Bail on Lurking Fear (From Two Pitches up)

This was Ken’s and I first attempt on the big stone. So we took the easiest line there.



On Saturday Sep the 4th on 2004, we humped loads across the west Face of el Capitan, up to the climb. We took everything for the climb besides water and food, as we had heard stories about the bears there, drinking your water and eating your power bars.


However we had all the irons and despite we had not planned any climbing for the day, we decided to take the first pitch. I went for it. It had a short ledge system at 5.4 to a intermediate belay, a bolt ladder with some hook moves to a roof with good pro and a small 5.9 face move at the end. That was simple enough and busted our optimism. Ken cleaned the pitch and we came down to Camp 4 overly optimistic. Now instead of fixing to pitch 3 in the first day, we considered fixing to pitch 4. On the next day, we carried water and food for 3 days in the wall plus the supplies for the fixing day. We jugged the fixed pitch, which I hauled. Ken started with pitch 2, which consisted of a bolt ladder with a hook move and some alien placements.



The heat of the day was on, and Ken was moving slowly. After 4h he finished the pitch but was feeling bad and dehydrated. While I jugged, he hauled about half the pitch but then he stopped. He was very tired and dehydrated. I finished with the hauling but decided we should rappel down before we turned that into an epic. Ken recovered fast once on the ground and we reconsidered our endeavor. We decided to lower the bag the next day and take the loads back to Camp 4. And so we did. It was a sobering and humbling experience. We made it to pitch 2. What a bs.