Most of the big climbs I do in the Sierra are thanks to my friend Ian McEleney. He comes up with stupid ideas and I’m dumb enough to join him. Well, payback is a bitch: When I came up with the idea of stacking Peter Croft’s “Big Four” alpine routes car-to-car and back-to-back in four long days, Ian felt obligated to return the favor. The following is an account of our time on what we dubbed the 4×4.
Day 1: Keeler Needle
CtoC: 15.5 hours
FA: Warren Harding, Glen Denny, Rob McKnight and Desert Frank, 1960
FFA: Galen Rowell and Chris Vandiver, 1976
After a short five hours of sleep (how did we screw that up?), Ian and I find ourselves hiking up the North Fork of Big Pine Creek. We both guide here frequently and could do the approach with our eyes closed. But aside from the familiarity, there’s not much to complain about. The Whitney Zone is home to an amazing number of great routes: the East Face and the East Buttress of Mt. Whitney; the Mithril Dihedral, Fishhook Arête and the East Ridge on Mt. Russell; and many more.
I take the first block to the 4th class, a natural transition point. Above, Ian squirms up the infamous off-width, which—between the two of us—is his specialty. After getting us through the blue-collar climbing, Ian somehow wanders around lost on the upper pitches, costing us at least an hour. (In case you’re doing the math, an hour here translates to an hour less sleep. Not awesome.) After a stupidly cruxy ending, we top out at 4 p.m., transition and head down the old ditch, aka the Mountaineer’s Route.
Day 2: Dark Star
CtoC: 14.5 hours
FA: Doug Robinson, John Fischer, Jay Jensen, and Gordon Wiltsie; 1975
For some reason waking up this morning doesn’t feel awesome, but Ian’s premade breakfast burritos and a quick VIA get us going. After about two-and-a-half hours of hiking up, we make it to the beach at Second Lake. Here, as if by a trick of our tired minds, we see a man who contributed immensely to the development of the palisades and climbed with the very same party that put up the route we’re headed to climb: Doug Robinson. A charger of his time, Doug is out with his partner Eva to scout a new route somewhere on Temple Crag. He chats us up and sends us on our way feeling like the Celestial Temple has blessed us with an encounter with one of its deities.
The rest of the route goes smoothly over terrain we can move quickly in. Dark Star is not as much of a rock climb as a mountainous ridge climb, something that Ian and I do a lot of. We tag the summit and head toward one of the worst descents in the Eastern Sierra: Contact Pass.
The following day, in 16.5 hours, Sierra Mountain Center guide Braden Downey will solo three routes on Temple Crag (Sun Ribbon, Moon Goddess and Venusian Blind), summiting three times and, most impressively, surviving the same number of slides down Contact Pass. The night brings us up to Mammoth, where Ian’s wife, Jess, has made a delicious meal, kept warm for our late arrival of 9:30 p.m. She preps our breakfast for the morning and gets us to bed at the reasonable hour of 11.
Day 3: SW Face of Conness
CtoC: 13.5 hours
FA: Warren Harding, Herb Swedland, Glen Denny; 1959
FFA: Galen Rowell and Chris Vandiver; 1976
With two days down and what I think is going to be an easy climb ahead of us, I wake up feeling stoked. Ian and I take our time leaving the house and aren’t on the trail until 7:30 a.m., but the late start doesn’t worry us; we have this one in the bag.
Halfway up Conness, both exhausted, we have a rare moment in which neither of us wants to be on the sharp end. We sit for a few minutes. Ian says nothing. I slowly and silently rack up for another dripping wet pitch. In what feels like an eternity—this is mentally the hardest stretch of climbing I’ve ever encountered—it relinquishes itself. The rest of the route covers easy terrain and we sail to the top.
Well off our schedule and feeling a tad defeated, we walk back to the car and are in the Mobile parking lot cooking freeze dried food at 9:30 p.m.
Day 4: Ygdrasil aka Red Dihedral
CtoC: 12.5 hours
FA: Dale Bard, Bob Locke, Mike Farell; 1975
You guessed it: Another six hours of sleep has us starting through the navigational crux of the Twin Lakes campground. A crudely drawn map on the bathroom wall produces key beta. Both of us are feeling good. We might send, we’re headed to a climb that neither of us has done, and best of all we know that it’s mostly straightforward.