Spam from Royal Arches

Particulars
The Royal Arches Route, Yosemite Valley, California
Difficulty: This is a serious, long rock climb on a big cliff. It is about 16 pitches long with the most difficult pitch being 5.7 A0 or 5.10b. Most of the route is easier and quite varied. If you do the A0 version, it amounts to a fixed pendulum – not hard as long as the rope is in good shape. Although it is possible to rappel this cliff (10 raps), it is not recommended. However, the walk off is difficult to navigate and strewn with false little trails that lead to drop offs.
Appeal: This place is beautiful! It is a gorgeous route on excellent rock and a great adventure. Definitely a world class experience.
Spam
On my first ever trip to Yosemite I teamed up with Jeanie to climb the classic Royal Arches route. While this climb is not as prominent as Half Dome, the cliff is still pretty daunting when viewed from the valley. We planned to head up in the afternoon and bivy on some fourth class ledges to get a head start on the morning crowd. A 5.6 chimney, a 3rd class scramble, a short 5.4 crack, more scrambling, and a 5.6 crack should have taken us to our bivy site but somewhere we went wrong. The first chimney was boot polished and more difficult than I expected. I hauled our packs up on a second rope before belaying Jenny up. The sun was still hot even at 5:30pm and I felt heat exhaustion coming on after only the first pitch. Thirty minutes rest in the shade of a Manzanita restored my energy and we kept going. The route finding seemed obvious, telltale chalk, pin scars, and poot polished rock marked the way. We didn’t question it much when the 5.6 crack that was to lead to our bivy site looked more like an open book that wasn’t marked on the topo in the guide book. But one pitch of this dihedral led only to a second and not the 4th class ledges and bivy we were looking for. “Maybe if we do another pitch we’ll find something,” we reasoned. Jenny was in the lead now and she set the belay at another tree and hauled up the packs. “She’s a tough little girl”, I thought to myself. When I reached her I surveyed our surroundings and saw a nearby opening in the rock to our left. I peered in and could see a level place about two feet wide and maybe five feet long and only darkness after that. “I want to go on up a bit,” Jenny said. Above us the dihedral continued up to yet another Manzanita. Dusk was gathering.

“You should take a head lamp,” I suggested. “No, it will only take a couple minutes to do this,” she replied. “Your belay is on,” I acquiesced. She climbed up but soon her pace slowed and she began placing more pro as the climbing was becoming more difficult. The dimming light faded to dark. “Greg, I can’t see to place anything. Can you bring up my head lamp?” “Sure,” I said and found my head lamp in my pack and turned the lamp on but nothing happened. The battery was dead. I turned my attention to Jenny’s pack and rooted around until I found hers. The battery was missing. Carefully I pulled each item from her pack and placed it on a six inch wide ledge beside me. Finally, I found the battery and got the lamp working. I replaced everything in her pack. I followed the pitch and when I reached her, we discussed what to do. The climb was at the limit of our abilities and the darkness just made it plane dangerous even with the head lamp. We decided to lower to the cave I had seen earlier.

Jenny wriggled into the cave first and exclaimed excitedly that it was huge. It wasn’t huge but it did continue for about ten feet beyond what I could see earlier and widened just enough to lay down on. So we did with me farthest into the cave and her near the entrance. We made our selves comfortable in our bivy gear and went to sleep, but not for long. I think I hadn’t slept for ten minutes when she screamed. Her scream and the shock of being awakened practically paralyzed me with fear. “What is it?” I shouted, my voice matching the volume and urgency of hers. “A cat. A big cat,” she gulped out. It was a few moments before I managed to convince myself that a mountain lion could not up so far up a cliff. Though the animal remained a mystery to us that night, we later deduced that it must have been a ring tailed cat. These cute little creatures are more closely related to raccoons but they do look kind of cat like and have a bushy ringed tail. They are also quite curious animals. I know this because they kept returning to the cave entrance to sniff around and play with some of our climbing gear outside. Jenny and I didn’t get much sleep as a result.

The next morning I finished climbing the pitch above in order to retrieve our gear then we bailed. Simply put, we were just too tired at that point to take on a big route. Below, at a bus stop near the Ahwahnee Hotel an older couple began a conversation with us. They were going hiking they explained and noticed that we looked like we had been out hiking also. “Yes,” we admitted. “Where did you go?” they asked. “Up there,” we pointed at the Royal Arches. “Oh my. That looks very steep,” they commented. We thought so too.
Logistics
Check out the logistics section in Spam from Snake Dike.

The start of the Royal Arches route is just east of the Ahwahnee Hotel. The trail is pretty worn by this time and shouldn’t be too hard to find. Rock Climbing Yosemite Free Climbs by Don Reid features this route as well as Fifty Classic Climbs in North America, by Allen Steck and Steve Roper and Yosemite Valley Free Climbs by McNamara, Barnes, Roper, and Snyder from Supertopo.