Climbing with Rambo

After the day of rest, I hooked up with Jason Rambo, a Rolfer from out east who shut down his practice temporarily in order to travel and climb. There are a lot of vertical vagrants here in Camp 4. Most are taking six months to a year off and living the dream of a climbing dirtbag. I'm a little jealous for sure as I don't feel I have quenched the climbing thirst much during this month.

Rambo and I headed out to the Five Open Books area to climb Commitment (3 pitch 5.9) and to possibly extend the climb to include Salangenella (4 pitch 5.8?). These climbs are just to the left of Yosemite falls by about 500 yards and we got spray from the falls when the wind picked up

Half Dome from our climb

From Vertical Vagrant

Commitment was a great route. I took the first pitch as I was excited to lead a 5.8 splitter hand crack. I once again was schooled by Yosemite grades as right at the start of the climb I got stuck. Jason gave me some crack beta to work the start. I'm not sure if I used it but I did something different to get past the awkward start. The rest of the pitch was fairly cruzer hand jamming broken up with several rest stances. We were warned by a previous party that pitch 2 is 'forgettable.' Jason led up what turned out to be a consistant 5.7 lieback/stemming flake that we both thought was a ton of fun. After being a bit embarrassed by getting stuck 8 feet off the ground on pitch 1, I definitely wanted Rambo to lead pitch 3, the committing crux pitch with a 5.9 lieback above a roof. Jason climbed up the easy slab, fished in some equalized nuts before the polished slab to the roof, hand traversed out the roof and put in 2 cams before committing to the exposed move. I felt exposed on follow so I'm glad I did not have to lead this pitch.

Rambo flakes the rope

From Vertical Vagrant

We had lunch at the ledge and decided to go for Slangenelle (note that I have given up on remembering the actual name of this climb). I gave Jason the long pitch that included an off width section and I was going to lead the other long pitch (pitch 4). Jason must love off width because he was super psyched on this pitch. So much that he kept climbing past the belay ledge and until only 1 foot was left in the rope. I had shouted to him when he only had 10 meters left, but the wind had picked up and he could not hear me. So I finally got his attention that he was out of rope. He downclimbed 30 feet and set up a Belay. By the time I joined him, the clouds had darkened over the falls and we decided to bail. Because of the downclimbing (I also had to downclimb pitch one in order to retreive gear that I had left on the ground which a party below threw up to me) we took an extra long time to climb just one pitch. So we left a cordellete and rapped back down.