I’d intended to start the day with BB Route. The ultimate goal was to do High E, Veronica never having done it before due to crowding. But I doubted it’d be any less crowded today, so my backup plan was to take Directissima to the GT ledge and hope we could sneak in line. I wanted to warm up on something before Directissima and that’s where BB Route came in.

When we got there, Ken’s Crack was free and since Veronica had never done Ken’s Crack either and since Ken’s Crack is never free, we decided to do that first. Freezing. It was a pretty nice day Sunday but it had been cold Saturday and the rock was still freezing. The route didn’t feel that hard, what I could feel of it, but I couldn’t feel much until about halfway up. Belaying from the top, I glanced over at BB Route which gets about an hour of sun a day (and that at the end of the day) and decided it wasn’t a good plan, not a good plan at all.

So my next brilliant idea was to do Dry Heaves. Since it starts from the top of a block, I figured we’d be past the first frigid thirty feet before we even started. Sure enough it was warm on that block but also oddly crowded. Strange day. There were people on Alley Oop and that hard, runout 10 to the right of it (can’t remember the name) and Cakewalk and that 9 (10 optional) route in between and, well, just about everything. But Ken’s Crack had been free and we later waltzed up to an empty High E butress and ran up the whole thing without another party in front of us or behind us.

It turned out it was a good thing there were other people on the Dry Heaves ledge because I hadn’t thought about Veronica with respect to the gear, only myself. Now knowing where the magic yellow Alien placement was, I felt pretty confident I could lead the route and I did. But then there was the question of when Veronica should clean the yellow Alien and what would happen to her if she fell either before or after cleaning it (she fell after). I was belaying from up top due to anchor crowding but luckily a friendly expert on the ground gave Veronica a lot of attention and advice, probably to the annoyance of his partner who was trying to lead the hard/scary 10.

Once that epic was over, we ran through High E and Directissima without incident or crowds, finishing up shivering but happy.

(I led everything)
Ken’s Crack
Dry Heaves
High E in 2
Directissima in 3