To Map of Outing

Look at California Bestof Resume Folder, otherwise you can see the action day by day.

Before going to Hawaii, in my "layover" in LA, I joined Robert's trip to the Palisades. Having done a trip to the region with him in 2001, I am sure this would be better (for starters, we would hike up a trail to our base camp!). The other participants included Colette (well represented in many trips on this site), Linda (a friend of hers), Johann (a repeat from the skiing trip), Stephanie (who turned out to be very photogenic, or at least has funny face expressions), and Romain and Michel (who would join us for a couple of days).

Before, the real thing, we did a hike to Mt. Baldy near LA with the company of Dave, Erica and, Andrej.

The start was tough, especially becoming unaccustomed to carrying a heavy pack. After setting camp, our first goal was the Venusian Blind climb that goes up Temple Crag: Romain and Johann would form one rope team, and Robert, Stephanie and I would form the classic MITOC Presidio team. We ended up climbing as a super efficient party of three, allowing us to take tons of pictures, eat, drink, phone, cook, sleep, drive, work, fix things, make coffee, while climbing at the same time... ok I am exagerating a bit, but you can do some things as a party of three that you can't as a party of two. Anyways...

Day two, calls for moving camp up. Since we still had a half-day to kill afterwards, Robert proposes the NW ridge of Galey which goes at 5.2, easy! The MITOC Presidio team ropes up again. I just take my approach shoes, hey is only a 5.2... of course, you can see it coming, it turned out to be slightly more difficult (say 5.6?), but it was still a very fun route (robert did it later with colette and drew a topo).

Day three, calls for a climb up the classic Starlight Buttress of the North Palisades. Here we now broke a new time record, we did a 22hr climb. Needless to say, the descent at night down the U-notch with crappy anchors and the route-finding at the top took us some time. At some point, I also dislodged a large rock that scared a group of climbers that were below us... which we ended up lending them our ropes to continue down. But it was an invigorating experience to know that you can make it through the night without a sweater!! and other fun facts, like you can traverse a glacier with you in-step crampons (NOTE that I am not talking about step-in crampons! but little in-step (one inch square that you put on the sole of your shoes))...

After a rest day, we come to the last climb of the trip, for us, we now teamed as Johann, Stephanie and I and we do the Swiss Arete after seeing that the weather was degrading a bit. The descent was some "fun" fourth class.

so 2001, 2008, I guess the next trip to the palisades will be in 2015!

More pictures in Robert's album