In Yosemite Valley

May 26, 2016

Today was a sad day. We ran out of Trader Joe’s Chianti Artisan Salami. It is the salami I previously gave up my vegetarianism for (December 2014).

This might not sound so bad, but in fact it is quite hard to get good food in Yosemite for a reasonable price. This was of course not unexpected, and if we were only staying the allowed 1 week, there wouldn’t be a problem. Our favourite picks are 12 donuts for $5.25, 8 tortilla wraps for $3.49 and corn chips for $2.99. Todd’s favourite ice cream sandwich for $3.25 is frequently frowned upon, because I don’t get any calories out of it. As Todd is usually craving sweets, we tried to be a bit inventive and made pan fried cookies from ingredients we already had.

Oatmeal, egg, vanilla coffee creamer, cinnamon, butter, sugar. In my opinion, they were quite good, Todd rated them a 5/10, as they tasted too healthy but nevertheless they have been eaten quickly. Days later, we tried this pan cookie making again, with store bought cookie dough from the fridge. They did not look like cookies at all, everything had melted together in the pan and I concluded that it takes some serious skill to pan fry cookies. We do spend quite a bit of time cooking, something our second campsite host Martin pointed out too. We spent 4 nights on his campsite at the Lower Pines Campground and we enjoyed it. He had some good stories to tell and one night we even watched a movie together. From our camp spot we had a good view of the South Face of Washington Column and the movie was: “Four Headlamps on Washington Column”. We did not watch all of it as it got boring after 40 min, but we were sure at the end that two headlamps were going up and two were going down. I was happy that my headlamp was in the valley.
Of course we did not only eat and watch movies but we also climbed some more in the Valley. Todd is a very good crack climber and I am a bit jealous. After a nice crack climb he usually smiles and says: “Jam, jam, jam, jam, all the way!” whereas I usually feel pain all the way. His excuse is that he just loves crack climbing (and slab climbing, and chimneys, and off-width and checking the weather forecast). Jamming is a technique of wedging body parts (most commonly hands, fingers and feet) into a crack in the rock to ascend. My speciality is not crack climbing (yet), although this is kind of a shame having lived near Squamish for 5 years. I sometimes wonder what my specialty is. I think I am a pretty good outdoor cook.

I made some extremely delicious chicken, coconut curry the other night. It received an 8.5/10, which is pretty good as I am only aware of Todd’s chocolate chip cookies that had previously scored higher with a 9.
Back to climbing. We climbed some multi pitch routes including Superslide (5.9), Serenity Crack (10d) and Sons of Yesterday (10a), Nutcracker (5.8) and a couple of single pitches I forgot the name of. All of those were very good.

Overall, I find the climbing a bit challenging. I thought I could climb much harder than 5.9, but so far, I am pretty challenged at that grade.
One day we decided to go bouldering, as there was some rain forecasted.

We thought we can just walk around and join a group with a bouldering pad (as it would work in Squamish), but it turned out to be quite difficult. We barely saw people bouldering, but at least Todd had the chance to climb a problem called Bachar Cracker (V4), that he really wanted to do. I decided that bouldering without Ryan is just not fun and mostly lounged in the sun.
We also went hiking to the Upper Yosemite Falls, as there was more rain in the forecast. The trail was fun on the way up and very bad for my knees on the way down.

The weather has tricked us a bunch of times and whenever we decided not to climb, there was no or very little rain despite a 90% chance of showers. Todd is probably sad about the “lost climbing days” but I enjoyed them nonetheless.
After the four nights on Martin’s campsite, we decided to leave the park and go to one of the free spots 20 km outside the park.

Of course our car did not like the extra driving and complained soon with the “AT oil temp” flashing again. We were a little bit disappointed, but the next day the light was off again and we “fixed” it with an extra fuse, to put it in front wheel drive only. Now the dash says “FWD” and we hope that our car will enjoy his back wheel vacation.
Now, we are preparing to climb Lurking Fear, a 19-pitch route up El Capitan. The aid climbing is supposed to be harder than on the Nose, but it is much shorter than the Nose (~30 pitches). Details to follow.