Yosemite

October 21, 2006

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Kirsten and I needed a girl-bonding weekend so we headed to the valley to do some climbing. This turned out to be one of my favorite weekends ever due to the gorgeous weather, being in Yosemite, getting elevated and laughing hysterically for pretty much the entire time. We drove up Friday and stayed at Hardin Flat Campground for the night. We got in late and everything was shut down. We couldn't figure out where to set up camp so we hunkered down next to the bathroom and the dumpster in the RV park. That's just funny.

We drove into the valley the next morning and headed over to the Lower Yosemite Falls area to climb Sunnyside Bench Regular Route. This 3 pitch climb is very mellow with the hardest moves topping out at 5.5. We thoroughly enjoyed our climb up with the sunny, warm weather and the gorgeous views. This was also my first real climbing expedition in 6 months because I was waiting for my wrists to heal, so it was such a great feeling to be on the rock again. All was well until we started to descend. The SuperTopo told us how to do the walk-off but something went awry. We got way off course and it started to get really sketchy. We reached a point where we couldn't go down, up or sideways without risking injury, so we decided to rappel off the nearest tree in the hopes of finding a trail. No luck with that but we did find someone else's gear on a tree. Apparently it's easy to get lost here. So we rapped off their gear to the next spot and found more of their gear slung around a rock. We rode down on that and finally found ground. It was a bit scary, but we totally handled it.

We got back and proceeded with the rest of our planned events. Kirsten and I had so much fun together. I have never laughed so hard for so long. :-)

El Cap