwise, especially in the forest sections.
We ended up taking a close to optimal route it seems, checking it afterwards on topo maps and in Google Earth.
Finally we got low enough that we could see Tenaya Peak again!
It was a relief to hit the main trail, and we had a short walk to this junction at the southwest corner of Tenaya Lake. I realized I had walked this short section of trail 8 years ago when I did the High Sierra Camp loop. At this point it was 6pm. Kristian and Marie were tired, but I still had a lot of energy so we decided that they would carry my pack to the road, and I would run the remaining 1.7 miles to the car and drive back to meet them. This was fantastic for me--what a perfect way to end a perfect climb! The trail was beautiful and a fantastic trail run. I ran 1.2 miles to the other end of the lake at 9:24 pace, then enjoyed a walk along the sandy beach at the edge of the lake (tough to go fast there) to the road, and then a short run along the road at 8:04 pace to the car. I arrived at 6:20pm, so exactly 9.5 hours for the day.
After Colorado I was sad I wouldn't be able to do the 8-9 hour climbing days I'd enjoyed back there, so it was wonderful to get one more in! Here's the route on a Topo map. Distance was a "mere" 5.9 miles. This was an absolutely awesome day with beautiful scenery and such a variety of fun activities--hiking, scrambling, climbing, a nice descent with some routefinding challenges, and finally a trail run! Hard to beat that.
And here's the route on Google Earth.
Sunday morning we decided to climb Holdless Horror, a "classic" 5.6 climb on Dozier Dome. We went early to try to beat the crowds, and indeed we managed to be first on a route that there would soon be a line waiting to climb. The downside was that it was very cold this morning.
The route was quite obvious following a crack. We started at 9am, with Marie leading the first pitch. We didn't realize until she was partway up that we were supposed to belay from the ledge Kristian is on here rather than the ground, so he had to climb up there while still belaying.
We got another nice view of Tenaya Lake from another angle.
Two guys arrived when I was still on the ground and started up after us, but went fairly slowly so we stayed ahead of them. Kristian led the second pitch (the first two were 5.6, and quite hard compared to anything we did the day before), and then again convinced me to lead the third, which was 5.4. However he hadn't gone far enough on his pitch, and I was at my limit on the 5.4 pitch, so I ran out of gear and had to set up a belay before the end. Marie ran up the last section without placing gear and belayed us up.
I forget but this is either a view from the summit or on the start of the descent. This was a good climb but an anti-climax after the previous day. I realized I much prefer routes with more of a mountaineering feel and easier climbing to harder technical routes.
The descent was superb, down wonderful friction slabs, and I actually enjoyed it more than the climb itself! We reached the base at 1:40 so a little over 4.5 hours to climb and descend--I forget the time of the climb itself but it was probably around 3 or 3.5 hours. We then collected the gear we'd left at the start of the climb, enjoyed the hike out to the car, and drove home. An fantastic weekend!
