Sat, Oct 28, 2017
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| With: | Iris Ma |
| Matt Yaussi | |
| Scott Barnes | |
| Tom Becht |
Tom and I had been exchanging emails about getting together for some peaks in the Southern Sierra, an area that we both seem to enjoy a great deal, especially in mid-to-late Fall when the days are shorter and the air a bit too frigid in the higher elevations of the range. I had in mind a handful of obscurities both named and unnamed that I was interested in but expected Tom to be far less excited about. To entice him, I suggested we could climb Church Dome, a moderate class 5 I'd done a decade earlier with Matthew that I knew Tom was keen on. He bit hard on the first cast and I didn't have to come up with anything else to get him on board. I wasn't really sure there was anything else in this particular part of the Southern Sierra he might care about, but it turns out he was also interested in Bartolas Point. Both of these would be included in the day's adventure. This was the first visit to the area for the other three who joined us and they didn't really seem to mind what we were doing. Scott in particular was excited about the rock climbing opportunities after our previous effort on Tharps Rock. In the interim, he'd gone out and bought hundreds of dollars worth of climbing gear, reading up on techniques, gear placements, anchors, etc. On the drive the previous afternoon with Iris he had her quiz him from the books he'd purchased, soaking it all up in like his life depended on it. And to some degree, I suppose it does. In a few short weeks he knew more about rock climbing than I ever bothered to learn and would be more than prepared.
We were camped at Poison Creek where the pavement (mostly) ends, about five miles from Big Meadow. The last time I had driven into Big Meadow I thought the van would be shaken apart by the horrible washboarding, so the others kindly allowed me to avoid another such beating and agreed to the Poison Creek camp site. We carpooled in for the day using Tom's Jeep and Matt's Subaru, both of which proved adequate for the sometimes rough roads we drove. Our 7a start wasn't exactly alpine, but it was still daylight savings time and far too dark at 6a to be pleasant.
We managed 
to drive
the vehicles
to within about 1/3mi of the point, making this a rather tame hike. In fact,
I thought it should be so easy that I sort of just wandered off in the direction
of the point while the others were still shouldering their packs. There wasn't
anything particularly hard, but I quickly found there was nobody behind me as I
supposed. The forest kept the location from being obvious, but as the guy
navigating by GPSr, it was pretty easy for me to think it should be
obvious. In five minutes I was standing in front of the 
class 3 rocks
at the base of Bartolas Point, making short work of it to find
the benchmark and the remarkable 
views we'd expected. There is
a fine sweeping view of the 
Kern River Valley to the south with the
Scodie and Piute Mtns behind it. I looked
for the others to show up but it was another five minutes before I spotted
Scott and Tom on another crag to the northeast. They caught sight of my wave
and soon made 
their way over, Matt and Iris a few minutes behind them.
We had
a laugh that it would have been a dismal failure as an organized Sierra Club
outing when as a group of five we couldn't stay together in better than three
separate parties for such a short distance. We spent another fifteen minutes at
the overlook before heading back to the vehicles.
another mile,
gaining 400 additional feet in the process. This made the approach a good deal
easier for this second visit, less than a mile each way. There's still 1,000ft
of gain from this closer point, so it's not exactly a walk in the park. In
an unscrupulous manner, Tom and I claimed to be the old guys and let Scott, Iris
and Matt carry the ropes and hardware - respect your elders and all that. With
a much lighter pack it was an enjoyable 
cross-country hike.
There is a ducked
use trail of sorts that we picked up soon after starting out around 10:30a, but
I had trouble sticking to it and lost it several times. It matters little if
you know where you're going and for this one we did. The topo map shows Church
Dome as near the trail heading north across a saddle, but we were after the
highpoint which is northwest of this, a feature known as 
the Taj Mahal.
Our 
scrambling route led us to 
the notch between it and the
next feature to the northwest
called the Choir Loft, a much harder endeavor than the Taj Mahal. We could see
bolts running up the southeast side of the Choir Loft, a 5.11 effort that was
never finished according to Vernon's guidebook, due to a rock hitting Brian
Jonas while it was being developed. The route was given the name Brian's
Song and well beyond our capabilities. The same guidebook casually mentions
that the chimney to the right of this route goes at 5.7 and was done by Fred
Beckey. We thought we might give that one a try when we were done with Taj
Mahal, but it looked much harder than the rating and we never gave it serious
consideration.
Our attention then steered to the Regular Route on Taj Mahal (another Beckey
route first done in 1972) and we went about 
spreading gear
everywhere as we
prepared for our five-person ascent. I knew that such a large party was sure to
take quite a few hours, so I was looking for ways to speed up the process some,
allowing for more time later in the afternoon for some of the other peaks that
I was more interested in. Knowing that Scott would be keen to lead the 5.5
climb, well within his abilities, we let him head up first after most of us
were ready to go. With Iris belaying, he 
started up
on the sharp end of his new
70m rope, apologizing for his slowness almost from the start. In fact he was
doing just fine, methodically checking holds, calmly placing pieces as the
difficultly warranted. He managed to drop two nuts in the span of about 5min
which provided some amusement and no small measure of chiding. Not long after
he was up about 60ft and just out of view, he announced the slope rolls off and
the terrain looks like class 3 ahead. I shouted up for him to build an anchor,
noting we had almost reached the halfway point marked on his rope. This would
give us a chance to use the second, shorter rope of mine that Iris had carried
up. Going second, I tied into Scott's rope at the halfway point while trailing
the second rope. I cleaned the gear on my way up and once up to
Scott's anchor, I moved down and off to the side
where I set up a second anchor from which I could belay. We then had Iris come
up on the end of Scott's rope while Matt would start up on mine, after Iris
had moved up out of his way. Having been distracted with video duties, Matt
wasn't quite ready with his shoes and other gear when called upon, so there was
a bit of a delay. This had the result of 
Iris finishing well before
Matt. I had Matt wait at 
a small alcove just below me so that
Scott could toss his rope
back down to Tom who was waiting to come up last. Around this time I realized
a flaw in my plan that would leave Matt exposed for the last part of the climb.
He couldn't climb directly up to my belay position, but would have to follow
the same route the rest of us did up towards Scott. A fall here would mean an
ugly pendulum into the wall below me. To avoid this, I had Matt tie into
Scott's rope from his alcove (with only a little coaching, he very quickly
figured out how to tie a figure eight on a bight), and then we let Tom know
he'd be simul-climbing with Matt for a short distance. It looked
a little whacked and
caused some minor confusion, but it was carried out fairly safely and we soon
had Matt off the rope above Scott.
To speed things a bit more, I coiled the second rope and went up the
class 3 terrain to the 
summit block with Matt, figuring we'd
set that up while Tom was
still hanging at the end of Scott's rope. I'm not sure where the 5.7 rating
for the summit block comes from, but it seems easier than that. There's a rap
chain at the top which makes it easy to set up a belay once the first person
is up. I climbed it without my pack to make it easier, after which Matt tossed
the rope up to me. 
Matt, 
Scott, Iris and Tom came up in turn
and by 1p we had all five of us 
atop the summit block.
It had taken about an hour and a half
to get five of us up the rock climbing portion, not bad, but certainly no
speed record.
The views across the Domelands were stunning on a fairly clear day, the weather
couldn't have been finer. With Taylor Dome to 
the west, Manter Meadow
and Rockhouse Peak to 
the north, White Dome and the Sierra Crest to
the east, it
was a wonderous display of white Sierra granite spread through out the
Southern Sierra. The oldest register dated 
to 1977,
five years after the first
ascent. Ours was the first ascent in a year and a half and probably the last
one of the season. For a remote peak it seems surprisingly popular, judging from
almost 40 pages of entries spread over the two register books. After rapping off
the summit block, we scrambled back down the class 3 section and
rapped off the 
Regular Route from the second belay station I
had used. We left some bright
orange webbing, not the most environmentally matching color, because that was
all I had. Scott had mentioned a rap chain described in Vernon's book and in
highsight that would have been the better (and probably faster) choice. As he
was rapping down, 
Matt
dropped his Spot device which went careening into the
northeast gully on the other side of the notch. This gave me an opportunity to
explore if there was a way off that side while I was there looking for his gear.
I expected to find pieces of it here and there but saw no sign of it - it would
have been easy for it to slip into any of dozens of crevices formed by the
boulders that occupy the gully. I found that there was an impasse
before reaching the bottom at a huge chockstone, but there also appears to be
some tunneling options that might get one out the bottom with a bit of
spelunking. Alas, I was more interested in getting to the other summits today
and left this unexplored.
Nearly 2:30p, I went back up to the notch where everyone was already down and putting away gear. Scott was interested in doing some other rock climbs in the area so we ended up splitting into two groups for the rest of the day. Three, really, as Matt decided to go around to the backside of Church Dome and explore for his lost gear at the bottom of the gully. He would spend much of the available daylight in the hunt, but in the end it was for naught. Scott and Iris spent the afternoon playing around on nearby routes found in the guidebook while Tom and I headed back to the Jeep.
cross-country. We went to Black Mtn first, requiring a modest
drop of a few hundred feet before climbing steadily up past 
Pt. 7,665ft
shown on the topo map. At a saddle just west of this point, we could see
Black Mtn to the
northeast, still 3/4mi away. It looks at first to be covered in thick brush,
but the dark color is soon seen to be the volcanic rock after which the mountain
was named, not a dense field of manzanita. The trick is finding a suitable route
up the west or south side to avoid the tall brush that grows on the lower
slopes. On the southeast side of the peak is a large outcrop of pinkish granite
that has an improbable class 3 stairway going up the center of it. We didn't
discover this until on the way down, choosing instead to stay to the left
where we navigated 
a rock field in deference to the brush.
We found the summit large, modestly brushy, and difficult to find an obvious
highpoint. Manter Creek cuts a channel to the northeast between the summit and
White Dome, two miles distant. We thought the summit would provide a good view
of this drainage, but it requires one to head several hundred yards in
that direction
before 
the drainage reveals itself. This was probably the
best new view we encountered the whole day. There are a number of domes and
interesting granite features all over the west side of the drainage, about 3/4mi
to 
the southeast
that would make for a interesting visit. There was also a bird's-eye
view of the 
Dome of Mystery,
popping up from the drainage near Manter Creek.
Finding no register, we left one before heading down 
the south side.
Butte Peak is about a mile SSE of Black Mtn and the hike between them
makes for 
a nice stroll through mostly-open
terrain. Upon nearing the base of the second peak, Tom curved to the left for
the easier "tourist route" from a saddle between the highpoint and a lower
summit to the northeast. I headed directly for the summit, ignoring the
difficulties that the 
upper cliffband
looked to present on the west and north
sides. It turned out to be no more than class 2 up a rocky gully at the very
end, but it was no shorter than Tom's route as we found ourselves reaching the
top at the cliff's edge at nearly the same time.
We found an unusual register at the summit, housed in an old baking powder tin
that was rusted shut. I tried prying it open with a screwdriver from my swiss
army knife, but no luck. Tom then suggested I open the other end with
the can opener which
worked quite nicely, the first time I've had to resort to that trick. It had
been left by Ruby Jenkins back 
in 1989.
The last entry, 
from 1990, commented on
the trouble he'd had in opening the thing. 27yrs later it had become impossible.
I added the two pages from the register to one I'd brought, leaving it in place
of the one I'd rendered unusable. Standing at the edge of the cliffband
looking northwest,
I wondered aloud whether we could find a way down through the
50-foot barrier. Spying something plausible, I headed down with Tom reluctantly
following, accusing me of leading him on yet another foolish sideshow. The
loose rock 
encountered had him swearing sharply, but he
continued down and we both survived without more than a few scratches. Great fun, I thought.
Afterwards, we had another mile and a half through more hilly
cross-country terrain to return to 
the Jeep,
the sun setting soon after.
We wondered if the others would beat us back to camp which would take us another hour to reach. Tom figured they'd be back in order to make dinner and campfire, but I guessed that with Scott among them, they would probably end up watching the sun set on some climbing route or another. I wasn't far off - they got back to camp about 45min after us, some of that due to the higher speed at which the Jeep could negotiate the roads. Tom and I had already showered and eaten dinner before they showed up as we were almost ready to bed down. Matt began chopping wood and starting a fire which I went over to supervise and provide some mild ribbing. The fire went out several times but eventually caught on with the addition of pine needles (Tom's suggestion) and we spent more than an hour around the fire enjoying the warmth and stories in the cold night air. Good times...
Continued...
For more information see these SummitPost pages: Church Dome
This page last updated: Thu Jan 16 08:20:34 2020
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