West Ridge of Conness

Mt. Conness is a 12,648' peak in the Sierras on the Eastern border of Yosemite. The West Ridge of Conness is listed as 12 pitches, and 1500 vertical feet of climbing. Devon, Scott, Buddy and I set out to climb the West Ridge July 6, 2013.


4:00am - The alarm goes off, but I'm already awake.  I eat a small breakfast of dried fruit in the warmth of my sleeping bag, then get up and find Buddy already sitting at the picnic table getting ready to go himself.

4:30am - We hop in the car and drive over to Pine Cliff RV park to pick up Devon and start driving to the trailhead.

5am - Me, Buddy, and Devon show up at the trailhead and meet Scott who's already there.  People start organizing packs.  We decide on teams, me and Buddy, Scott and Devon.  Each group of 2 has a 70m rope, and a rack of trad climbing gear.  The normal split for carrying gear is 1 person carries the rack, one person gets the rope, and each person carries their own personal gear.  I get the rack, Buddy gets the rope on my team.

5:45am - On the trail.

We set a moderate pace at the start, the approach isn't long in miles, but it's brutally rugged terrain, mostly without trail, with sections of talus; icy snow fields; a steep, sandy chute; and bush whacking.

We hike the trail out to the Carnegie Research Station, that's where the official national forest service trails end, now we're picking our way up the slope towards the saddle between Conness and White Mountain on use trails.

As we reach the last lake, we hit the first major talus field.  Buddy is feeling sick, and moving slow, but it's still early, so we're not concerned about time.  We scramble over the talus, each person more or less finding his own way up to the chute.  Scott goes really off course, and ends up 100s of yards away from the rest of us.  Devon, Buddy, and I all go up the easiest of the chutes, and wait at the saddle for Scott, it takes him awhile.  It turns out he'd chosen a much harder chute to go up, scary, loose 4th class, but he manages to top it out, and make his way back to us.

From here the route is totally unknown to us.  I've done the hike up to this point a couple of times, but never around to the west side of Conness near Roosevelt Lake.

We start the descent from the saddle to walk around the base of the Conness Plateau towards the West Ridge, we're moving slow.

I try to stay high, I don't want to descend too much, just to have to regain a lot of elevation to reach the base of our climb, that meant dealing with a lot of talus, and having to avoid some steep slabby sections.  Buddy is really hurting, so I try to help him out by taking the rope as well.

Finally, we reach a very obvious ridge coming off the west side of the mountain, and we get excited, finally there.  But, we reach it, and something's not right.  The ridge should come down almost into Roosevelt Lake, and I can't even see the lake.  This isn't the right ridge.  I scout ahead a bit and see the ridge we want, it's probably still a mile in front of us, so we continue on.

We reach the right ridge, and get up to the base of the climb around 12:30pm.  Just as we get up near the base a large rock, probably the size of 2 tower servers next to each other, comes tumbling down the west face, granite bouncing off granite sounding like pool balls colliding.  The rock takes a bounce and explodes into many pieces still high above us and sends smaller, but still very dangerous sized rocks raining down all around us.  We decide now might be a good time to put on our helmets.

1pm - we're starting the climb.  The height of the route from here is only 1500', but it's very low angle, it's supposed to be 12 pitches, but they must all be 200' pitches.

In my group I lead first, and run the rope out as far as I reasonably can.  It’s windy, unnervingly windy, gusting to probably 40MPH, enough to knock you a bit off balance, and make you press your body against the rock face for cover at times.  The wind will be a constant problem through most of the climb.  Buddy takes the 2nd pitch, Devon has already finished the 2nd pitch as Buddy is climbing.  To avoid climbing directly over Devon, Buddy ends up in some slightly more technical terrain, and gets stuck in a bit of a tricky spot.  He's trying to traverse left when suddenly he's yelling, "FALLING!!  FALLING!!"  A hold broke off in his hand and sent him tumbling probably 20-30'.  He's a bit shaken, but fine.

I lead the 3rd pitch, Buddy takes the 4th.  The climbing is taking forever, despite us doing long run outs, and using most of a 70m rope on each pitch.  It's actually taking us about an hour per pitch, We're 100s of feet into the climb, our only option now is to continue up, but there's still a lot of climbing in front of us, and it's 5pm, it will be dark by 9pm.

We have to switch to simul-climbing.  So, neither of us is on an anchor, we're still placing protection, but if either of us falls, we both fall.  We do this for a few 100'.  It's clear even this isn't fast enough, we didn't bring enough gear to go very far simuling.  So, we regroup at a belay ledge, all 4 of us, and decide it would be best to combine all of our gear, and simul as a group of 4.  That means 4x the chance of taking a fall, but we should now theoretically be able to climb twice as far per run.  Scott takes the lead, followed by Buddy, then Devon, then me at the back cleaning the gear.

Progress is still slow, we're nowhere near the top at 8pm.  We're at a good belay ledge, and decide it's a good idea to get our our headlamps and get them on our helmets.  Before long our headlamps are on, and we're climbing in the dark.

Fortunately, it turns out we got out of the last bit of the most technical climbing just before dark set in, not that we knew that at the time.

After doing a long run in the dark, suddenly the protection is getting further and further apart, then just disappears altogether.  Scott has reached the final 3rd class section.  I climb up to meet everyone, we unrope, and pack up the gear, and continue the walk up the summit.

10:30pm - we're all finally standing on the summit.  Everyone is out of water, no one has had much of a chance to eat, since we started climbing at 1pm.  Scott started the day in shorts and a t-shirt, he only had a light jacket for warmth, as we're signing the summit register I see he's huddled up shivering, so I offer him my down jacket, which he gladly takes.

Buddy has spotty cell phone reception, but manages to check us in on facebook, so anyone wondering where we are now has some chance of knowing we're on top.

From here, there's still a long ways to go in the dark, with 1 short technical section to get off the summit.  We start down.  Everyone is an experienced climber, the technical section is pretty trivial compared to what we just did, so we get through that without any mishaps, and finally get onto the massive Conness Plateau, for awhile it's easy hiking back to the notch where we climbed up the sandy chute. Unfortunately, the normal use trail is buried in snow, so I choose my own route, and try to keep it conservative, not heading too far down the saddle.

It takes awhile to get back to the notch, everyone is moving slowly, dehydrated, and hungry, and tired from the long day.  Buddy had left a small, 16oz water bottle at the notch for the walk down, he shares with everyone, we all get a couple gulps of water.

We head down the chute, that's no problem, but now there's the long talus field in front of us, and we have to cross some snow fields at what is now around 1am, so they're firm.  I kick steps across one, people follow in the steps I kicked, one slip and you'd go sliding down the snow into a boulder field at the bottom at speeds that would likely cause serious injury.

Back on Talus, we descend slowly, and carefully.  There's a small lake at the bottom of the Talus field.  I'm desperate to get down so I can finally have a drink.

2am - Finally, we're sitting at the lake, filtering water, and drinking.

From here, there's nothing left that's technical, it's just route finding our way back to the car in the dark, but I've done the hike before, there are many routes you can take, and we're in a valley, it'd be hard to get really far off course.  We meander a bit, and move slowly, but make our way back to the cars, it's 4:30am when everyone is in the cars and ready to head back.

5am - At last, I'm back in my own tent, and headed off to sleep.

The next day we find out Scott's wife, Charleene had called the Sheriff, and the Yosemite Rangers, since she hadn't heard from Scott.  Scott managed to contact her just in time to stop her from sending out SAR.