June 2nd, 2016:
I assume that the name of the route and my panic attacks were a coincidence, but I hope to manage them eventually.
Lurking Fear is a route up El Capitan that is almost entirely aid climbing, at least for most people. Aid climbing at that grade C1 and C2 is generally straight forward and means that the pieces of protection you put (camalots and nuts) are bomber and you rarely need specific aid gear like hooks. You place a piece, clip your aid ladder, walk up and then clip your rope to the piece below, or you take that piece out, because you would run out of gear really quickly otherwise. Leaving every second piece in the rock for your protection makes your gear similarly spaced as if you were free climbing the route. Fully loading every piece, especially the small pieces scares me though. Often, you step into the ladder and the piece moves a little and makes that sound of metal scratching and digging into the rock a bit. The higher you step in your aid ladder (5 to 6 steps), the more you pull it into a direction you don’t actually fall and the more insecure it feels to me. When free climbing, you usually don’t load any of the pieces unless you fall. Success depends on your climbing skill an the gear is just an extra gadget. Unfortunately, I cannot climb 5.13c, so free climbing lurking fear is not an option.
We decided to take 4 days to climb the route. As there was a chance of a small stream beside the the start of the route we took the time to check that out before carrying up all the water we needed. We found the stream, but it was not much of a stream actually. The real stream came down from the sky minutes later though. As we knew, you could not count much on the weather forecast, so we had ignored the forecasted thundershowers for the day. When we hiked down the trail, we saw some poor climbers on the wall swearing and suffering.
Later that day we started packing and preparing a large amount of burritos and sandwiches and hiked in the 32 kg of water. There was a group that had just fixed three pitches, so we decided to do the same on the next day, allowing them to get ahead and avoiding the forecasted thunderstorms for that day.
Turned out that they were really slow and after we fixed three pitches we were worried that we would be stuck behind them the whole next day, which sounded really unpleasant.
So the next morning, we looked with binoculars and saw that in fact they had not moved much and were still lounging on their portaledge. We decided to delay our start for another day and then on May 28th, we finally started. As Todd had climbed/aided the first three pitches, it was my turn and I went up until pitch 7. We let Chris, a guy who soloed the route pass on pitch 4, because he was faster, but we kind of stayed close behind him until pitch 13, had a great time and assisted him with his haulbag. Then we passed the slow party, who were on their 3rd day! on pitch 6 on our first day! They kept dropping gear, including a micro traxion haul device, so we were quite happy to be ahead. They must have had a great excess of gear, if Todd and I dropped our haul device we would be screwed and could not continue. Dropping stuff and moving slowly seem to go together. Amazingly, they still thought they are going to complete the route. There was a bit of hail and rain between pitch 6 and 7, so we got wet, but by the time we set up our portaledge at 7pm on pitch 7, we were dry.
The next day was Todd’s turn again and the goal was to reach pitch 13. Todd made it, I made it too, but barely. I got really scared at some point.
Day 3 was my turn again, but I only made it up 1.5 pitches, then Todd took over and got us to Thanksgiving ledge on pitch 17. Chris had left us beer and wine in the cave of the ledge as a thank you for waiting and letting him pass :).
And then on day 4, we made it to the top, there were only two easy pitches left and I went first and only freaked out once or twice.
The hike down (East Ledges Decent, only 2-3 hours) sounded fairly pleasant when I read it. But surprise, it was pretty gruesome, with quite a bit of lose rock, gravel, slippery rocks, heavy backpacks, rappels, hurting feet and mosquitoes.
A couple of hours later we were happy to be back on the ground! The car has not been destroyed by a bear, so we could drive off, shower and eat pizza!
It was quite an adventure to climb El Capitan and we are both happy that we did it. Todd of course wants to climb it again!
And now, a heat wave has hit Yosemite and we are thinking of going swimming and then towards Tuolumne, as it is supposed to be cooler there.
