As for El Capitan, every climber from Everest base camp to the Brooklyn Boulders gym recognizes it as the indispensable cliff. Elite climbers do “free climb” El Capitan, meaning that they make all upward progress with hands and feet on the rock, and with gear employed only as a safety net. Nobody is better acquainted with this aspect of El Capitan than Caldwell, whose 2015 climb of the Dawn Wall on El Capitan, with Kevin Jorgeson, is considered the hardest long free climb ever done. El Capitan also has remarkably few proper ledges; almost all “free” ascents, as a result, involve quite a lot of resting on ropes and hardware between upward pushes. Virtually nobody, in other words, had ever climbed El Capitan without dangling from the safety net, which helps to explain why El Capitan was for so long the final word in free-solo hypotheticals, as in, “Do you think it’s even possible?

Source: New York Times June 10, 2017 01:41 UTC