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FACE DOWN IN THE DITCH Pretty much all I had heard about the Ditch (also known as Yosemite Valley National Park) is that the grades are stout, the days are big, and tourists and mosquitoes run rampant in early summer. These are all true, but mostly extraneous to the Valley experience I now know. As a climber of over a dozen years (and having read every single climbing publication in those years), I knew of the Valley as the Mecca of the rock climbing universe and, as such, was a place I simply had to go. I would be lying to say that I didn’t have an agenda in Yosemite. I wanted to go and do the very best of the Valley. This little climb named Astroman kept haunting me. I wanted, nay, intended, to do Astroman – not just make it to the top, but really climb it in good style. In past years I had weaseled my way out of trips to the Ditch, excusing myself with too long of a drive, not enough money/time, or just that I wasn’t strong enough. After spending much of the spring of 2006 in Indian Creek and with well paying contract work lined up in mid-June, I stewed up a pretty good plan to take a trip down the Ditch with my partner in crime and fulltime road trip bum, Evan Horn. On May 26, I said goodbye to my girlfriend in Boulder, CO and drove to Moab and met up with Evan. We procrastinated the long drive across Nevada by spending a day “training” at Indian Creek, which left two oozing gobies on the back of my hands and a few on my knuckles as well. I would love to claim these wounds as my Achilles’ heel. The next morning Evan and I drove 18 hours across Utah and Nevada on a highway not arbitrarily called “the Loneliest Highway in America.” There were desolate roadhouse casinos, swarms of giant grasshoppers, and sand dunes and salt flats. Evan passed a good three hours with a soap opera-style account of the life and times of the transient NOLS instructor, his rant induced by a Bookoo energy drink. I got about five words in edgewise and became quite jealous that caffeine wasn’t coursing through my veins to the same effect. We crossed the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains, relieved to finally see some topography after the flat, fast, and seemingly endless Great Basin, and turned south through rolling California wine country. We passed out on a small dirt pullout just outside the western entrance to the park with the hum of cars on the highway while visions of El Cap, Half Dome, and golden granite danced in our heads. Evan woke me up by throwing sticks and pinecones. We crawled back into the car, entered the park, and held our breath as we turned each wooded curve, expecting to see the shimmering walls of El Capitán. We didn’t hold our breath very long; we soon realized that it was another forty miles of slow winding roads before we enter the Valley proper. An hour later, we slowed to a stop beneath the cleanest, steepest, most inspiring wall I have even seen. No words or pictures can truly portray the utterness of El Capitán. The feature is staggering; Evan and I responded with lots of holy shits and banging on the dashboard. My hands started to sweat and stung the still oozing wounds on my hands.