First night on a portaledge

So I decided that it would be a good idea to borrow Colin's portaledge and try it out for a night. A portaledge is basically a cot suspended by pieces of adjustable webbing. You use one of these on a multi day climb when there are no natural rock ledges to sleep on. When when I climbed el capitan there were tons of natural ledges so we didn't have to bring one of these up with us. I figured that I should find out how to set it up in my dorm room first instead of fiddling with it hanging off the side of a cliff.

So instead of going to party with my friends, I packed up my haul bag and drove up to castle rock in boulder canyon. It had been raining on and off that day, and of coarse, it was raining pretty hard when I got there. I almost turned back around, but since I had already driven all the way up there, I might as well do it. I would have liked to solo aid climb up country club crack, but since everything was wet, and the light was fading fast, I just decided to climb the easy approach up the backside to get to the top.

I rappelled down, jugged up, and hauled up the pig (haul bag) and portaledge. It took about an hour of trying to set everything up, leveling out the ledge, and getting the rain fly on. Finally I was ready to get inside of my bed in the sky.




Normally after a full day of wall climbing, you're so exhausted that it's not hard to sleep. Because I didn't do anything that day, and normally have trouble falling asleep. I didn't get as much rest as I had hoped. I never got the portaledge leveled out quite rite, so I kept sliding down towards my feet. Whatever, it was still cool to be sleeping up there. 


I woke up about 100 times throughout the night, and finally got woken up to two guys that were going to climb the crack that I was sleeping on top of. I didn't want to be in there way, so I quickly got all my stuff packed up, and was back on the ground. I met these two really cool guys Rob and Tommy. They were going to aid country club crack to get ready for climbing the nose. Sweet! I said, I did the same thing. I talked with them for a while about my experience with the nose, and gave them some beta, etc.. They will be in yosemite the same time I am, so hopefully I'll see them there.