calvinclimber's blog

Posted by calvinclimber on 10/19/2006

Grade V, C2+ * October 1-3, 2006
By Calvin Landrus, National Director of Solid Rock – Climbers for Christ

We arrived in Yosemite on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday morning we hiked up to do The Prow. There was a line-up for the route and we were behind a party from Norway and soloist from S. California. We had to wait until the afternoon to get started fixing a few pitches. We only got two done before it started to rain. Thankfully, the soloist recognized that we would be faster and let us fix ahead of him.

We were planning on spending the night at the base of the route. But with the prospects of a wet night, we left our stuff and headed back to Valley floor to spend the night out of the rain. In the morning, the weather looked iffy but we hiked back-up (the approach is a much easier without all the big wall stuff) and started to climb-up our fixed lines with our haul bag and portaledge. The Norwegians were not far behind us. They had gotten a forecast and according to them it was not good for late the next day and had made the decision to bail. My partner and I discussed our options. We came to the conclusion to continue on, since the route was easy to retreat from, it didn’t channel water on us from above and we had a rainfly for the portaledge - we could hunker down if necessary.