Eight years earlier, Sean had pecked away at the first 800 feet of the Nose route with Eamon Schneider before being stalled. The climbing was horrendous, miserable — much different than the clean lines on Hetch Hetchy Dome. When they returned, a block the size of Evergreen Lodge had slid over their anchors, severing the hangers, to join the jumble of talus in Wapama Falls below.
“It’s shattered,” Sean says of Wapama, “with things ready to peel off all over the place. It’s ridiculous. Then, you get higher, and everything gets sheer, sweet, way cleaner, but again really ominous. There are bigger cleaner panels and blocks, but you know all those want to leave and will be leaving soon.” (Tim has seen similar rockfall in person — alone. While climbing last year on Hetch Hetchy Dome, he heard what he thought was thunder in the distance, then, he turned toward Kolana, witnessing a huge block of granite tumble into the water. It created a most impressive tidal wave that fanned out to the dam.)
For Sean, the missing block on Wapama gave pause to freeing the route. No more laybacking the deep corner — the rockfall forced them out onto the Nose proper. Sean is guessing, once he frees the Nose, that it will come in at 5.13a. That will come next season, though, four or so pitches later. Until then, he hopes other climbers will have the grace to leave it alone. It’s the same sentiment for which most of the climbers in Hetch Hetchy hope — to be left alone in their waterlogged wilderness. Keep it down to the dull roar of the falls. Climbing? As Nick says cryptically while serving a pint, “It’s been known to happen.”

Doug Robinson, a Sierra pioneer and the progenitor of “clean climbing,” is a filmmaker living in the Bay Area. Bruce Willey is a climber, recovering surfer, and freelance writer living in Big Pine, California.