"El Capitan, Part 2 "
I suppose it’s about time to get serious. I’ve had nearly a year off, and if I want to try again, it’s time to get in shape. Mentally. Physically. Emotionally. Last September my friend Pavel and I embarked upon a failed attempt to climb The Nose of Yosemite’s El Capitan, arguably the most famous rock climb in the world. It’s about time to start training if I want to try again.
I would have written about the experience earlier, but the story was delayed by a handful of razor wielding bastards now hopefully getting slow cooked in Satan’s personal crock-pot. I left Yosemite the week of September 11th for a customer workshop in New York, and subsequently the story of my failed attempt to climb a big chunk of rock seemed terribly insignificant. Perhaps in the grand scheme of things it remains so, but it’s a tale I’d like to tell.
Originally, my climbing partner Gary and I had planned to climb The Nose in May of 2001, but his regrettable shoulder surgery and my unrelenting work schedule prevented that attempt. So my Czech friend Pavel and I decided to team up last summer for a September attempt. We had in 2000 successfully climbed Leaning Tower and were quite comfortable and capable partners with dozens of climbs together and a handful of big routes too.
It’s now a year later. If I’m to have any hope of even attempting it again this year, I had better get training soon. I’m not sure it’s going to happen. I’ve had a few setbacks. First off, a series of injuries (one concussion, two bouts of tendonitis in my left shoulder and two demonic sinus infections) and an ungodly amount of time spent at 33,000 feet have prevented me from climbing regularly, and my normally impressive skills in the vertical world are seriously and embarrassingly lacking. Secondly, Gary has had an extraordinary run of bad luck. Since January he has undergone two more shoulder surgeries, broken both his ankles in a nearly life ending forty-foot grounder from the top of a rock in Joshua Tree, AND lost his entire climbing rack when some hoods decided to liberate his minivan from his driveway and use it as a source of fuel for an impromptu riverbed bonfire. Fourteen grand worth of equipment - ropes, packs, cams, wedges, stoppers, biners, cords, slings, bolts, drills, ascenders, draws, shoes, aiders, offsets, aliens, pitons, hooks, hammers, and chalk – all up in smoke or currently on sale in some 909 area code pawn shop. Or auctioned on E-bay by the more technologically sophisticated, white collar car thief.
Pavel and I could try again, but he was planning an attempt earlier in the season. Additionally, Pavel and I, although solid climbing partners, are not fast climbers. In order to stay on schedule and succeed on the Nose, realistically, we each may need to team up with a faster partner.
I would love to get on that route again. It’s 3000 feet of perhaps the best rock on the tallest cliff in arguably the best climbing area in the world. But it was damn hard. Smoky, sweaty, scary, and wonderful. And damn hard.
As I mentioned, Pavel and I didn't make it. We gave it the old college try and failed like a second string linebacker with a bum knee on an athletic scholarship. We didn't even get close. The trip was probably doomed from the start. I should have seen it coming when I forgot to bring my extra sleeping bag and pad to use at the base of the cliff and had to spend $80 at the Yosemite Mountain Shop on gear I already had at home.
If not then, I definitely should have known we were in trouble when 200 bucks worth of gear was stolen out of a crack we protected on the steep ramp leading to the first pitch after we left to go get dinner.
I blame the British guys who were climbing near us earlier, who we later witnessed suspiciously running from the trailhead to a parked rental car. Just can't trust those greedy imperialists from across the pond.
Thieving limey bastards.
Of course it could have been those fat, larcenous, valley squirrels. Vile little creatures, chubby, buck-toothed, nut-whores. They probably progressed from stealing unwatched peanut butter sandwiches and pizza slices to fencing hot climbing gear to all the rock hounds hanging out in Camp 4 for nothing more than a long winter's supply of “Gorp” and maybe a handful of “Pay Days”.
Thieving bushy-tailed bastards.
Regardless, it was a bad omen.
Pavel and I arrived in the valley on Saturday afternoon. We checked the base of the climb, found two parties approaching El Cap Tower on the 14th pitch, and no one waiting to get on route. Pavel and I have amazing luck with our chosen climbs. We consistently attempt popular routes on the busiest weekends and have never once had to wait for a party in front of us. We racked and organized the gear, checked the ropes, packed the haul bag, all ninety pounds of water, food, bivy sacs, sleeping pads, rain gear, batteries, and a two foot PVC pipe for conveniently packing away the kind of human garbage you wouldn’t want to see hurled off a cliff only to land on an unsuspecting family of Japanese tourists. We dragged it all (slowly) to the base of El Capitan. We fixed a rope up to the base of the first pitch, located about fifty feet up a precarious eighty-degree ramp, and left our haul bag and rack. Our rope remained fixed, and we left a collection of "Aliens" - camming devices used in cracks to protect the climber in the event of a fall - in the narrow seam we used to climb the ramp. We accepted this might be a bad idea, but neither of us had experienced any gear theft before, and with our ropes and rack and packs sitting at the top of the ramp alongside the soon to be pilfered pro, and with the sun already set, we saw little risk.
We left to score some slop at Yosemite Lodge, served by the famously slow and surly locals of the Valley. When we returned the Aliens were gone. The thieves even had the gall to ascend our fixed rope to claim our gear. I suppose I should thank them for their generosity. They could have stolen our whole rack from the top of the ramp - walking off with more than three grand in climbing equipment and ending our trip right there.
Needless to say, we were a bit disappointed. It's bad form to yank gear from a fixed line. If I ever catch a climber with a rack of well-used Colorado Custom Hardware Alien cams all magic-marked with a black "JP" on the slings, I'll boot his ass right off the cliff. Of course, then I would probably have to explain to the local rangers why “John Peterson” deserved to deck. I suppose it’s better to chalk it up to experience instead. My annual payment into the universal trust tax as my friend John likes to put it.
Still, you have to think that in the grand, cosmic scheme of things, the theft of climbing gear by fellow climbers has got to result in some enormously bad karma. Regardless of my own moral/ethical/legal aversion to larceny, I would never have the balls for it. Before I’m about to hang it all off the side of a cliff, teetering precariously on the edge between elation and oblivion, I want to know just what gear I’m entrusting my life to, and I want to believe that God, fate, and the ghosts of climbers past are all smiling upon my attempt. Climbing is a safe but notoriously unforgiving diversion.
I digress; Pavel and I had a rock to climb. And a big one at that.
The Nose is roughly 3000 feet tall, following the central and most prominent line on El Capitan and is usually climbed in 34 individual pitches. Most teams climb the route in three or four days. It’s pretty important to stick to that schedule as the Nose only hosts a few wide and comfortable ledges on which a climbing party can sleep, and most climbers don’t want to go through the trouble of hauling porta-ledges up the wall.
Our plan of attack was to climb to the top of the fourth pitch, to Sickle Ledge, and fix ropes from there all the way to the ground. Then after a rest day, we would ascend those ropes, drop one to the ground, and would begin our climb anew from that ledge. We hoped to climb all the way from Sickle Ledge to pitch 15 and El Cap Tower. We would spend the night at El Cap tower and would then climb the second day to pitch 21 and the cushy (for a slab of granite) bivouac ledge there. On our third day we planned to reach the top, but were prepared to sleep on the ledge at pitch 25 if need be.
We began our climb of El Cap on Sunday morning at about seven. After an arduous day of climbing in the smoky air (forest fires were burning around Yosemite and the resulting smoke lay thick in the valley during the morning hours and stung our eyes and throats), we built the anchors and left the exhaustingly heavy haul bag dangling over the side of the ledge, five hundred feet off the ground. You have to hang the haul bag as rats can actually climb the cracks of El Cap all the way up to the Sickle and will steal your food. By this time, we didn’t want anything else stolen on the trip.
Thieving rat bastards.
Arguably the most difficult and frustrating part of climbing a big wall is the hauling. We needed about 90 pounds of gear, food, and water to live on the rock for four days. It required all of my body weight to move the bag just a foot. I had to hoist the bag with my weight by attaching the rope of the haul bag to my harness and using my legs to push against the rock to move the rope through the pulley. The leader would have to jump on that rope a hundred plus times after every pitch to move the bag up to the anchors. This of course is only after climbing a hundred plus feet with thirty pounds of gear. It’s an arduous process. Climbing a big wall is often compared to running a marathon. For multiple days. Hauling plays a huge part in breaking the will of countless climbing teams.
After reaching Sickle Ledge, we rappelled back to the valley below. We needed a rest day. We spent Monday replacing our lost (bastards!) gear in the Yosemite Mountain Shop and relaxing in El Cap Meadow. It was in the meadow that I had the privilege of meeting two of the very best climbers in the world - Alex Huber and Dean Potter.
Alex, a famous German climber, well-known for climbing some of the longest and most difficult routes in the world, was in the valley scooping out a new project we would later learn to be “El Corazon”, a sick and ungodly difficult new route through the prominent heart shaped formation on the face of El Cap. I suspected at the time I would almost certainly read about it with awe in an upcoming issue of Rock and Ice. Six months later the issue hit my doorstep.
Alex was a relatively little guy, but built thick and solid. He had long and greasy black hair tied back in a ponytail and spoke with a heavy German accent. He was remarkably friendly, excited and animated and eager to talk. He spent an hour or so chatting about his experiences in the valley and around the world. We talked about The Nose; it’s history and challenges.
Specifically, I asked him about Lynn Hill’s famous ascent and why it has yet to be repeated. This perhaps requires a little explanation for non-climbers. It certainly needs no explanation to anyone who has ever spent any length of time tied to the sharp end of a climbing rope.
The most famous and conceivably the most significant single achievement in the history of rock climbing happened ten years ago, when Lynn Hill, a diminutive climbing phenom from southern California and one of the best climbers in world did the unimaginable and free climbed The Nose of El Capitan in it’s entirety. This does not mean she climbed without a rope. It means that during her famous ascent, never once did she use gear or the rope to aid her ascent, only her hands and feet, and merely utilized the gear to protect her in the event of a fall. A year later, she repeated her unbelievable ascent– only this time – she did it in one day.
That feat, to this very day, has not been repeated, despite the frequent attempts by seemingly superior climbers, both men and women alike. It was an unprecedented and, put simply, a miraculous achievement. In my company was one of the best, if not the best, big wall free climber in the world. Who better to inquire about that achievement. For if anyone had the skill to repeat it, it was Alex.
Alex explained that Lynn’s climb was incredible, and that she is truly a legend. He told me that on the most difficult pitch of The Nose, Lynn’s tiny frame (she is only five feet tall), allowed her to scale a seemingly impossible corner and fit her fingers into the few miniscule impressions in that section of rock. Every other climber has been thwarted by this part of the route and sent whistling into the air. Alex told me in no uncertain terms that Lynn is an amazing talent, and her size, usually an obstacle she has had to consistently overcome, became her advantage on the Nose.
It was an honor to hear the story of a truly heroic athlete so warmly told by an equally heroic athlete. And a story about the rock I was about to attempt.
Dean Potter is a different animal. Dean is a tall and sinewy figure with ruddy features and a mop of dark, shaggy, unkempt hair. Like Alex, I also met dean in El Cap meadow while he was relaxing, staring up at the imposing gray face of El Capitan. I approached him, recognizing him by his appearance as a fellow climber, but not, however, recognizing him as the famous Dean Potter. We started chatting about climbing, and I told him I was preparing for a climb of The Nose. I started talking about some of the obstacles I anticipated. Namely the fear I commonly feel after switching to the bolder challenges of free climbing after spending long periods of time aid climbing, a slower and typically safer method of climbing big walls in which I ascend the wall via “aiders”, flexible nylon step ladders attached to solid protection in the rock.
So I said to this guy, “Do you ever get nervous stepping out of the aiders, and getting back out there free climbing?”
He looked at me with a curious sideways glance and responded with an utterly unconvincing, “uh, yeah”.
I had the sudden sinking feeling I was not talking to the standard valley yokel or weekend wall rat. So I asked him what he was in the valley to climb. He told me just yesterday he had finished a one-day link up of El Capitan, Half Dome, and Mt. Watkins.
My jaw hit the dirt.
Let me explain what that meant. Each of those climbs is rated a Grade 6. A grade 6 is a route that should take mere mortals like myself more than one day to climb. Here I was hoping to knock out El Cap in one day less than a standard workweek. The guy I was talking to finished three of them – and none of them even remotely near one another other than the fact that they are all in Yosemite Valley, in less than one day. That’s roughly ten thousand vertical feet of granite and God knows how many miles of approach trails in less than 24 hours.
Clearly I wasn’t speaking to a mere mortal.
I asked him his name. He said simply “Dean”.
I asked astonished and embarrassed (for I knew the answer to my question already), “Are you Dean Potter?” He nodded his head.
I was fatally embarrassed about my previous lament about fearing the additional exposure of free climbing. For not only is Dean the best speed climber in the world but Dean is also famous (read notorious) for his bold (read audacious) and terrifying rope free solo climbs up Yosemite’s ruthless, unforgiving big walls. These rope free ascents include The Nose. I have photos of Dean climbing The Nose, his rope coiled up and tied to his back, literally thousands of feet of air beneath his feet. And here I was complaining about stepping out of my aiders. Dean is regularly rope free in the high lonesome, just one slip, one broken and crumbling hold from permanently terminating his employment as a career climber.
He once made it up all 2500 feet of Half Dome in just over two hours. He was only the second person to climb all 1500 feet of the dangerous and unrelenting Astroman rope free. And as I learned before nearly everyone in the world, Dean was the first person to link El Cap, Half Dome, and Watkins. To top things off, only weeks after my attempt, he also broke the record for the fastest ascent of The Nose. And then shattered it yet again a week later. He and his partner did it in just over three hours. That’s about six minutes per pitch! To put it in perspective, that’s climbing 3000 feet in about the same time it takes to watch Titanic.
Dean is a beast - with really, really, REALLY big b…well, you get the idea.
Inspired by our new camaraderie with climbing's elite, after an light dinner, Pavel and I settled into our bags at the base of El Cap for an early night and our upcoming date with the most famous rock in the world.
We woke up at 4 AM. Our attemp began in the darkness of pre-dawn. As Pavel jogged back to the car with our tents, I began the ascent of the three ropes that lead 500 feet straight upward to Sickle Ledge and the start of our climb. I clipped my Petzl ascenders to the rope, and began stepping out the dozens of feet of elastic stretch in the ropes. As the ropes finally went taught, I made my slow, deliberate progress up into the night air. There is something inherently unnerving about climbing in the dead of night, ascending into an ever-expanding void, only the blue glow of an LED headlamp to light the way. The rope seemed to disappear into space, and after only a few minutes of climbing, I found myself impossibly high off the ground, the bottom of the rope vanished into the blackness below. I was totally entrusting my life to my gear. I was attached to the three climbing ropes, all linked together and tied to the anchor many hundreds of feet above. The ascent was slow going. And more than a bit arduous. By the end of the first rope, I was drenched in sweat. By the time I reached the top, I could see the first rays of dawn illuminating the haze of Yosemite Valley, and Pavel began his climb. I prepared the rack, sat down on the ledge and waited for Pavel’s helmeted head to pop up over the top of Sickle Ledge. As soon as he arrived, we began our climb in earnest.
The day was long; the longest day of climbing in my life. Each pitch, many of them gorgeous and sustained expanses of challenging climbing, took longer than we anticipated. The hauling was hard, and we moved too cautiously. Actually, we were pretty timid. And as a result, Pavel and I were climbing slowly. This was not a good thing. Each pitch was putting us further and further behind our schedule and plan to reach the top of El Cap Tower before nightfall.
Despite the work, the climbing was amazing. Standing just 500 feet up off of El Cap provided an amazing view of majestic Yosemite. A lacy veil of smoke hung lightly in the air and the trees appeared as the bristles of a rich, deep carpet covering the valley now well below our feet. Occasionally we could see the glint of cameras and binoculars as tourists in El Cap meadow stopped to watch our nearly glacial progress.
But the scene below was surprisingly bested by view above. As we craned our necks skyward, nearly one mile of beyond vertical rock towered over us. The rock sometimes appeared vague and mysterious, other times shimmering and majestic. But as night fell upon the two of us still inching our way up El Capitan’s rugged façade, the endless expanse of granite seemed taunting and ominous.
The quality of the rock was extraordinary. The granite stayed surprisingly cool despite the constant exposure to the sun. The exposure, the holds, the line, was marvelous. The most famous line on The Nose is called Stoveleg Crack. Stoveleg is a 200 foot (or more) section of vertical crack and left facing flake that provides for the bold some amazing and exposed free climbing. It was in the late afternoon when we reached Stoveleg – many hours later than we planned. By this time, both Pavel and I were dog tired from the constant exposure to the sun, the slow, methodical, exhausting movement up the wall, the weight of the rack pulling us back to Earth, and the grueling drudgery of hoisting the goddam pig.
Stoveleg should have been a joy to climb. Routes this pristine are gems in a climber’s list of ascents. But El Cap was beginning to beat us down. Stoveleg crack was so exposed and so sustained it sapped what remained of our courage. The crack would swallow an identical size of gear for a terrifying distance. We would often find ourselves with 30, 50, 60 feet of unprotected rock between our placements. We climbed cautiously, leapfrogging gear. Night had long since fallen during these final two pitches before the relative comfort and safety of the ledge on Dolt Tower. Two rather expensive pieces of my gear had fallen during the adventure of Stoveleg. First, a $60 number 2 Black Diamond Camalot – ironically a very important piece of gear on Stoveleg, went plunging into the trees after it inadvertently popped off my rack while I was reaching for gear. One the very next pitch, a $35 dollar quick draw sailed past my ear after Pavel made the same mistake. To those of you who have never watched, it takes a terribly long time for something to fall that far.
This trip was beginning to get very expensive. Unanticipated losses now totaled close to four hundred dollars. And we still had two days left of this crap.
By this time, I wasn’t having fun.
I was exhausted. It was dark. I just wanted to get to the top of Dolt Tower, unroll my bivy sack, and fall defeated into a deep sleep. I would try to rally but kept saying to myself, “I want off this goddam rock.”
I pulled my exhausted self over the ledge of Dolt Tower just before 11 PM. We had been climbing since before 5 AM.
Pavel and didn’t say much as we prepared for sleep.
But the experience wasn’t over yet. At about 1 AM, as I lay semi-conscious in my sleeping bag, I heard a climber scream a grave warning into the night. ROCK! A blast of adrenaline hit me like wave of Arctic water, and I shouted the same warning to Pavel who subsequently responded in the same fashion. We dove, bags still wrapped around us to what we hoped was the safety of the wall. We cowered there, hands over our heads for a long time. Remember, it takes a long time for something to plummet that far. We were already one thousand feet above the valley. And this call came from well above. Pavel asked where I heard the warning. I wasn’t sure; I could only tell it was above us and the warning was delivered in the most serious tone. After what seemed like an hour we heard it, a tremendous crash into the scree and trees far to our right exploding out into the previously silent night air. Whatever someone pulled off of the Captain’s skin, it was big. I didn’t sleep much the rest of the night.
Oddly enough I woke up ready for more abuse. Sure, El Cap beat me the day before, but I had devised a plan through which we could get back on track. We were only a few short pitches from El Cap Tower, the ledge we had tried to reach the night before. We could make the ascent to El Cap tower, climb and fix as many pitches as possible above it, and descend back to El Cap for a night there. It would put us a day off schedule, but barring any additional setbacks, we still had enough food and water to complete the trip.
But Pavel wasn’t up to it. And, despite even the best laid plan, neither was I. We both knew that we were not mentally or physically prepared. Although we could certainly hit El Cap Tower, fix a few pitches and have a relatively light day of climbing, we were not climbing fast enough to keep on schedule, and we would have been forced into the same two-day routine for the remaining sections of rock we had originally planed to climb in just one day. We didn’t have the gear or the energy to fuel that kind of progress.
We emptied our water, packed the pig, and readied ourselves for the long series of rappels to the inviting valley floor. As Pavel hiked the pig to the base of the climb, I had to endure the rappel with a 40-pound (a lot lighter without all that water), saddled under my ass, hanging from the belay loop of my harness. This is the preferred method for rappelling with a haul bag. Strapping it to your shoulders puts far too much torque on your back, threatening to flip you backward as you slide down the ropes to horizontal terrain.
Two hours later (and I can’t remember how many rappels, eight?) we touched down, retrieved our remaining gear, the extra rope we dropped after our morning jumar to Sickle Ledge, and walked slowly back to the car.
We spent one rest day in the Valley, replaced the gear we lost to gravity, and then drove to the astonishingly beautiful Touloumne Meadows for a few more days of abuse by granite monsters. Three days of climbing in the Meadows proved equally frustrating as we found ourselves off route and exposed on a chossy, treacherous tower, and had to descend another route unsuccessfully. We came back a day later to climb an adjacent route, the famous and dangerously run out Hobbit’s Book (successfully this time!), retrieved our waiting gear before more thieving bastards could add to our mounting financial losses, and finally headed home.
On Monday, just a day later, I left for New York, looking forward to some urban adventure and putting the experience of El Capitan behind me. Devastatingly, that wasn’t too difficult. On Tuesday, the world changed right before my eyes, and the risks, the challenges I experienced on a tower in Northern California were suddenly and terribly dwarfed by the terror inflicted upon two towers in New York City.
El Capitan was quickly forgotten. But it waits, magnificent, imposing. I’ll be back to challenge myself upon it again. Maybe not this year, but I’ll be back.
