25-26 Oct 25

I was in Yosemite for 5 days. With no doubt, it's the Mecca of climbing.

Day 1 – Top rope at Swan Slab This is my first time setting up top rope anchor on Trad gear. It's fun to put my knowledge learnt into practice. I setup a 5 point anchor and a tree anchor. I got to say tree anchors are surprisingly bomber. I would trust trees even more than bolts.

I brought my brother and a few friends to try crack climbing. It was fun to see him slither up the crack.

I'm not sure if I will bring complete beginners to climb in the future though. I enjoy sharing my passion for climbing but I prefer to climb with people who knows how climbing systems work or at least trust my setups. It's mentally tiring to climb with people who don't know how things work, yet have an opinion. Not that it's wrong to have an opinion, but I am just too occupied with ensuring the safety of the setup to deal with questions.

Day 2 - Multi-pitch at Swan Slab I climbed an easy 5.6 multi-pitch with a friend. The route is fun and straightforward. We used bomber tree anchors as good as double bolts.

There were 2 occasions where I got my cams stuck. A 0.2 BD Z4 microcam in a tiny crack and Size 2 Wild Country Friend in a horizontal crack.

Microcams get stuck easily as their range of motion is limited. Wiggling in cams from wider to narrow textured cracks is also a sure way to get them stuck. I should stick to vertical and parallel crack placements for cams. For textured and flaring cracks, nuts are often much easier to place and remove.

My brother and colleagues left in the afternoon. I plucked up my courage to ask to climb with strangers. It was surprisingly a fun and safe experience. I climbed with Patrick, a ranger working to fight fires in the valley. The first route was 5.10a top rope climb. The crux of the route is climbing over a mini-roof. It's fun and easy (on top rope). Next, was leading a technically challenging 5.10a slab. It's bolted but I really should have brought some cams. The bolts was spaced widely apart, and it goes diagonally upwards. Thank god I made it up without falling.

Climbers in Yosemite are super nice. My newfound climbing friends drove me to Camp 4 to meet up with my climbing partner for the next 2 days, David.

David was a Frenchman who had been climbing for longer than I lived. He was big-walling on El Cap a few days back. We discussed our plans for the next day. We would be going up a 3 pitch route called Reed's Pinnacle Direct.