At Cirque of the Towers a common question seems to be "will I get to use my new Petzel 3-LED headlamp tonight?" For three of our five nights camped near a creek below the Cirque, we watched headlamps come on and off high on Pingora and Wolf's head. It's a quiet little drama as you try to piece together what is going on from the movement of the light. It will flash up, then down, then up again as he or she snaps their head to look at the rope above or the rope below. Then, two lights will huddle together at a belay station as they set up the next rappel. Or the light will snap off as they sit and talk about what to try next. "Is their rope stuck?" We all ask. I doubt there is any water left. Was it not for perfect weather and a consistent high pressure system (and the drought of '12), we'd be calling in the 'copters. Except here there is no cell service. For now let them learn, they are young. We feel good being older, appreciating how incredible it is to be here, and knowing that the fun is in the safety.
There are number of questions you ponder while hauling a 50-lb pack through a boulder field at the end of the 10-mile/1400-foot hike in to the Cirque. When you travel with a mathematician and a scientist it is all about thermodynamics (yeah, I'm a geologist, but stay with me here). You see, you want to balance keeping a straight line of travel against wasting energy with unnecessary gain or loss in elevation. You gotta hump over the boulders while maintaining direction. Remaining level is optimum. You have real thermodynamic feedback to go on. At 10,000 feet the lag between asking your quadriceps to haul you up on the next boulder and your lungs demanding more oxygen is about 1.5 seconds. Sure, you tell yourself that hoisting yourself up stores potential energy generated by manufacturing CO2. However, it's hard to convert precious potential energy back into kinetic energy because lowering that 50-lb pack drives your balance and control muscles to work almost as hard going down as the big muscles did on the way up. Another reminder that we live in a consistent universe: entropy always increases. Here measured as a deep pain in the lateral gluteus muscles.
More science: Climbing shoes have nearly perfectly flat-black soles. Whatever makes the rubber sticky makes them really black. They absorb a large percentage of incident solar energy. They get hot. Your feet swell from hard work and altitude and then they get hot. Here, as we say, is some beta: On the east ridge of Wolf's head or the southeast buttress of Pingora, in the afternoon, it's nice to belay with your sunward foot under a rock or small overhang. Or stand so that the shadow from your ankle falls along your foot. What a great complaint, "I was climbing this great fin of rock, Wolf's Head, with 1000 feet of open air to my left and to my right, nearing 12,000 feet, in 70 degree sunshine, but my feet got too hot." Misery is where you find it.
We turned left a few hundred yards too soon and into an irresistibly sweet notch through the ridge toward the valley. Camp was maybe an hour away. We'd been climbing 5.6-5.7 for pitch after pitch up and across Wolf's head in glorious sunshine. After climbing the narrow spine arcing up from the roots of Pingora, the route weaves west between these great jagged fins of rock set against the sky and across to the true summit. A quick 2 rappels and we were on the trail. The shadows were long and rehydrated stroganoff with freshly filtered, ice cold, melt water called us home. The book says "avoid the notch." But who needs the book when you are old and experienced and it's 70 degrees out? Three or four dirt-rappels later it's over a last clean edge and one more pitch down to the path again. Except for one minor detail.
Tensing said, "Sir Edmund, I am not standing on the rope, it is stuck."
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