The next portion of our trip takes us to Courtright Reservoir. It starts on a special day - August 5 - Pente's second birthday. Since it was Pente’s birthday, everything today was as she wished. For me, it was unclear as all she said was Meow Meow Meeooww. Dave was certain her meaning was clear though – she said that we should take a rest day, drive to Fresno, goof off, shop and then drive into Courtright Reservoir.
Sounded like a plan.
We headed out of the Needles and drove to Fresno. Here we hit the Whole Foods for lunch, did some shopping at Trader Joes, and spent some time catching up with correspondence while online in a Starbucks. It was actually cooler in Fresno than it’s been in Boulder. It was a nice way to spend a rest day. After a while, we headed toward Courtright Reservoir.
Driving into Courtright, one is greeted with many beautiful views. We stopped at one particular overlook and ran into a climbing friend who recognized us from our online presence. He (Jody) was there with his children and niece. He gave us some information on the better camping locations.
We drove a bit further into the park and with a turn, we saw Power Dome – the “prize” of Courtright climbers. The wall was big. Dave said it reminded him a bit of Medlicott Dome in Tuolumne Meadows. We snapped a few photos of this impressive piece of rock and went a bit further.
To get to the area we wanted to camp, we had to cross a huge earthen damn barely wide enough for one vehicle – and no guardrails. It was very creepy for sure. I know a few folks that would have demanded exit from the vehicle! We crept across the damn and found a nice spot near the road.
The Courtright Dam, built in 1958 (and looks like it's had no maintenance since) is 315' high and entirely made of earth. It's quite impressive. (There is a photo of Dave on this page and you can see the dam in the background).
Ordinarily camping near a road isn’t our choice, but there was so little traffic on the side of the dam we were on that it wasn’t a problem.
Once settled, we gathered the necessities for Pente’s birthday celebration. This day marked the one-year point from when Pente came to live with Dave. When he picked her up, the workers at the humane society stated she was one year old. Hence, this day we celebrated her second birthday.
Pente loved all the attention. She happily ripped open her wrapped birthday gift (which late had to be taken away during the night to stop her from playing ‘mouse hockey’ all night long). I’m glad she liked her little fake mouse so much. She wasn’t quite as keen on wearing the birthday hat, though she had ideas about celebrating with the hat.
August 6, Wednesday
We got up excited to head over to Power Dome. We did quite a bit of information gathering before coming to Courtright. One thing that we repeatedly heard was the *necessity* of getting tricams for protection. It seems this rock has a bunch of these perfectly round holes that are difficult to protect with anything else. Dave also brought some cord because in many instances (we were told) one can push the cord in one hole and it comes out another. One knot later one has bomber protection.
We’d talked with folks and had the guide book, so it seemed clear what we needed to do to get to the face of the wall. Unfortunately, even with this information, it was not clear. We hiked up to the top and looked at the scramble down. One wrong move and it’d be over for us. There had to be another way. We poked around and found a bit of a down climb – safe, small and very exposed and finally located a rap station. From the looks of it, this station has been in the wall for a century.
Okay, maybe not a century. Still, they were rusty button heads. And the hangers looked like someone had tried to pound them flat. Or remove them. Or something bad. Bleck. We rapped down and found another equally manky rap station. This got us to a ledge system requiring some 5th class eecking on horizontal traverses with little protection for a long ways.
The wall was huge. Bigger than we anticipated and trying to make sense of the face with the topo took a long time. Finally, after quite a while and lots of scrambling, we found the climb we were after: Little Nukey. This route was recommended by several people. It is rated 5.9 - a good introduction to Power Dome climbing.
The climb started with some slab moves and offered typical old-school California bolting… long run outs. Still, it was a very fun climb. Just pure fun. The first several pitches, we did not see any of the infamous Courtright solution pockets or holes. Closer to the top, they showed up. And they were cool. Lots of fun climbing them and protecting them.
By the time we topped out it was about 4 or 5 meaning a second route was out of the question given the approach. Besides, we were convinced that the approach we’d taken was absolutely incorrect. Where is this easy approach several people mentioned to us?
August 7, Thursday
Today we planned to head back to Power Dome and climb Paraclete. Then we wanted to go to Penstemon Dome and do a four-pitch 10a that looked to be a lot of fun.
Paraclete is a 5.10b multi-pitch up the sheer face of the dome. Given the hassles with approaching the dome yesterday, and additional review of the book, we felt that we’d approached the face of the wall from the wrong side. The book’s very VERY minimal description could be interpreted as meaning one should approach from either side. (Clarity is not an adjective I’d apply to the guidebook). Given what we’d faced yesterday, we had clearly approached the wall from the wrong side. Or maybe not…
Our plan was to hike to the top of the Power Dome and stash our stuff. We would descend to the base of the wall taking only what we needed. While on top, we found that someone left a rock message: “Make Babies, Aug 08.”
Really?
Given that we both share the sense of humor of a 6th grade boy, we corrected the sign to read: “Eat Babies, Aug 08.”
We cackled the rest of the day over our apparent cleverness.
We then headed down the “correct” way to reach the wall. Almost immediately we learned that that getting to the face from the opposite side proved equally puzzling, difficult and even more dangerous. Yesterday, a fall meant a long pummeling death resulting from bouncing down the rock face many hundred feet. Today one slip on the slippery rock meant a sliding, scraping fall for about 100’ until plunging into a raging class four river with roiling waterfalls. At least the drowning wouldn’t take long.
After far longer than we’d anticipated, we did finally get to Paraclete. The climb was fun and long. However, given the long approach time, we didn’t have time to go to Penstemon Dome at all. Instead, we hiked to the crazy damn and looked around. Then we went back to camp, gathered our bathing suits and walked to the reservoir. The water was cold, so I barely got in. Dave got right in and had a grand time. It was nice to hang out and relax a little while.
August 8, Friday
We got up, ate and headed to the second most popular wall in Courtright Reservoir: Trapper Dome. According to the guidebook, this dome is located ten minutes from the Trapper Springs campground. Unfortunately it did not say in which direction.
One would think a many hundred foot dome would be visible, but with the density of the trees, that is not the case. Our ten minute hike turned into an hour + hike looking for this stupid rock formation. I was ready to just leave, but Dave pushed on and found it, it was on the OTHER side of the road…
No one was there. More consultation with the guidebook didn’t help much determining which climb was what. After some time, we felt we’d found the climb we wanted. And Dave headed up. It looked like fun – sharp edges up a face, then a finger-eating razor-sharp crack up a right-facing corner.
After all the hiking, I was not motivated to climb so I only belayed. Given that Dave had just completed the “best climb on the rock.” We decided to get out of Courtright. We had a ways to go.
Courtright Reservoir had a lot going for it – it’s beautiful, there is a ton of rock and it’s very quiet. We didn’t see a single other climber there the whole time we were there. There were many fisherman and many more four-wheelers. Still it was a very quiet place to be with gorgeous views. On the down-side: approaches. Perhaps the reason there are not many climbers there is because it‘s a pain to get to anything…at least anything on Power Dome. It takes quite some time, is dangerous and it could be argued that the risk and time is not worth the climbing. Still, we are both happy we got out there. We wondered why the locals haven’t installed just a single anchor on top of one of the routes to enable a quick and easy rappel approach to the base of the cliff??...
Our goal for the rest of the day was to head to Wawona and hang out with Karl Baba at his home. We stopped and got a bottle of wine, some additional food supplied and headed into Yosemite National Park (where Wawona is) to see Karl. We enjoyed a nice evening of swimming in the creek, spaghetti, hot tub and just good conversation. Good times.
No comments:
Post a Comment