The Eastside Lowdown: Front Country Cragging under the shadow of the High Sierra Crest

To be frank, I thought about starting this story with an epic. Some hanging on the thin edge thing: frozen fingers grasping for a nub, a hair-raiser of a lightning storm scrubbing the inside of your helmet, being skinned alive by a fall on run-out slab. It sells magazines and stokes campfires, not to mention touches the void that is ego.

But I’m happy to report that climbing is more fun when you manage to avoid these stories in the first place. When fear is replaced by experience (see above), or when you find heightened conviction with vigorous hands and feet and the common assurance of such things as a rope attached to a good, maybe even loving partner.

And my epics have left me with more laugh lines than grey hairs and are pedestrian anyway. Stories that come screaming down out of the Andes, Alaska, or prodigiously out of the Himalayas, are best experienced from the comfort and privacy of a water closet accompanied by a long Mahleresque bowl movement.

Thanks to the Sierra Nevada, where the weather vacillates most often between perfectly fair to even more fair, and the rock is, for the most part, constitutionally solid, California stories scuff the edges of the pastoral. No wonder Muir went up a pine tree in the midst of a windstorm or soloed Mt. Ritter in shepherd boots. It sold stories and fueled lowland awareness to preserve something that made it difficult for Muir to keep his feet on the ground. 

This is not to say Sierra climbers are, as a bunch, cowards. It’s just that they operate in a medium that is a perfect mixture between a Mediterranean and desert clime. Try finding a book titled Minus 148 Degrees or The Savage Mountain regarding the Sierra. Won’t happen. Instead, one is more apt to find something more akin to John Tyndall’s Hours of Exercise in the Alps. Doug Robinson’s apt title, A Night on the Ground, A Day in the Open comes to mind as does Smoke Blanchard’s Going Up and Down in the World, both of which are actually about the Sierra, both low and high. After all, the Sierra forgives most of the time and even loves you back with all the loyalty of a good dog.

But in the interest of keeping your attention (and to show how swashbuckling I become under stress), I would like to get one story out of my system. Plus, it begins at the south end of the front country Eastern Sierra climbing continuum — where this story begins.