Sunribbon Arete: Time Flies When You're Climbing in the Mountains (Hardwear Sessions)

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By Brett Cassidy, MHW Customer Service

It's 2:50 AM when I wake up on the asphalt between two white lines outlining a parking spot. The alarm on my wristwatch isn't set to go off until 3 AM, but the familiar jingling of 'biners, nuts, and cams wakes me up ten minutes early. I groan, roll over onto my side, flick on my headlamp and see Nathan rifling through the trunk of the car to sort gear. I reluctantly get out of the 3rd Dimension sleeping bag I borrowed from the warranty department and start eating a Clif Bar. With Nathan and I both crinkling wrappers and sorting gear, I hear Josh let out a groan, flick on his headlamp, and sit up in our parking spot. Yup, it's time to climb.

We get on the trail at 3:50 AM after getting dressed and sorting gear and food. Headlamps blazing, we power up the long uphill trail toward Temple Crag, one of the High Sierra's most impressive peaks. At 12,999 feet and a whole half mile wide, Temple Crag is entirely humbling, utterly impressive, and a tad intimidating. Of course, it's completely dark out and I don't know this yet, but I will soon learn. Today our sights are set on the Sunribbon Arete, a long steep arete shooting up Temple Crag's east side rated grade IV, 5.10a. With a steep 7 mile approach, 18 pitches of climbing, and a team of three, we know we're going to need all the daylight we can get to complete this mission car-to-car in a day as planned, which explains why we're out here at such an ungodly hour. After a couple hours of hiking, the sun comes up and the massiveness of Temple Crag reveals itself. As I eye our route I start grinning ear to ear. This climb is enormous. This climb is going to be sick.

Josh, Nathan and I reach the base of the Sunribbon Arete around 8:30 and Nathan starts up the first 5.7 cracks at 9 AM with Josh and I tied in and ready to simul. Takeoff. After an hour of simul-climbing we'd ticked off three pitches and were feeling pretty good. Having been warned of how long this climb takes to complete we continue to climb through the following pitches, belaying each other as it looks really steep and exposed. Every pitch is amazing: gut-wrenching exposure on perfect sierra granite. Each move seems to bring me further and further from the ground which looks completely flat and distant below my toes which grip the rock and keep me from flying out into the sky. As the hours drop off the clock we ascend further and further into space on the celestial arête past a Cliffhangeresque tyrolean traverse, some 10a face moves, a beautiful 5.9 hand crack, a burly unprotectable 3-4" fist crack/offwidth (ok, it would've been protectable if we had some big cams, but running it out was my only option considering our small alpine rack), and a whole lot of intricate traverse moves over massive drop-offs. Time flies when you're climbing in the mountains and before we knew it the sun was setting and the summit was still hidden behind a series of gendarmes. Damn this is a long climb. With a couple pitches of 4th and low 5th class climbing left, it was completely dark. We flicked our headlamps on again as Nathan led the simul-chain to the summit.

10 PM. Knowing we still had to get off the mountain we didn't spend too much time rejoicing on the summit before looking for our descent route. Our info told us not to get suckered down a gully too far to the right so we stayed left . . . way too far left. In complete darkness it was impossible to find the rappel onto contact pass and we started descending a steep buttress of loose rock and ridges on the southeast part of the mountain. Dehydrated, exhausted, half-delirious, and completely lost we make the tough decision to stop descending into the abyss. Looks like we're staying on the mountain until the sun comes up. My body is still warm from the day's effort so I find a ledge, anchor myself with a couple cams, and curl up on top of my backpack to fall asleep. In about an hour I snap awake shivering. I'm wearing only sneakers, my Thermadry tops and bottoms, a pair of Cooper Shorts, my Epic Jacket, a Windstopper Micro Dome, and my climbing helmet (I figured the helmet might trap extra heat). At over 12,000 feet this isn't much. I start to fantasize about the sleeping bag down in the parking lot and the down jacket I stashed at the base of the route, and then I chuckle because I realize I'm "epicing" in my Epic Jacket. Thank god I have a lame sense of humor because the next six hours will be spent shivering in the fetal position with my hands in my armpits and the backs of my knees cramping from dehydration. Nobody ever said climbing was glamorous, ok?

When the eastern sky brightened it felt like the best moment of my life. We all got up immediately, realized what a ridiculous spot on the mountain we had chosen as our bed, and started backtracking toward contact pass, which was very easy to find with the convenience of daylight. A few hours later we found ourselves gluttonously chugging ice cold water from Third Lake, a tropical-blue alpine lake along the descent. As we looked back up at the route we had conquered we beamed with pride. This had been the longest, most amazing climb I've completed to date. Maybe we didn't finish it car-to-car in a day like we had planned, but we certainly had an amazing climb and we avoided becoming a paragraph in the annual "Accidents in North American Mountaineering" books by making the difficult decision to stop descending.

At Amigo's Mexican restaurant in Bishop as I chugged a Dos Equis, still having not slept more than 5 hours all weekend, Josh revealed to me that he had used our climbing rope as a blanket the night before. As cerveza spewed out of my nose I asked "What would you guess the temperature rating was?"

Warning, video contains course language