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One afternoon I returned from climbing South Crack on the Stately Pleasure Dome and someone asked me if I wanted to do a traverse in the Palisades and then introduced herself as Kim. Well, I wasn't too busy, so I asked for some more information. It looked like a pretty big undertaking, but what's a little suffering? So I hastily threw some stuff together, and we headed off. Kim managed to convince Courtney to head along too. We stopped at the Mobil station for some food and then headed on down to Bishop.
In Bishop we stayed at the luxurious Thunderbird Inn. I took the first shower I'd had in 2 or so weeks, and sent my sun tan down the drain... We looked at the guidebook, the maps, and some accounts from others who tried this traverse. We decided that there was no way we could do it car to car in a day, and decided to hike in and bivy, then bust out the traverse and return. So that meant we didn't have a 3 am wake up. So we relaxed a bit and watched "black sheep" or something like that on the TV.
I didn't hear the alarm, but Kim was awake and she heard it, so we roused and got our
Next up was North Palisade, supposedly the most sought after summit in the sierras, 14,242 feet, and no easy way up. Certainly the way we went up didn't seem particularly easy, with one sketchy 5th class mantle the way I went up but eventually we got up there at 3:50. From there it was a short traverse to the "U" notch which we descended with 2 long rappels (25 M or so). Once again the way looked far too hard on the far side, but by traversing around to the right, we found a way that worked and we were up on what we called "Pandemonium" (Polemonium) 14,100 ft. 6:15, and time was running out. Luckily that was the end of the 5th class climbing as far as we knew. It was just a long scrambly ridgeline up to the summit of Mt. Sill, so off we went.
Scramble scramble scramble. I went on ahead and got up just at sunset, 7:15, 14,153 ft. After some pics, I put on my down jacket and hunkered down out of the wind to wait for Kim. She came up in a bit, and there was no more up. Just lots of descent in the dark. We put on our headlamps and started back down. I had spotted the place where the descent went over the NW flank of Sill, so we headed there. It seemed that the route dropped off precipitously, but there were plenty of holds. The long range route finding was difficult with only the LED headlamps, but we continued down ok. We missed a ledge that cut to the notch, but only had to climb up a little bit on very loose talus to get to the notch. Then it was down a long way on talus avoiding the hard snow and ice. Finally we turned the corner, and there was another couloir dropping off into the darkness at what seemed way to steep an angle. It was the only option, so down we went. Finally we got to the glacier, unfortunately, it was rock hard and steep. So once again we were skirting along the upper edge of a glacier. Unfortunately this one went on forever. At one point I dislodged a big rock that clattered on down the glacier alarming Kim, and at another I used a rock to cut steps across a tongue that I just didn't want to traverse up and over. Finally I hit the talus field. From there I made much better time, nearly running across the field of appliance sized blocks. A few shifted, but I was moving fast enough so that I was off them before they could get me. It went on forever. I got back to the bivy site at 10:35. I went back up to the top of the morraine so Kim could see my light, She got there about 11. Neither of us was psyched for the 8 to 10 miles back to the car, so we curled up under the sleeping bag that Courtney left and tried to sleep. It was much colder and windier than the previous night, but somehow I managed to sleep some of the time, I guess I was tired or something.
The next morning we packed up and slogged out to the car. Back through Bishop for e-mail, Mammoth for food and groceries, The Mobil to say hello to Courtney, and back up to Tuolumne Meadows to look at the photos and burn a disk of them. A successful adventure. Luckily, as Barry Blanchard says, "It doesn't have to be fun to be fun".
Here is what some others had to say about this area (with their pictures)
http://scotty.geostrachan.com/climbing/ca_peaks/n_pal/n_pal.htm
SummitPost pages: Thunderbolt Peak - Starlight Peak - North Palisade - Polemonium Peak -
Mt. Sill