Yosemite!

Hi!

I just send you this Email to share some pictures of our Yosemite trip. I spent the first 2 weeks of June in the Valley with Laurent and Xavier, 2 friends of mine from France.

During the first week, we climbed the Nose on El Capitan. We spent 4 days and 3 nights on the wall. It was a first real experience of big wall for both of us, and a great adventure! The route is superb, especially the upper part! While we slowly made our way on the wall, we were passed by some aliens like Alex Honnold and Ueli Steck trying to break the speed record on the Nose, or some others guys who did the route twice in a day......

Then Laurent had to go, and I stayed one more week in the Valley with Xavier to climb some moderate classics. We climbed:

- Royal Arches route, a 15 pitches not too hard route with a lot of scrambling and ledges (not my favorite route of the trip)...
- East Buttress on Middle Cathedral Rock, a really beautiful route on orange and grey granite, easy to protect: we loved it!
- Regular route on Higher Cathedral Spire: an adventurous short route (5 pitches) with route finding and some hard 5.9(!?!?!) variations!
- Freeblast, the first 10 pitches of Salathe Wall on El Cap, the best free route of the trip!
- Central Pillar of Frenzy on Middle Cathedral Rock, a short but really good route, with tons of cracks from finger to off-fist size!

During the last day, before driving back to Reno via Tioga Pass, we also gave some ridiculous burns on Midnight Lightning (the famous boulder problem in Camp IV) and Generator Crack (a classical offwidth/chimney along the road...).

In addition, I'd like to say that two things made this trip possible for me:

- The Club owns gears for this kind of vertical journey and easily lent them... It's a chance we have, and that it's not like that in every climbing club...
- Without the 2 cracks at the ARC, it probably would have been impossible for me to climb these routes full of cracks!... So yes, this wall is short, but they are some really good opportunities to get basic jamming skills on it. Don't miss them, climb a crack! :o)

Enjoy!

Julien