Lost Arrow And Other Fun In Yosemite Today [UPDATED With YouTube Video]

I have so many pictures of so many things, but I want to give you a preview here.


Here's how we first saw the Lost Arrow, though we didn't know what it was called at the time.  A man was looking through a humungus telephoto lens up at this jutting rock high above us.  Here's the start of the legend of the Lost Arrow from the Yosemite library website.

"Tee-hee-neh, a beautiful Indian maid, was betrothed to Kos-soo-kah, a young brave, who was fearless and bold with his spear and bow. At dawn on the day before their marriage, Kos-soo-kah made ready with other strong braves to go forth into the mountains to hunt bear, deer, rabbit and grouse for the wedding feast. Before leaving, he slipped away from the other hunters to meet Tee-hee-neh, his bride, who was waiting nearby.As they parted Kos-soo-kah said, “We go to hunt now, but at the end of the day, I will shoot an arrow from the cliff between Cho-look, the high fall, and Le-hamite, the Canyon of the Arrow-wood, and by the number of feathers you will know what kill has been made.”  [There's an editor's note that says this legend may be fictitious.  I guess that refers to the fact of it being a legend, not the story itself.]

The rest is here, along with other Yosemite legends.



Our second view of the Lost Arrow was from the Lower Yosemite Falls view point where you get a better sense of where it is.  Here's some more history of it from a climbing website, SummitPost.

"There aren't many climbs in Yosemite that lead to a true summit. But of those that do, the Lost Arrow Spire has to be one of the most famous and exciting of all. The Lost Arrow Tip was first climbed in 1946 by a party that used some rope tricks to rig up a tyrolean traverse, a popular way to end the climb today. The first actual climb to the top was accomplished by Yosemite pioneer John Salathe and Anton Nelson in 1946. They climbed the Lost Arrow via the Lost Arrow Chimney ( V, 5.10a ), the first grade V big wall done in the U. S. Today the Lost Arrow Tip and tyrolean traverse return are one of the classic climbs of Yosemite!"

It's at 6912 feet.  And all that is leading to the fact that the man with the big telephoto lens pointed out that there were ropes from the Lost Arrow to the rock to the right and someone was crossing it.  I didn't have my telephoto with me, but in this shot below, you can see the rope and the black silhouette of the climber to the right of the Arrow.  The black spot on the left seems to be, well, a spot.  

click image to enlarge and focus a little bit

This led us to wander further down the valley to see if we could see the "dozens" (we were told) climbers on El Capitan.  That's for another post.


[UPDATE 10/18/17:  When I uploaded a video with two El Capitan climbers, my video got posted with a bunch of El Capitan videos.  Which made me realize I should find a Lost Arrow video there too.  There are a number (obviously since people doing this want to document their feats!)  So here's one from Agustín Copp showing this traverse.





And here's Andy the Slackliner crossing.