Trip Reports from SCMA Members

San Gabriel First Ascents! Should You Care?
by SCMA Member Tony Bird

From the top of West Twin Peak, the San Gabriels started to make a little sense. The good granite lay in a long line, paralleling the San Andreas Fault. Mt. Pacifico. Horse Flat. That prominent crag on the west ridge of Mt. Waterman. The boulder area between East and West Twin, the broken south faces of the Twins, and the long east-trending ridge leading to Triplet Peak, topped by three enormous boulders, with maybe one or two fine granite faces on the buttresses. Good, white, Yosemite-style granite, uplifted in a long string, sandwiched between the variety of generally unclimbable stuff produced by the collision of the great tectonic plates. For whatever reason it's there, it's all strung together, so we might as well make use of it.

Actually it was Virgil Shields' idea, and I don't know how he got it, exactly, but he hangs out with peakbaggers and other disreputable types. I had gotten a look at what I thought was a real nice face, on the southeast side of what I thought was East Twin (turned out to be Triplet) on an autumn trail run into Bear Creek Canyon some years back, happened to mention it to him, and sure enough, it incubated and hatched and there we were, with Will McWhinny, the only other susceptible mind he could bamboozle into this project. My pack, with 2-1/2 gallons of water, a full climbing rack, bolt kit, mess kit and the rest tipped the scale at 92 pounds. I managed to palm the ropes off on my partners. "You oughta know that Virgil likes wandering around the backcountry with big packs," Ben Chapman, who conveniently had to tend to other duties that weekend, told me afterward. I knew, I knew.
We only made it halfway down the ridge to Triplet, but we managed a couple nice but short crack routes on something Virgil called Consolation Crag. It was the wise thing to do, and it made for a nice afternoon of climbing. Since I got up 'em first, I got to give 'em names-first time for me. Hozro, 5.7, on the left, Navajo for the feeling of fitness and harmony. We certainly got fit. Beauty Above Me, 5.9, on the right, a little trickier, with a bat or two objecting from somewhere deep inside.

Lynn Hill says the mostly male urge to get around the countryside and put your names or bolts on every available bit of the unclimbed coincides with our (not her) gender's peculiar territoriality. I can't argue that. "Like dogs peeing" was how she put it. What can I say? Too late for the FFA of the Nose, I'll have to settle for Hozro.

Just when I was about to do another day at Williamson, I succumbed to these urges a second time. Ben and I were the only Cinderfellas staying home from the ball (i.e., Dinner Climb in Formal Attire at Tahquitz Rock). Sue Ann came along, with pack pal Walter Woof, and assured us, after we thrashed our way up a 30-foot flaring crack Ben dubbed Satan's Sphincter (5.10b/c) that we were "truly manly men." SS is the right of two north-facing cracks on something I call Observatory Crag, which from a distance looks a little like one of Mt. Wilson's observatories, on the west ridge of Waterman about a 45-minute approach from Three Points on Angeles Crest Highway. It's a pretty place-great views, lovely trees, and short but fun climbing potential. Perhaps we'll go back. We burned out on the left crack, which has to be an 11+, and scouted a few other lines, including a boltable southeast arete and a spectacular summit overhang that might appeal to 5.12 imaginations. Hey, there are worse ways to spend a summer day.

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