September 21st-23rd, 2001

Friday, September 21st
Since we already knew the approach from last year’s trip, we weren’t too worried about getting up to the North Rim early, so we planned a meeting at my place about 10am. This would be late enough that Tim wouldn’t have to fight morning rush hour to get up to the north side of Phoenix. Scott arrived a bit before ten with Tim close behind. We loaded up Tim’s truck and drove north about 10:30am.  The drive to Flagstaff went quickly as we played with Tim’s new in-dash stereo unit. Seems like only Americans would come up with remote control for a device that sits a mere arm length from the user. The unit handles MP3 music disks as well as regular CDs. Tim had brought a disc full of songs and I’d also burned one to bring along. My disc had 22 CD’s worth of files on it, but the unit would only read the first 14 folders. This meant we wouldn’t be able to listen to my “Pure Funk” CD that had such classics as the Theme From Shaft, Car Wash, and Kung Fu Fighting. The good news was that C.W. McCall’s Greatest Hits files were intact, so we had a good laugh listening to some of the songs (like the 70’s hit, “Convoy”) as we rolled north. I think Scott was about to spontaneously combust in the back seat.

We pulled into Flagstaff about 12:30 and swung into Bun Huggers for lunch. Scott needed a hat, so after chowing on burgers, we went next door to Popular (outdoor shop) and he picked up a nice polyester camouflage-pattern knit cap. It was very stylish. We stopped for gas on the way out of town. The convenience mart actually had an energy drink in the cooler, next to the better known Red Bull, that sported the name “Whoop Ass.” So for a buck-fifty, you could actually pick up and open up a can of Whoop Ass. I nearly bought a can just because it was funny. I fought off the urge, though.  We rolled north past the usual tiny towns and Indian settlements in the middle of nowhere, crossed the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry, and then climbed up onto the North Rim, arriving at Jacob's Lake about 5:30pm. We talked about getting something to eat before heading to the campsite, but just picked up ice cream instead and headed north to our usual camping area. We found our “usual” site empty and got organized (which basically means we found the beer after throwing down a tarp and a sleeping bag). We sat around shooting the sh*t and having a few beers for the next few hours, finally calling it quits about 10pm and heading off to bed. Tim sacked out in his truck while Scott and I had to sleep on the ground. I had a helluva time getting comfortable and spent about half the night thrashing around before I picked up on the idea of putting my big bag under my pillow. This brought the pillow up to a way better level and I finally got to sleep.

Saturday, September 22nd
After waking up for about the thousandth time, I saw it was getting light. It was 6am. Time to get up. My rustling around brought Scott around, but I had to bang on the back window of the truck to wake Tim up. We packed things up and got ready to go. I had everything in my bag and ready to toss in the truck by 6:15, but the others were a bit slower out of the chute. When Tim started pulling the coffee stuff out to percolate some kind of nasty go-juice, I told him we needed to get moving instead. We got the truck packed up we rolled out of the campsite a bit after 7am. The road in to Point Imperial was pretty much empty at that time of the morning. We kept an eye out for wildlife near the road. Last year, we’d nearly creamed a few turkeys and some emaciated deer on the drive down this road. This year, the only wildlife we saw was a few stray cattle, munching grass and ignoring us as much as possible. The parking lot at Point Imperial was totally empty (no surprise) when we arrived. We stashed the truck, made quick toidy stops, grabbed the packs and headed off down the hill at 7:45am.

In the last year, the loose burned out slope had changed a little. The ashen soil was a little bit more compacted and some of the foliage had started growing back. The harder surface made it harder to get a good step in the slope, but that paled against the fact that the returning plant life consisted of these knee-high willowy plants that sported bristling thorns up to about ¾” in length. We avoided these as best we could, but every now and then you just had to plunge through a few of them which would usually send a few of the needles into your lower legs. Oh joy and rapture. We took the same path as last time, heading down into the (sort of) center gully-right and downclimbed out the bottom as loose dirt rained down all over. That put us on the slope below the Coconino rock layer. We plunged through thick brush (more needles) at the bottom and then started tracking through the trees to the south towards Hayden.

We were soon clear of the trees and crossing the red rock slopes leading up to the base of the formation. Last time, we stashed our packs by some trees in the red hills, but this time we lugged them up to the base of the route. The hump up the hill to gain the east side of Hayden is a real pain in the buns (couple hundred vertical feet worth anyways). We crossed below the east face to the base of the route, which we knew for sure after identifying it last year on our way back out after climbing part way up on the wrong line. We threw down our packs. Approach time was an hour and 30 minutes; 1100 feet of ascent; 290 feet of descent.  One thing I wanted to do this trip was to see which direction the route actually faces. Traditionally, the easiest path to the summit is known as the “south face”, but I usually have a fairly good sense of direction and could swear the route we were on last year was pretty damn south. So, that would make this route more to the east. To settle the question, I had a compass (on my watch) with me. As it turns out, I was pretty close. The route faces 130 degrees on the compass dial, which is just east of direct southeast. Thank God we settled that question!! :-)