From base to summit, it’s a 3,000-foot vertical climb up the face of El Capitan, the landmark granite formation in Yosemite National Park. Even the most hardcore rock climbers must train for the feat, and the summit is not always reached in a day. It’s common for a climber to pause halfway up the ascent and camp out—yes, sleep!—right on the rock’s face. We asked a few veterans how it’s done.
ONE STEP AT A TIME
The right side of El Capitan has 27 main routes to the top. Those who attempt the face—up to 1,000 parties each year, climber Ken Yager estimates—can swing between different routes or start halfway up the mountain via a hoist, taking the journey one segment at a time rather than heading straight up from the base.
ALL-NIGHTER
Each year, approximately 750 people apply to vertical-camp (or “bevy” or “wall out”)—climb all day, camp on the wall, and finish the next day. Veteran climber Tyler Karow says that the anchors that keep his tent attached to El Cap can hold the weight of a Toyota Prius. When you wake up in the morning, he says, “half your vision is granite, half your vision is the sky.”
NEED FOR SPEED
Climbers like Brant Hysell, who runs the Gravity Lab YouTube channel, challenge themselves to scale the walls as fast as they can. Hysell usually doesn’t camp, opting instead to climb for 20 hours straight. Ironically, he says that’s when he most forgets the passage of time. For a while, he held a speed-climbing record on El Cap’s Salathé Wall.
TALK THE TALK
Climbers have their own language. “Speed style” is what Hysell does: ascend the face as swiftly as possible. Your “psych” is your energy levels, and the goal is to climb your way into a “flow state.” Taking on a huge new adventure is “epicing.” By the end of each day, you’re “toast.”
LOOK UP
One day last spring, over a span of four hours, 600 people looked through two telescopes stationed at the base of El Cap to spot one thing: a human making their way up the granite face. Climbers stand out in neon T-shirts or in sleeping bags tethered to the rock.
TOURIST ATTRACTION
When Yager launched Yosemite’s Ask a Climber program 15 years ago, he put the telescopes in place. Now, a staff of rangers-cum-climbers oversees them and answers questions from 20,000 El Cap gazers each year.•
Jessica Blough is a freelance writer. A former associate editor at Alta Journal, Blough is a graduate of Tufts University where she was editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
