First climbing day! Which very annoyingly coincided with the day that we had to switch campsites. We only had three nights reserved in Camping Vista Hermosa, and on day 4 we had to move all of our stuff over to Camping La Junta, which meant we needed to be back down to our stuff by 8pm ish to pack up and move everything before reception in Camping La Junta closed at 9pm.

We set an early alarm and ate some breakfast oatmeal while still cozied up in our sleeping bags, then hiked up to the base of the route where we had stashed our stuff the previous day. It’s called Homo Santa because it’s a combination of two routes, Homo Sapies (where “pies” means “feet” in spanish) and Send it like Santa. This route is popular enough that the topo (i.e. the map of the route) is quite detailed, with a pitch-by-pitch description so it’s hard to get it wrong. Which I still did, but that’s besides the point.

Homo Santa is a ten-pitch route. The first pitch is a slabby roof section and is the hardest part of the route, so that was a bit of an early morning kick in the pants. But it got super fun after that.

Will lead the first two pitches since they were a little harder. The plan was for me to lead pitches 3-6, which went great. Annoyingly, on pitch 6, I accidentally missed the anchors and kept climbing. It got a lot harder and I got scared and took a while to get through the next bit and had to make a gear anchor on an awkward ledge in the middle of pitch 7 and it was not my favorite. Will then climbed up and got us to the top of pitch 7 (which was an amazingly awesome solid hand crack for him and some sketchy loose cupped hands for me), but by then it was getting a little later than we wanted, especially considering the fact that we had to hike all the way down to the main valley that same evening. Pitch 8 is the one the route is named for, dubbed “Santa’s Chimney”, but we ultimately decided to just go down from the top of 7 and didn’t get to send it like santa. We may need to go back to this one.

Leading pitch 3 of Homo Santa

We don’t often rappel with two ropes in Yosemite so there was some faff on the way down, plus at the base we rappelled basically straight into a little stream so that was inconvenient. We made it back to the bivy cave by 5:30pm to do a full repack of all the stuff, which is quickly becoming our least favorite chore, and then started hauling it down the trail. It takes ~3 hours on the way up, so we were hoping for 2 hours on the way down.

Yet again, we passed a bunch of climbers hiking up as we were going down, and felt like lost gringos fully out of sync with the rest of the climbing community. Bummer that we couldn’t stay a few more nights up in Trinidad Valley.

About halfway down, we discovered that the jetboil lid had fallen out of Will’s backpack somewhere on the trail because it was in an outer pocket (the jetboil is our camp cooking stove). Will sighed deeply, then left his backpack behind and started trudging back up the trail while I continued down to the campsite. He did eventually find it almost all the way back at the bivy spot, assisted by none other than Tommy Caldwell, a famous American climber (Dawn Wall and Devil’s Thumb are his two big climbing documentaries, and as of now he holds the speed record with Alex Honnold on The Nose route on El Capitan in Yosemite).

Meanwhile I was cruising down to the campsite and made it there in a blistering 1.5 hours, where it was my turn to sigh deeply and then pack up the stuff we had left at camp into three giant bags to take it over to the other campsite. The catch here is that the two campsites are on opposite sides of a river, and the only way to cross (besides swimming) is in these little zipline carts. There is a pulley system to pull the cart from one side of the river to the other, so you need a friend to help you get across. It would be hard to ride the cart with more than one big bag, but luckily I found a couple of guys waiting to cross that were willing to take some bags across for me. Definitely still a pain in the ass though.

This is a video from a different day but it shows the cart system for crossing the river.

I eventually lugged everything to the other campsite, checked in, picked a spot to camp, and set up the tent, all before 9pm. I honestly felt like a hero at this point, but also Will had been hiking that entire time so I think he’s the real hero on this one. He did eventually make it back to camp with the jetboil lid safely tucked away in a zippered pocket and we ate some food and fell into bed. Lessons learned today for sure.

Day 4 Modified Perfect Ratio

7 pitches : 14 hours

Making progress, finally!

The full list of Cochamó posts can be found here.