The last few days have had their ups and downs while trying to plan a climb of The Prow on The Column. Up until this afternoon I wasn’t completely sure it would happen. Timmy O’ Neill stepped in a couple days ago and for those of you that don’t know Timmy he is a force to be reckoned with. He made it his mission to scour the Valley looking for people to help with my climb. We needed at least 5 people to help carry me to the base of the climb and all of our stuff like food and equipment that is needed. Timmy managed to find one person who actually wanted to climb with Timmy but then after hearing my story from Timmy decided to do this climb with me instead. Without the help of Timmy tracking down one person it was looking pretty grim.
So today Christian Cantell volunteered to do whatever we needed to make this happen and he is now on the climbing team along with Craig Muderlak and Nick Sulens. He also tracked down all the people to carry the human cargo and non human cargo. Nathan Pacheco and Kiyoko Davis have been totally integral in making this happen. They helped me train and helped get people together and also gave me advice on what I should work on and what I truly needed to know to make this climb work for me and for the members of the team. I have truly learned a lot from both of them and owe them big time! Nathan will be manning the ground crew making sure we have people to carry our stuff and me to the base and back off the base. He will also make sure we have refreshments when we are done.
It is truly amazing how many people it takes to pull this off and how many are coming together to make it happen. I will never be able to repay all the hard work and debt of gratitude I owe them.
So we will be climbing The Prow on The Column (AKA Washington Column). We blast off for the base at 6:30 am and will do the first 3 pitches or maybe 4 tomorrow and then do the rest the next day then rappel down on the 3rd day possibly into the 4th day. We will be spending the 2 or 3 nights on portaledges that will be attached at master points on the rock. There we will be resting and eating our meals. I have never done this before so it should be an interesting and possibly scary experience. We will have half dome across the Valley from us and amazing views of the Valley.
I am looking forward to telling and showing you all about it. I will do my best to post as soon as I can after so be looking for it.
Links of Interest:
Sean
Way to stick it out, good luck !!! -thanks for writing-
Vette
wow I am so dang proud of you E!!!! what an experience…. take it all ina nd have a blast!!!