Great Rock Climbing in Yosemite

Yosemite National Park is bigger than we thought! When you look it up or read about it, of course the valley comes up at first. But there’s another great area northeast of it, around Tuolumne, where we spent the next days. On September 8th, we did the classic multi-pitch route Southeast Buttress on Cathedral Peak. Although early in the morning, we had a bare-naked free solo climber ahead of us and a party of 6 behind us, so it’s clearly a popular route. It was a fantastic, easy climb along cracks, slabs, and a cool chimney. The panorama from the summit tower made it even better. We could see the imposing Eichorn’s Pinnacle from there and hurried to climb that as well. After the alpine-like descent to the ridge, we met some Americans who once climbed up there when a thunderstorm was rolling in. There was so much static in the air, their hair stood up in every direction and the rope was crackling with every move while preparing the rappel. Fortunately, this day the weather was better and no thunderstorm in sight. So, we did the North Face route, and the Americans took some nice pictures of us standing on the peak of Eichorn’s Pinnacle. From up there, we could see a thunderstorm forming, still far away but coming closer. We knew that this kind of weather change can happen very fast there, so we hurried again and made our way down quickly. We were out of any danger way before, but about half an hour after we reached the car, it indeed started raining.

The next day, we went to Daff Dome. We had to wait for another party in front of us, so we did a nice, short slab route at first. After that, we could finally climb West Crack, a great route with a splendid hand crack in the first pitch, a tricky overhang and a fun knob face in the second pitch and a sublime finger crack in the third pitch. Afterwards, I went for a refreshing swim in Tenaya Lake.