Rock Climbing in Yosemite

In New York I've had a difficult time finding a decent climbing gym which is affordable to a student. In San Francisco, I've been back at climbing with a vengeance, at a great gym around the corner from where I live. But the ultimate goal of the climbing sessions was always to get outdoors and go going climbing in Yosemite.

Yosemite is world-famous for its scenery but also, among climbers, for the awesome rock climbing opportunities there. In fact, the American route ranking system was developed in Yosemite. The central Yosemite valley is hot (and crowded!) at this time of year, so a better alternative is the higher Tuolumne Valley, just to the North.


I went to Yosemite with Nikhil, a fellow intern at Google. He is from Delhi and is doing a PhD in computer vision at the University of California San Diego. He is working within Google's image search project. We met on the hike to Sykes Hot Springs last month, and found we had a lot in common - interest in photography, the outdoors, travel, and computers.

We did a crack-climbing course with the Yosemite Mountaineering School on Saturday, learning skills like finger, fist and foot jamming (which is sometimes just as painful as it sounds!) In addition to the crack climbing, at the end of the day we did some climbing on faces which had no cracks - or anything else, for that matter. You get hand and foot holds on tiny ledges, about 1mm wide, which form when plates of rock erode off. It makes you feel like a human fly.



The campsite at Tuolumne is huge (300+ campsites) and surprisingly poorly equipped. It has no electricity, no hot water, no showers and no real place to wash dishes. It was also full to capacity. We were lucky enough to get a camping site for the first night, but on Saturday we ended up squatting on the campsite of a dutch girl, her American friend and an Italian couple - which resulted in some great conversation.

On Sunday, Nihil and I did an 18 km hike along the Yosemite Creek which leads to the place where the creek drops hundreds of meters into the valley. As we reached this spot, I closed my eyes and Nihil lead me to the edge of the cliff. When I opened my eyes, this was the view I got:



It was a awe-inspiring moment ...