Trailhead: Robinson Creek Trail
Elevation: 11040 ft
Route: Red Dihedral
Difficulty: 5.10
We climbed Incredible Hulk during an absolute tear in the High Sierra in 2016. We had apparently decided that we were alpine trad climbers and went around ticking off classics with varying levels of style. The Red Dihedral was a fantastically aesthetic route that we did in a day with minimal drama. The hulk itself is a striking feature and the route ascends some very steep cracks on impeccable granite. I'm honestly not sure if I could climb it today without doing a substantial amount of preparation.
We were perhaps 300 ft off the ground when we heard the man yelling. He was hard to hear through the wind that was howling up little slide canyon in the early morning hours. I could see him approaching the rock from up canyon. This was confusing, because from what I had seen on the map there was nothing up there; just vast Yosemite backcountry. Greg reached the belay and we spent a minute looking down at the man and trying to make out his words. Eventually he caught the attention of a team below us on another route, and after a few more minutes of shouting back and forth he turned and walked off towards the climbers camps.
We later learned that he was a lost Yosemite backpacker, who thought he had found his salvation when he came upon humans, but to his distress we were all hundreds of feet off the ground. Fortunately he was able to wait at the tents for a team to descend and direct him to the road.
He had called attention however to the fact that we were indeed very far from any kind of help. We had hiked in several hours this morning in the dark to start this long (1500 ft) route that was at (or above) our current climbing ability. I thought about this a lot as a I led up towards the crux - a three dimensional move at the end of a long steep crack. I placed gear before the crux and made the mistake of looking down. The ground seemed very far, and the rope I was tied to seemed thin. Hmmm. I considered the crux again. When I'm climbing in the cold everything hurts and I felt like my skin itself was aching today. In a burst of scared energy I tried to muscle through the move and fell, shrieking hysterically. The rope caught me. I felt ridiculous. The unhelpful adrenaline gone, I got back into the crack and climbed through the crux to the belay. We were about halfway there.
We swapped pitches back and forth until we came to the final one, an ugly low angle pitch covered in melting ice and snow that culminated in a "hole" that one must crawl through. Greg, always the tenacious one, led the pitch and then we were on the summit in the howling wind, looking out over the Sawtooths.
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