Mount Starr King

June 2024

Zach and I played a little hooky from work midweek and drove out to Yosemite for some climbing. Our plan was to get acquainted with Yosemite Valley’s famous rock (and sandbagged grades) on day one, and then climb Mt. Starr King on day two.

Our first day was spent on Glacier Point’s apron. We climbed the famous Grack, a three pitch 5.6 trad route, and a few other mellow routes in the area. We finished the day on some Yosemite 5.10 slab, which unbeknownst to us would pay many dividends for our adventure to follow. We ate a huge pot of pasta after our successful day, drove out of the park to sleep in the woods for free, and knocked out.

On Tuesday we were forced by NPS bureaucrats to wake up at 4:30 a.m.. In its latest efforts to stymie the public's access to public lands, the park service requires one purchase a permit to enter the park even for the day unless one enters before 5:00 a.m.. One almost needs a phD to have intellect enough to decipher the sphinx riddle that is the NPS regulatory framework, and certainly one needs more than a phD's salary to pay for all of these permits to enter parks for the day, park a car within a park, go camping, go backpacking, have a camp fire, or use a stove in the wilderness.

Anyways, Zach and I resolved to enter the park and not pay for it, and so we were at the trailhead by the time dawn’s early light started warming our bones. We ate breakfast and sorted gear. Before long, we set off for Mt. Starr King. We could see the intimidating granite dome for nearly the entire approach which added a great deal of nervous anticipation to our hike in.

After a couple hours, we found ourselves in the middle of a fairly heinous bushwhack to get to the peak’s southern saddle. We thrashed about in the brush for an hour or so, and eventually found ourselves on solid granite. Class 2 terrain took us up and over the middle dome of this formation, and soon we stared up at the impossibly steep looking southeast face of Mt. Starr King. Our research led us to believe that the climb would be an easy 5.2 romp, but the sheer granite wall that rose in front of us looked much more difficult.

After pondering our predicament and discussing line choice, we racked up and I took the lead on pitch 1. It started with twenty-five feet of runout face climbing that had me wishing I had never got into climbing mountains in the first place. My feet found delicate texture for good smears and small edges here and there, but there were basically no hands. I doing much harder face climbing yesterday, which gave me confidence on the delicate moves. Eventually, maybe 30 feet up, I got a couple of crappy pieces of protection placed. A small cam and a semi-decent tri-cam. I looked up at another twenty feet of face that led to a decent looking flake. Once at the flake, I realized it sounded horribly hollow, barely hanging onto the wall by a thread. It was downward facing, so no opportunity to get a nut in it. I placed a cam or two, and set up for the longest of the three runouts, which felt like forty feet but probably was closer to twenty-five. In any case, a fall—even if the flake didn’t explode—would probably send me flying below my belayer. Realizing this, I resolved to be careful not to fall.

I climbed confidently, and made it to a belay stance. I built an anchor—which featured an old school hex that Zach and I had now succeeded in placing both days of our trip—and hauled Zach up. I thought that he would either be extremely scared or extremely stoked by the good rock and scary runouts. Fortunately for me it was the latter, and he was stoked to take the lead on pitch two as planned.

He smoothly picked his way up the terrain and then hauled me up. We scrambled to the summit. The broad summit of Starr King was breathtaking. We had a wonderful view of the backside of Half Dome, and could see the entirety of the mighty Clark Range. It was a stupendous day to be in the mountains, and we were stoked to have gotten out, even if the climbing was more than we bargained for (maybe like 5.5 PG-13).

Two rappels saw us the down to the saddle where we let out some happy shouts of triumph and relief to be off the wall. I had a thoroughly pleasant time bushwhacking and hiking to the car. On the hike back, we had to recross Illilouette Creek, which was an easy crossing in the morning, but was raging strongly on our return due to all the snowmelt. I saw a lady lose her footing and fall in the creek, and an older man try to help her but also fall himself. So I ran over and handed them poles, and gave them each a hand, hauling them to safety across the creek. Then Zach and I trotted across the creek and made our way back to the car.

The last mile or so back to the car involved a small ascent, but we crushed it pretty efficiently and soon were driving back to Santa Cruz, reveling in the glory of our epic mid-week mission.