Public Sanitation Wall & MIDDLE CATHEDRAL ROCK

Intro

In the latter half of 2024, I made the decision to quit my job and enroll in a 6-month coding bootcamp, with hopes of upgrading my skills and moving closer to the elusive flexible remote sufficiently-paying career job. The bootcamp also gave a nice reprieve from the daily grind, and I spent my summer enjoying the additional freedom and flexibility. Fall 2024 seemed the perfect time to head to the Valley, as it would be the first time in years I had the window to do so. But the day before leaving for Yosemite, I unexpectedly came down hard on my leg while cleaning my gutters and fractured my tibial plateau. It was a minor enough fracture that I was still able to bear weight, but according to my ortho doctor, any climbing, running, etc. was out. However, he did tell me to base my activity level on pain--if I felt no pain, what I was doing with it was probably okay. So I decided to head to Yosemite anyway and promised myself that if I felt pain I would stop.....

Public Sanitation Wall seemed like a good place to test the waters on my knee. Short approach, low commitment, sport climbing on good rock.

Nate and I each climbed three routes (he led two, toproped one, while I toproped all) at Public Sanitation Wall. He did all of the leading. I managed to get up a few pitches, but was terrified by any twinge of pain and struggled upwards in imagined pain and frustration. Climbing 11c one-legged and the talus field on the approach was quite a challenge. At the end of the day, my leg ached. I suspected my attempt to climb in Yosemite was a three-pitch failure.

But with renovation work being done on my place back in Estes Park, I preferred to stay on the road and work. So out of an irrational hope for a miracle of healing, I stayed in Yosemite, bumming off Nate's Starlink, riding his bike around the Valley roads, reading books, and taking my lectures and working on homework. After a few days of this, my knee was feeling a bit better. I couldn't help it. "Let's try the Central Pillar of Frenzy", I proposed. I had climbed this clasic 5-pitch 5.9 route three times (2007, 2015, and 2017) and was happy to climb it again. Plus it was somewhere we could walk from our post in El Cap Meadow. But when we got there, there were two parties on route and three lined up at the base. The first party was hardly moving. No thanks. So we headed right and cragged for a few hours, climbing four single pitches. My knee felt better than it had a few days previous (perhaps because the climbing was a bit easier), so that was encouraging. Perhaps we could climb something bigger the next day....

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(I almost left and drove back home after the first day at Public Sanitation Wall. My doctor had told me 6-8 weeks of no climbing on my tibial plate fracture, and I figured I had been foolhardy to try to push that limit. But Nate encouraged me to stay a few more days and suss it out a bit more. I am glad he did, because I ended up staying in Yosemite for three weeks, climbing awesome routes like Voyager (5.11c, 7p), The North Face of the Rostrum (5.11c, 8p), Jericho Wall Free (5.12a, 8p), Scarface (5.12, 9p), The Great Escape (5.11d, 4p), The Moratorium (5.11b, 3-4p), Freeblast (5.11, 8p), Central Pillar of Frenzy (5.9, 5p), and Gates of Delirium (5.12-, 10p). I didn't do much leading but I was able to follow without too much difficulty other than my usual struggles with 5.11+ and harder. By the end of the three weeks, it was four weeks post-fracture, and I had mostly forgotten about it, and I decided to add a one-day detour to do the 44-mile Grand Canyon rim to rim to rim on the drive home.)

previous and next adventures