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SS Father-Son 1996?

This was back when I was a wee lad, just a whippersnapper, before I could grow a moustache or knew what girls were or how to make them work for me. So I was around 18. This is the age in cultures all over the world, where parents try to figure out how to make their snot-nosed son into a man. Junior's first hooker, say, or lashing with a cat-o-nine or some ceremony involving poison ants. My dad reckoned the Steck-Salathe might do the trick.

I didn't climb much at this age, .10a hands about my limit, with that limit reducing in reverse proportion to increasing crack size. Very heady stuff. My dad, though, was a hardy old-schooler who ate rocks and frowned at springy-thingies. He could've been Harding's granddaddy. He could've been Whymper's mentor. So, paraphrasing Largo, the only thing preventing me from roping up with my dad was the chance to rope up with the guy who roped up with Whymper, who was my dad.

Let's skip ahead a few paragraphs. My mom dropped us off at Four Mile trail at about four. We had one headlamp, cuz old-schoolers can't be bothered to carry two of them--it would actually be convenient. We thrashed our way toward some notch in the skyline that my dad proclaimed the start of the route. The ramp was a little scrambley but fine. And gray dawn revealed that notch, yes, that was the start. Wow. Geezers can home in on wide cracks in the dark.

What flamer said is true, the first pitches are the real deal. Wilson lurks pretty low, this being the good old days when people still called a lot of this crap 5.8. Now Chris Mac comes along and bumps the thing two grades and it's no fun anymore. But I digress. Wilson seemed hard. He's sort of a dick. The pitch either before or after that (the squeeze) is exactly as wide as the distance between my two ears. It'll let you know whether you'll fit in the Narrows. I doubt a helmet fits.

Then some jumbled crap climbing, manteling huge talus blocks and stuff. Then you sit on the Flying Buttress and eat the lunch of old schoolers, like gecko tails and spit. Rumor has it Chongo spent a week right here slurping relish packets. Then, if you're still pretending it's 1953, you can aid the Headwall. Because real men don't climb 5.9 cracks, they dog around on bolt ladders. Obviously. The slab pitch was gripping, although I was a headcase and sloppy with my feet. Got up it. But, again agreeing with flamer, the flare below the Narrows is greased death lightning waiting for soft gumbies to wander past. This pitch was 5.8 in the old guide, Mac calls it what, .10b? Your everyday run-of-the-mill holdless proless .10b flare smeared with Crisco and the thin blood of sport climbers.

We'll assume I wasn't killed and continued climbing. We can assume anything. The Narrows is the best pitch in the Valley. It's not really that hard, you sure as hell can't fall out of the thing. Nor can you move up. So feel free to hold your breath in there and nap all you like. There's half a dozen old cams to be had if you can reach them. Which you can't. I will say this, though: be solid on arm bars. Getting into the Narrows your upper body will be in the squeeze, whilst your wee gobied chicken legs dangle out under. It's like arm bar campusing. Another note, go out to the chockstone and pass your haul line underneath it so the little pig will swing free with a barely suppressed Soooeeee!

I don't really recall any of the rest of the climbing, except that it kept coming and coming. Everytime I thought it would ease off there was another steep nasty. You're drained by this point. Either that or you're not drained and you're thinking about simuling the Nose later on. But if you're like us, you'll top out at dusk, stumble down the gully to the other gully, stumble down that one, sharing the light of one lamp, miss the improbable stepthrough, go right into slabs, do battle with some satanic manzanitas, do a half dozen abseils off shrubberies and stout saplings, wander out onto Four Mile at about midnight, throw yourself Steck-like facedown in a creek, then walk back to Lower Pines because your mom, waiting since dusk, had been chased from the trailhead by gentle-hearted tools afraid she might nod off in her seat and technically become an OB commando and enemy of the state.



All true. Send it.

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