Over the summer, Steve Bosque and I walked up to Ribbon Falls to start a new line in the back left corner of the amphitheater (approximately 100’ left of the start of Sky People). As the falls raged, unable to look up, we prepped our gear and put our faith in a weather report that promised a break in the rain the next morning. It was a true wilderness experience, with bright green frogs unfazed by the falls and no noise from the bustle of the valley floor.

Over the next few weekends, we made quick work of the first three pitches, nailing a contrived beak line (A1) to link easier free climbing. After we had reached the top of the third pitch, Josh Mucci was able to join us. We’d promised him a “perfect easy crack on vertical rock” on the fourth pitch, but this turned out to be closed off, marking the beginning of more difficult climbing. Armed with beak tips and copperheads, we slowly worked our way up the Fistful of Copper pitch. Above, the route continued to push back, with more pitches of difficult and circuitous aiding up more than vertical and closed cracks, until we reached Karmac Ledge. Here, we were able to set up a bivy and continue our push toward the top of a buttress. This ledge became the site of what we believe to be the first magic show ever performed on a big-wall first ascent, with Steve Bosque doing magic acts that honored the work of Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin.

After a bit of mungy free climbing off our bivy ledge, another pitch of vertical aiding past an array of horizontal dikes brought us to the start of the obvious beige corner clearly visible from the floor of the amphitheater. Happily, this feature, which looked like a roof from the ground, turned out to be a less-then-vertical corner that offered spectacular climbing back out to the edge of the buttress. We named this Cassidy’s Corner, after a memorial we found at the base for a man named Terry Cassidy. The memorial had a bell attached to a prominent tree, and we would ring the bell and say Cassidy’s name to mark the beginning of every weekend as we pushed our route closer to its inevitable end.

A final pitch of easy mixed free and aid, with a final sketchy aid traverse (rivets interspersed with beak tips and hooks), brought us to the summit just as the sun was setting. We stood at the top of the buttress and the end of our adventure as weather reports indicated that El Niño had plans for a white Christmas.

Another long pitch of circuitous free climbing (5.8) will bring a climber to the true top of the formation and an obvious tree that can be used to return to the ledge at the top of our route. The route is equipped to rap back to the ground without the need to leave any ropes fixed: Spaghetti Western (V A3 5.6).

–Kevin DeWeese