In mid-July, Jon Griffin, Gabriel Andres Mancilla Jipoulou, and I climbed two new routes in the Williamson Bowl of the Sierra Nevada. We first set our sights a prominent subpeak directly south of Mt. Tyndall (14,026’). We had dubbed this the First Pillar of Tyndall after the name of the only previous route on this feature, climbed by Urmas Franosch and Andy Selters in 2000. They had reported good climbing with a spectacular section of ridge up high. We planned to start up the buttress to the left and converge with their route at the stellar knife-edge. We climbed knobs and dikes to the base of a long right-facing dihedral (crux 5.10+), before extending up cracks and flakes to the magnificent knife-edge ridge, reminiscent of Wolfs Head in Wyoming’s Cirque of the Towers. One last pitch up a small headwall at 5.9/5.10 brought us to the summit. We proceeded to the north, traversing the western slopes of Tyndall until we were able to descend the North Rib (third class) down to camp, completing Jahloada’s Witness (8 pitches, IV 5.10+ R).

The next morning we returned to Tyndall and climbed a route up the far left buttress of the east face, between the East Gully route and the East Chimney (5.8). We climbed cracks and corner systems of all sizes toreach broken ledges leading to a chimney, which deposited us at the top of the face. After tagging the summit, we retraced our descent from the day before back to camp. The route is Chorblamos (11 pitches, IV 5.10).

– Tad McCrea