Your window into the stories, history, and ongoing work to preserve Yosemite’s climbing legacy.

A Note from the Editor

On July 12, Yosemite’s Facebook page stated: “With the high temperatures we are currently experiencing, we encourage all visitors to the park to take necessary precautions to stay safe and cool.”

It’s been hot this past week—upper 90s—but temps are finally easing here in the Sierra Foothills. Now we’re in the high 80s, trending to the low 80s into next week. Yosemite Village runs about ten degrees cooler, hovering in the mid-70s.

Headlines

July  16  –  The  Seattle Times (Paloma  Chavez)

“Tacoma teacher found dead while hiking to Yosemite, officials say.”Harris Levinson, 61, began his solo trek on June 23, planning to hike the John Muir Trail from Whitney Portal to Yosemite (Inyo County SAR post, July 12).
He was due to pick up a food cache on June. 29; when it remained unclaimed by July 8, a friend alerted the Sequoia–Kings Canyon rangers.
Search teams traced his GPS device and, on July 12, found his body at 9,400 ft in Lone Pine Creek; officials say he fell about 100 ft on Mount Whitney’s little-used climbers’ route.
Friend Carrie McCarthy believes the fatal fall occurred the same day he started, just a few miles into the trip.

July  15  –  SF Gate (Ashley  Harrell)

Vernal Fall squirrels are on the prowl:

“For the entire hour I spent at the top of Vernal Fall, squirrels darted constantly, snagging snacks… Some visitors were feeding them on purpose. No rangers were around to educate folks—unsurprising, given that the National Park Service has lost nearly a quarter of its employees since the Trump administration began downsizing the federal government in 2017,” Harrell reports.

July  12  –  Daily  Mail (Emma  Richter)

Savage squirrels, encore:

“Squirrels are running rampant at Yosemite National Park—sassy, violent, and snatching meals whenever they can.”

Feature Preview

For this week’s feature, we spoke with longtime Tuolumne climber Dave Yerian. Museum docent Nansi Wilson often mentions Dave’s decades-deep love for the Meadows when I visit, and I ran into him again at the Mark Chapman memorial in May. Yerian has also been posting about the upcoming 44th anniversary of the Bachar-Yerian on Medlicott Dome.

We talked for 30 minutes—stories from the first ascent, memories of friends lost (he counts ten in the past year), and, impressively, he still remembered which routes I did in Tuolumne more than twenty years ago—Goldfinger included. Dave says he’s grateful to feel connected to the Yosemite scene after all these decades.

Chris Van Leuven

Editor, Yosemite Climbing Association News Brief

YosemiteClimbing.Org

“Taken a few years after the Bachar‐Yerian first ascent. By then, John was climbing for Boreal and had traded his iconic red VW bus for a Toyota pickup,” Yerian says. *Photo: Dave Yerian collection*

Dave  Yerian Remembers the Bachar-Yerian on its Forty-Fourth Anniversary

“I’ve never really talked about the Bachar-Yerian to anybody—ever.” – Dave Yerian

How can one describe the Bachar-Yerian? It’s basically three meaty pitches—dead-vertical knob climbing with about three bolts per rope-length—sandwiched between an approach pitch and easier, albeit unprotected, climbing to reach the top. It’s also one of Tuolumne’s great run-out testpieces, storied in lore and home to big falls by some of the world’s best climbers.

A quick summation: graded 5.11c X (USA) or E6 6a (UK); five+ main pitches including a 60-foot 5.6 approach; 13 bolts total, four placed from hooks. It ascends a “steep” black, water-streaked wall littered with knobs. The guidebook date is July 1981, [Yerian contends August 24]. Pitch breakdown according to Mountain Project: 5.11c (some say 5.12a); 5.11a; 5.10d through a “maze of knobs” and a traverse above the third bolt. Pitches 4 and 5, 5.9-ish, offer some gear with the odd bolt before easy slabs to the summit. Outside once listed it among the 25 greatest “moments in Yosemite climbing” for its bolt-on-lead ethic.

“The farther apart the bolts were, the more of an artistic statement I could make about the value of skill over technology,” John Bachar wrote in Alpinist #26.

I wrote in Climbing:

1982: Wolfgang Güllich & Thierry Renault attempt the second ascent.

Güllich falls 30 ft onto a 5 mm slung knob on P2, nearly cratering.
Renault takes three falls—30, 40, 50 ft—trying to reach bolts on P3; the last yanks Güllich so hard he “thrashes” his knuckles. They retreat.

1984: Ed Barry & Kurt Smith—P3. Barry down‑climbs below the third bolt (40‑ft run‑out). A knob breaks; he falls 45 ft, ricochets off Smith’s shoulder and plummets another 40 ft.

1984: Jerry Moffatt & John Bachar—P4. Moffatt whips 45 ft when a foothold snaps. He finishes the pitch in fading light; Bachar leads the cracks in darkness, bracing himself for Moffatt’s follow to complete the fifth ascent.

I’ve been on it twice. The first time I was way out on the third pitch, staring at an estimated 80-footer as my elbows started to drift from the wall—classic sign of losing it. Would I reach the next bolt? Not necessarily. The rope snaked out of sight below me; I couldn’t even see the last bolt. Two thoughts blitzed me: This climb might be a bit much for me… and now I’m down-climbing until God rips me off the wall.

Halfway back to the previous bolt, I peeled, took a sizeable whip, and slammed the wall—fine but rattled. My partner finished the lead but insisted I start the next, which offered no backing off at the crux. I remember thinking Bachar probably couldn’t pause long enough on a hook to drill, which explains the outrageous run-outs. During a high-step-mantle-esque move, my right thumb was pressed flat against a knob; I had to wrap my fingers over it for stability, my face inches from the granite as I executed the final, hard move. From the anchor, we traversed into Peace and rapped.

I returned a few years later to belay a friend who took progressively bigger lobs until he nearly hit the slab; we bailed. That became my Climbing story, “King Air: A Belayer’s Day on the Bachar-Yerian.” In it, I wrote:

“Medlicott Dome’s infamous… B/Y is known for its brittle knobs and epic screamers.”

Bachar captured the vibe in Alpinist:

“…There I was… at the edge of this huge expanse of tiny bright crystals, light shimmering across black and gold bands…What if, fifty feet out, a crystal snapped? Would a sling around a knob hold a fall? …It was the immensity of the rock—and of the dream—that drew me. I wanted to see if I could expand my climbing paradigms and my soul.”

Enough backstory—onto the fresh interview with Yerian.

“Bachar kept stepping the game up; he just kept inventing new routes,” Dave says. Originally, Bachar and Mike Lechlinski planned the line, but a dispute sidelined Mike. Bachar went looking for a partner willing to gamble ground-up with hooks—or huge run-outs. The method, as Bachar wrote, echoed Dresden’s Elbsandstein climbers, who placed sky-hooks and body-weight pro to hand-drill widely spaced bolts.

Dave recalls Bachar scooping him up, driving silently to Medlicott, and the two of them soloing to the first ledge. “He pulls out the hooks: ‘Same deal as Cheatstone—ground up, no coming down,’ Bachar told me,” Yerian recalls. Bachar needed a leg-loop harness to hang on hooks; Yerian followed in a Swami.

Their multi-day over multi-week siege ballooned into myth. As word leaked out, folks hiked up to watch. Knobs snapped; both men fell.

“I was f---ing scared for sure,” Yerian says. “The sustained fear of the unknown was daunting—I just stayed poised for him.”

Pitch 2 hit peak seriousness: “If that loose hold breaks, you’ll fly past the belay, hit the slab, and you’re dead,” Dave warned.

One did break. Bachar flew—he says 40 ft; Yerian swears it was 100. “His EB came right at my face and knocked the wind out of me,” Dave says. (Bachar wrote the catch was on a hip belay; Dave insists it was a Münter.)

They eventually reached the summit as a crowd had grown in the Medlicott parking lot below.

“We just went to the moon without a spaceship—and it was possible. Truth is, we weren’t trying to make it a bold run-out route—we just couldn’t get the hooks in.”

Dave continues, “We reached the top and felt like we’d gone through something we couldn’t explain to anyone else. Our faces looked like we’d been awake all night—we were trashed mentally.”