Yosemite = Hard and Humbling

                                                            The 2 Jeffs's Looking at El Cap

                                                              A king swing we decided to play on

                                                                      A nice tree belay

                                                              Jeff in sending mode

                                                                The Giant sequoia

                                                         ...i think we have a bit of gear?

                                                              A view of the beautiful valley!

We arrived in Yosemite on Wednesday the 13 late at night...or early morning and slept in our car for a few hours then at around 5:00 am we woke up to wait at the camp 4 registration booth till 8:30.  We were told from several people that if you want a spot you have to get there super early, so that’s what we did.  Because we had driven into the valley in the dark, when the sun rose on Thursday morning we were in awe of how massive the mountains were and how beautiful the scenery was.  We set up camp and with high hopes and very little sleep we did our very first TRUE crack climb at the church bowl.  We figured we would start on some easy single pitch and very quickly we learned that nothing was easy.  We started on a 5.8 layback crack and Jeff took a good 15 foot fall on a lovely nut (small protection that you slide into a crack) and it was exciting to say the least!  We moved onto a 10.a crack that Jeff onsighted (climbed top to bottom with no falls or takes on the first try) and I surprisingly did as well.  At around 2:00 it was getting too hot for our very redheaded friend Jeff Runions to climb without frying himself so we took a drive around the valley and conversed over a cold pop!  After the first day we were super confident that we would be able to do a big wall so we hiked over to El Capitan and sat in silence admiring the 3000 ft clean face with the sunset glow beaming on it.  We mapped out our route then headed back to camp for dinner.  Camp 4 had such a neat feeling to it.  We were surrounded by some of the strongest climbers (including Kevin Jorgeson), and people from all over the world.  Everybody is super friendly and we made really good friends with 4 guys that stayed at our campsite as well.  On Friday we woke up early to get first dibs on a Multi Pitch named Frenzi- a 5 pitch 5.9.  We climbed with a girl named Anika we met in Smith rock and we quickly learned that she was the only one who had climbed crack before.  My whole life I have never been known to be slow..but I was seriously a turtle in molasses getting up this thing.  We decided to bail off at the start of the 4^th pitch because there were some pretty adequate climbers below us waiting at every anchor.  The repel off was super fun and we still had some confidence that it would get easier, so we had lunch then went to swan slabs and climbed a 5.9.  It’s a hard thing digressing from 5.12’s to 5.9’s (which we normally warm up on) which made our egos  pretty sore so the next day we did a 5.7 multi pitch and I had a blast on it.  At this point our optimism toward climbing El Cap was diminishing fast, but at least we were having a fun time with everybody at the campsite. On Monday we “attempted” a 3 pitch 5.10a splitter crack that required handjams (jamming our fist into cracks and crying cause it hurts) Jeff jammed out a send on the first pitch but we were shut down after the second pitch.  Okay, so now our big wall balloon was completely depleted and Jeff, Jeff and I sat there on Monday afternoon debating our level of adequacy to get up this monster.  Unfortunately it came out a no for many reasons, a) we have never aid climbed b) we are getting tormented on 5.9’s , and c)bad weather was rolling in.  After much debate we decided to blame our inability to climb a big wall on the “weather” so we packed up our things and headed west…we didn’t know where west but we were going to the ocean.  On Monday night we stopped in Monterey CA and now we are making our way down the beaches of the California coast.  We feel a little ashamed/guilty that we only stayed a week in the crack climbing mecca of the world, but we learned a valuable lesson : we are sport climbers. We leave Yosemite with the positives...it was the most stunning mountain valley, the campground was so diverse in culture, and we planted a seed for what we might be able to do years down the road.