Matthes Crest

I have been living in Oakland for 3 yrs and just now made only my second climbing trip to Yosemite. Not something that I am proud of saying. Anyways, I pulled a single day trip with Binh Ta, fellow podiatry student, up to the Tuolumne Meadows area in Yosemite to climb a crazy cool long knife edge ridge called Matthes Crest. The ridge goes at 5.7 but the majority of it is 4th class. The views of the feature and the surrounding landscape was fantastic!

We left the Bay Area around 8:30pm and slept on the ground just outside of the park. We hit the trail for the approx 5 mile hike in around 7:30am and were at the base of the climb by 10:30.

Hiking in we pass Cathedral Peak, seen in the background.

The climb was PACKED! As I approached the South end, where we were going to start, I could hear and see many parties already up on the ridge and at the base of the first section there were at least 5 different parties either waiting or working their way up the face. We even had the privilege of celebrating one guy's birthday by eating some of his birthday cake that one of his friends hauled up for him. Everyone was just happy to be where they were.

Some of the parties as the base of the south ridge start. We by passed some of them by starting to the left, out of view. The birthday boy is in blue.  

I lead the first pitch. We took a variation of the normal start to by pass the crowds. It was a wandering crack up a semi-vertical face. We almost made it to the ridge but had to set up belay behind a group in front of us.

Top of pitch one. One of the only two pitches that should really be considered climbing. 

Binh took the second pitch that brought us to the ridge line. Once on the ridge the options were to simul climb or free solo. Simul climbing is where two people are tied together on a shorter rope and the leader places pieces occasionally while the follower cleans up the pieces as they both climb at the same time. We felt that the best option was to go free because the majority of the ridge was 4th class or low 5th class climbing. The ridge was beautiful! We passed many parties made it to the northern notch where the majority of people bail. There was a bunch of people there and we decided to continue up the North Summit. I led a pitch up the north summit above the notch and while climbing I hear "ROCK" as something buzzes past my head. It didn't sound like a rock and I instantly knew that is was the GoPro of a guy who I met on the first pitch. The guy dropped his glasses on the first pitch and we talked about how lucky he was that it wasn't his boss's GoPro. Bad day for that guy. I watched it blow out of it's case as it bounced down the mountain.

Binh Ta. New Balance climbing shoes in action. 

We soloed past all of them.

We hoped to get off Matthes early enough that we could climb another route on the way out. We probably could have if we would have bailed at the notch when we had the chance but we didn't!  It was a bit of a cluster getting down off of the North Summit because of all of the people. We signed the summit registry, AKA a small box with a notebook in it.We teamed up with another party to do the rappel because we only brought one rope and made the hike out.

The climb was great! I could have gone without the crowds and added another climb in on the way out but in a way it was nice to chat with random climbers from all over the world. We met climbers from California, Brazil and Italy.

The shadow above is the north notch where we descended. 

We were home by about 10:30pm. It really is awesome that from where am I living now I can pull a day trip to Yosemite. We will see what other trips I can pull before I end up moving in about a year.

As you probably noticed, I got a lesson in Lightroom from Kimber on the basics of photo editing and she gave my blog a bit of a face lift. Enjoy.