The 5.11c trilogy

It seems that a lot of climbing areas have trios of routes to aspire to. There's the Yorkshire limestone triple crown, three bold aretes at Stanage Plantation, the alpine trilogy of f8b+'s... similarly, yosemite has three long adventure routes, all graded 5.11c (as in the previous post, trying to convert this grade into British money will not give an accurate indication of what these routes are about.)
First up was the Rostrum. 8 pitches of sustained and strenuous crack climbing, with a few cruxes and two off-widths thrown in for good measure. We again played paper scissors stone for first lead. I was initially exuberant at losing to Dan, as it meant he would lead the crux and both off-widths. This glee quickly disappeared when I checked the topo and realised that actually all the cruxes abnd off-widths were on my pitches. I made Dan promise to lead the second offwidth, to give me a break.
The crux went swiftly, the harder offwidth was like watching a wild animal trying to escape from a vice, Dan got some tough pitches to keep things fair, and the top offwifth turned out to be easy (disappointing so, as I wanted to see Dan struggle like I had on the first one).

Second up was Astroman, a classic amongst classics, abnd deservedly so. So many famous pitches, with some evocative names: the endurance corner, the boulder problem, changing corners, and the Harding slot. Oh the Harding slot! Or Harding slut, which seems a more accurate name to me, given how's much of a whore it is to squirm through this narrow fissure. I am certainly no Tom Randall. I unashamedly slumped onto the rope 3 times before handing over the lead to Dan, having failed to gain entry to the narrow slot. Dan succeeded on his fourth attempt, and with a tight rope talked me through the series of jams and pressure moves to make progress. The upper part of the slot is too tight to fall out of, but almost too tight to make any measurable upwards progress. Now I'm pretty slight, but the possibility of becoming a permanent fixture seemed very real from within its confines.
The rest of the route went without incident, but continued in the vein of stout and strenuous crack climbing until you are sat on the very top of the cliff.

With 2 down and one to go, we hiked into the west face of el capitan. In some ways this doesn't feel like a proper el cap route, it certainly is not a big wall. Still, it comes in at about 600 metres of climbing, but atypically for yosemite, little of this is pure crack climbing.
Being carless, we decided to walk in and bivvy the night before. The base of the route is high above the valley floor and makes for a great spot to bed down. Embarrassing though, we were still beaten onto the route by Neil M and Hazel F. They arrived warm from the steep hike as we struggled to coordinate cold limbs. We matched their pace until high on the route where two pitches were soaked by drainage from recent rain. This wetness cost both teams time, and it was with some alarm that I realised we had 30 minutes of light left and four pitches above us. Dan and I simul-climbed to try and heat the encroaching darkness. Despite running out 100m of the route we still lost, and finished the final 100m by headtorch. My second benightment in 5 weeks.
On topping out el catp we took the 8 mile trail back to camp 4, unsure if we could find the much faster east ledges descent in the darkness.

As well as giving great climbing and a thought challenge, these routes were great training. That's a total of 39 pitches of extra granite climbing on everything from finger crack to full body squirm, thin slabs and thuggy roofs, leading I'm blocks, efficient change overs and hauling a day bag. In spite of my previous post full of amateur philosophizing about searching for lessons in failure, I've had a lot more fun improving myself whilst ticking does great classics!