brought us back to Talkeetna. An evening filled with beer and story telling at the Fairview followed, rounding out our alpine adventure. The next day we found ourselves back in Anchorage, renting a car and driving south to Seward for a few days of exploring the Kenai peninsula and visiting a great friend, Laurel Schoenbohm (‘05). This was truly a trip to remember and has certainly sparked my excitement for exploring the Alaska Range! Summary Mt. Huntington, Alaska Range, Alaska The Harvard Route, Alaska Grade 5, 5.9 A2 70-degree ice
Sanity Restored Jeremy Roop (‘10) Being a first year PhD at UC Berkeley wasn’t allowing me much time to go rock climbing. Similarly, for Joe Forrester, a first year surgery resident at Stanford, climbing time had all but disappeared. Neither of us could take more than a day at a time away from the lab or hospital, and although Yosemite was only a four-hour drive away, it hardly seemed worth the trip just to climb a few pitches and drive back the same day. At some point during the spring however, driven to near madness by a cruel concoction of 18 hour work days, caffeine, obsessive compulsive disorder and, in my case at least, extreme scientific nerdism, we realized we needed to go rock climbing. Not just any rock climbing would suffice. We needed to get up high; to feel the air beneath our toes, suffer a bit, get scared, and look down at the ground with the perspective that only comes to you somewhere around the 11th pitch hanging belay when you find out your partner has just finished the last of the water. And so we hatched a plan. We would leave the Bay at 7pm on Friday after Joe got out of the hospital, climb the 1000+ feet of mixed free and aid on the South Face route of Washington Column on Saturday, then drive back Saturday night. I had to get to the lab and finish an experiment Sunday morning and Joe had to round in the hospital. The fact that the last time I had climbed outside – and the last time Joe and I had climbed together – had been nearly two years ago in Malawi was not a problem. We reasoned that given our recent lack of opportunities for adventure and physical exercise, we would, if all else failed, be propelled to the summit on our extreme level of psych alone. And so, on Friday night after leaving the Bay, we arrived in our campsite outside the Valley at 11pm. After three sleepless hours, the alarm went off, we got back in the car, and made the final 45 minute drive to the Valley floor. We 28
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had forgotten to bring spoons, and so, like dogs, we slurped our breakfast of granola and milk from tuperware bowls while speeding along the winding road through the pine forest. At 3am, we racked up in the Awahane parking lot, tossed back a few espresso shots, and charged into the woods in the direction of Washington Column. Despite our extremely high level of psych, we promptly got lost and thrashed around in the dark for an hour or two before finding the highway of a trail that led to the start of our route. The first pitch, a 5.8 corner was mine. After two years of not crack climbing, the first two jams felt very awkward. The third and fourth started to feel better though, and by halfway up the pitch, my body had remembered what to do and I raced upwards on easy terrain with yelps of joy as the treetops fell away below. After passing a few sleeping parties on the third pitch bivy ledge, Joe took over for the middle five aid pitches and easily dispatched a lot of micro-nutting up splitter seams. I took the final four pitches, which were a combination of beautiful and exposed, thin hand sections interspersed with awful thrashing in poorly sized chimneys and off widths. Joe, wearing a pair of yellow Hawaiian board shorts printed with blue flowers, merrily jugged around these bits in his tennis shoes. We topped out in the early afternoon, made our way down the descent gully, and as planned, drove back to the Bay; our sanity, for the moment, restored. Summary Yosemite National Park, California Washington Column, South Face, V 5.8 C2
The Last Gentleman Michael Wejchert (‘08) Soloing is a tasty way of incorporating the commitment of alpinism on an otherwise easy climb. My best solos usually happen when I’ve slept well the night before, not anticipating any type of activity except reading a book or going out to breakfast the next day. I’ll wake up, notice it’s beautiful outside, feel particularly antsy, and be in the car with a pair of ice tools before I can convince myself it’s a bad idea. On this particular day I drove to Lake Willoughby to solo The Last Gentleman, an idea long dormant and certainly one that festered in my mind since sitting in a tent in Patagonia. The climb consists of four to five pitches of WI5. I love to solo onsight: to me it’s the purest form of adventure. The uncertainty assumes an artistic quality often not found in other forms of climbing. Today, I cheat, packing a skinny rope, a harness, and two ice screws. A means of retreat