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Aid Climbing the Dawn Wall (Mescalito)

I had been hanging out with a buddy in El Cap meadow who had been on a wall with “Pass the Pitons” Pete for 12 days and mentioned Pete was looking for porters to haul down some loads from the top El Cap. This was the day before I was planning to climb the West Face of the formation so after my buddy Cedar and I found ourselves on top with plenty of daylight to spare having done the route in 8ish hours, the idea of making a couple hundred bucks suddenly became appealing. We grabbed the bags, regretted our decision about 20 minutes in but it wasn't until about 10 minutes from the parking area when I took a misstep and rolled my ankle. I heard a crunch and immediately knew it was a sprain. My ankle was not healing at the pace I was hoping and after two weeks I was itching to climb. I convinced my buddies Chris and Billy that it was good enough to aid climb in so we set our sights on Mescalito. Mescalito is an aid line put up in 1973 that ascends the wall of early morning light aka the dawn wall. The famed “Dawn Wall” route on El Cap shares more pitches with Mescalito than any other route. With all of our gear sprawled out while racking up, Alex Honnold rolled by, asked us what route we were climbing and casually questioned why we were considering bringing so much wide gear. We had (2) #4s and a #5 per the topo but Honnold seemed to think were wasn’t a whole lot of wide on the route, we obviously had to downsize so we ditched the #5. I had heard from multiple sources that the route has bad hardware, a number of missing rivets and could use some work. I personally had no experience with bolting but I had a few days to borrow the necessary tools/hardware and get properly educated on how to hand drill. We hauled loads to the base of the wall on Friday 11/30 and immediately noticed an old rusty belay bolt at the P0 belay. We had time, so we went to work, removing the bolt with tuning forks, drilling out the shallow 1/4” hole to a deeper 3/8” hole and installed a shiny new 3/8” stainless steel expansion bolt. We woke the next morning, hiked to the base, clipped our new bolt, and started up the route. We climbed 8 pitches before it got dark, set up the ledges, ate some Tasty Bites, and went to bed happy with our progress. Waking up on a portaledge on El Cap is an experience I cannot describe in words… Let’s just say it’s quite rad. We packed up the ledges and booked it up to pitch 15 which we had heard needed the most work. I climbed the pitch just before sunset and confirmed is was in fact sketchy and more dangerous than most would prefer. The next morning, I woke up and immediately headed up to place a bolt about 10 feet off the belay in the absurdly shallow hole of a missing rivet. Higher up, I pulled out a rusty rivet that was already in the process of coming out of the wall and put in another bolt. Chris added a third bolt to the pitch in the location of another missing rivet towards the top. There is A LOT of ethical debate regarding replacement of rivets with bolts. I don’t intend to get into the details but I feel that our actions were the right ones. After pitch 15, we only had 2 pitches of aid plus 80 feet of 5.7 to get to an epic ledge called The Bismark. We arrived shortly after 2pm and I raped down to pitch 17 to replace an old lead bolt. When I jugged back up to the Bismark, Chris had just started up the pitch above in order to fix it for our blast to the top the next day. He wearing his free shoes and was prepared to free climb the unprotected 10” section at the top. Chris is a wide climbing aficionado who has dragged me up dozens of pitches of burley off-width and chimney, always cruising them with minimal difficulties. I was in pure chill mode and just got my camera out to take a video of the ledge when Chris yelled “Oh Fuck, Oh Fuck!” and fell 30 feet straight out of the unprotected squeeze. The three of us has been half jokingly hoping each other would whip the entire climb so Billy and I were overjoyed when we saw such an epic fall go down. Chris rested a few minutes, pulled up to his high piece of gear and opted for the layback escape. The layback is only rated 5.10a but it was slick, Chris was exhausted and Billy and I were almost certain he was going to go for another ride. He barley squeaked it clean, got to the anchors and lowered down for burritos and an epic sunset. We made it to the top mid afternoon with huge smiles on our faces. In all, Chris took two falls, I took two and Billy got away with zero. We watched another unreal sunset on the top of El Cap in an awesome bivy spot and ran into some friends who had just finished the Muir Wall. The Milky Way came out, the shooting stars began to roll through the sky, and a nearly full moon rose. We woke in the morning, packed up and booked it down the east ledges in about 1 hour and 30 minutes. We made it down before noon and had the rest of the day to hang in the meadow and look up at the beautiful piece of stone we had just climbed.