Got a Yosemite epic?

I was guiding a client that day and he didn’t want to go someplace crowded with tons of other people. We talked over a few ideas. Though I’d never climbed it before, I suggested Bridalveil East. I’d heard that was a good route right by the waterfall and not terribly hard. My client was a solid, experienced climber and I thought doing a route of that kind of length and grade would go just fine.
We didn’t begin too early as I didn’t feel we needed an alpine start. The weather was perfect, the route isn’t that long and the approach is pretty short. We hiked up the tourist trail to the base of the falls and got started on the crack system that leans diagonally left and up. We’d climbed a few pitches and everything was going well when the wind picked up and blew a little spray onto us. But our route took us away from the falls so I thought there shouldn’t be a problem as we climbed higher.
As we kept going, the wind swept more and more super-icy water on top of us. It was starting to get pretty bad. Because the crack beneath us led down and right, we would have had to rappel right through the waterfall to retreat. So for better or worse, we were committed.
There weren’t fixed anchors so I was trying to figure out belay stations as I went along. We were four pitches up when things got much worse really quickly. As I was belaying him up, suddenly the whole waterfall fell right on top of us. Beneath me the rope completely disappeared into a torrent of water.
I can’t see him, I can’t hear him, I’m pulling as hard as I can and I’m getting nothing. I managed to place a piece of gear above me and I cranked on the rope to pull the guy up. I even turned upside-down to push my legs against the overhanging rock as hard as I could. Nothing. It felt like the rope was stuck. Freezing water pounded down on my head. I could feel my arms and hands going numb. I was on the verge of going badly hypothermic.
When he failed to move for at least 20 minutes – it felt massively longer than that, like forever – I worried he may have drowned. I couldn’t know but it was possible. What should I do? One option that came to me was to tie off the rope and free solo out of there, though it was horrible to think about leaving him behind. At what point does that become the right move? After an hour? Four hours? When it gets dark? I was supposed to be in control of the situation, but if I waited too long, then we could have both died.
During this time I could see down below families picnicking at the base of the waterfall. Kids were playing and chasing each other and their parents were laughing. Even if they saw us, none of them knew that anything was wrong. That was such a bizarre contrast. For us, it was clawing for survival, hypothermia, life and death. For them, it was “I’ll have another slice of watermelon, please.” We were having no picnic, that’s for sure.
My brain was getting numb and I could tell I was starting to lose it. I just kept on screaming and pulling the rope. The waterfall slackened a little. Then the rope started to move the tiniest bit. Finally he climbed up to me. It turned out that he hid under an overhang when the waterfall got so heavy that he struggled to breathe. He was also fighting to get our gear back beneath the torrential downpour. I yelled at him to leave anything that didn’t come out easily because that situation was no time to be cheap.
I knew I had to get us out of there as fast as possible, but the route was completely soaked. My chalk was like soggy pizza dough. From then on I didn’t even look for where the route actually goes. I just started totally going for it on anything I could find. It became a 5.11 lead through an overhang without any protection but the belay, though then the climb eased off a bit. I could see easy ground above and I only had to climb a 5.8 slab to get to it. But the waterfall was still chasing us.
I reached a foothold on dry rock and I thought I’d gotten out of trouble. I stopped to chalk up, forgetting that my chalk bag was totally soaked. Then while I was trying to dry my hands, a last big gust came up and blew a big spray of water all over the rock. Instantly the slab turned glassy and slick. There was no way I could climb it then and I didn’t know how long the wind would keep spraying water or when the sun would dry the rock. I knew that as the day cooled off, the winds should die down. But logic was only part of the equation because it seemed that no matter what I did, things kept going wrong. The rope trailed beneath me and draped past the overhang. My belay was more than 100 feet below. If I took a fall, it would be incredibly gigantic.
Eventually the slab did dry up, I scampered up the rock and into the forest above, tied off to a tree and brought up my partner.
“Peter, that was amazing, you got us out of that horrendous mess!” he said.
“Wait a minute, I’m the one who got us into that mess!” I said.
He saw me as the hero but I thought I’d completely screwed up. I apologized to him for placing us in a bad situation. I didn’t want him thinking that I’d done everything right. All of us should recognize when we make mistakes and cause dangerous problems so that we learn from those situations.
It’s also important to see actual risk as opposed to perceived risk. People drive 80 m.p.h. and tailgate each other while playing with their cell phones. That’s so normal that some don’t view it as dangerous until one person blows it and somebody dies. Even then, who says they won’t drive in cars anymore because it’s too dangerous? If you got killed in a car collision or drowned in a waterfall, it would be equally tragic, though there are far more close calls and accidents in cars than there are in climbing situations.
I’ve been stuck in storms and other tough spots. Usually you slow down and place more gear, but this was different and I couldn’t deal with it in those types of ways. It felt like the climb sucked us in by appearing so friendly. Then it hunted us and tried to get us. I never felt that way before. Finally it let us go.
I found out afterwards that local Indians believe that waterfall is haunted. That certainly played into how I felt about it later. I’m not sure I believe in that sort of stuff, but if I’d known I might have started an hour earlier because it never hurts to stack the odds in your favor.
I thought about it a lot and it’s hard to come up with anything else I should have done differently. I could have asked around or checked out the afternoon winds there the day before. We could have waited until the fall to climb there when the waterfall is smaller and warmer. Then again I never encountered anything like this before or since, so I’d say the main lesson is stuff happens.