Zodiac
by SCMA Member Brandon Thau

Ryan Rambert, Justin Bastien, and I were sitting around eating burritos with Chongo in the Employee parking lot of Yosemite Lodge around noon. Chongo was talking about the B-Team and burning one when Justin came up with the idea of doing Zodiac in a push. I said I couldn't go because I had to wait for Grant to get back from Fresno so we could get on Gulf Stream, but then I figured Grant would probably get back late and I would have enough time to do the route. After five minutes of talking there were four of us ready to go: Justin, Ryan, Chris from Alaska, and me. We got all our gear together and minimal food and water. I went ultralight with no raingear. Chris bailed out at the last moment and the three of us hiked to the base at 5pm. This was Ryan's first El Cap route and Justin's second and my, uhh I forget. I started us on the first pitch. As I was hauling ass up the first pitch I got on a marginal TCU placement that I knew might blow but I didn't want to waste the time to fix it, it blew and I fell about 20ft. When I came to a stop the bombing raids began. Huge blocks of granite came whistling down from the summit and exploded about 40 ft behind us. We all almost shat our pants and I thought about bailing, but only for a second. I ran thorough the first two pitches in 1.5 hours using the caterpillar system of soloing off the belay. Ryan jugged the free line to the ground and Justin cleaned. Ryan had the next two pitches and it was starting to get dark. Our headlamps stayed on until dawn when Justin finished his block and we were on pitch seven. We divided pitches into blocks of three to get off the wall. I got Grey Circle and the Nipple pitch. The Grey Circle pitch was harder than I expected and I didn't get done with my block until 11AM. Ryan then got on lead for the Zorro Roof. About this time Justin was starting to fall asleep at the belay. When the lead swapped to Justin he became awake again and Ryan and I started to sleep. We would wake up after a few seconds of sleep and wonder where we were and realize we were still on a speed ascent. It started to get dark again and the exposure disappeared. We ended up crawling over the top at midnight, taking off our harnesses, walking five feet and going to sleep. I crawled into a fire pit and used a Stagg chili can for a pillow. We descended at dawn and got ice cream for breakfast. I slept while Justin and Ryan went climbing during the day. We ended up doing the climb in 29 hours and combining only the fourth and fifth pitch.

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