El capitan how long to climb

If you count on a gallon of water per person per day, that weighs more than 48 pounds of water for two people spending only 3 days on the route. Conserving every drop of water makes you appreciate faucets, and especially hot and cold running water in a whole new way! Unlike backpacking meals, there is no point in dehydrating food when you also have to carry the water needed rehydrate it anyway.

On big walls, foods like canned fruit in juice that you can drink afterward go back on the menu. For really long ascents, some climbers cache water along the route prior to the climb itself, going up and down repeatedly to make sure they have enough supplies along the way. Lighter climbers and those on longer routes often end up resorting to pulley systems that provide a mechanical advantage in order to haul these unwieldy loads.

Also, people always want to know — what about, you know, when you have to go? With multiple parties on the same route at one time, the only reasonable thing you can do is forgo modesty and pack it out. You can buy commercial kits like the wag bag , or just ask your partner to look the other way while you do your business in a plastic ziploc.

Double bag. Maybe add some kitty litter or wrap the final package in aluminum foil to help control the smell. Learning to climb a big wall like El Capitan takes a lot of practice. Most of the time people start in the climbing gym or on short walls to make sure their systems are efficient. Once these basic systems are dialed in, the next step is a smaller Yosemite Wall like Leaning Tower or Washington Column, before embarking on climbs the size of El Cap.

To get a head start on learning all the skills needed for big walls, go climbing with a guide from Yosemite Mountaineering School. As the only authorized guide service in Yosemite, these guides have climbed El Capitan dozens of times and are great teachers for climbers of any experience level.

Learn to rock climb in Yosemite with the Yosemite Mountaineering School. Photo: Yosemite Hospitality by Marta Czajkowska. Yosemite National Park and Mariposa County set the stage for epic family getaways, with the more children, parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents tagging along the merrier. Alex Honnold captured the national spotlight with the documentary FreeSolo. Here is what you need to know about climbing El Capitan that puts that tremendous feat into context, and gives you a sense for what is really happening up there on El Capitan.

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The right frame of mind is a prerequisite. The rewards will be infinite. Share This Story. One of the most emblematic rock faces in the world, El Capitan is famous not only for its characteristic and striking appearance, but also the history that surrounds it. Some of the most important ascents in rock climbing history have taken place on El Capitan, and various climbers have risen to fame thanks to their memorable climbs on this impressive granite formation.

It is believed that the first humans to lay eyes upon El Capitan were the Ahwahneechee Indians of the Miwok tribe, who called the Yosemite Valley Ahwahnee , likening the area to a wide, gaping mouth. But before anyone ever found the now famous granite face, El Capitan was formed from the magma created by the collision of tectonic plates and carved out by millions of years of flowing rivers and glacial action.

One of the most striking formations in the Yosemite Valley, El Capitan measures in at about 3, feet 1, meters tall from base to summit. Aside from its technical difficulty, its sheer height is one of the factors that makes ascending El Capitan such a challenging feat for trad climbers and sport climbers.

The park is located in central California, in the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, just about 40 miles 65 kilometres from the Nevada border. The park is surrounded on all sides by national forest lands, and the Yosemite Valley, at the western end of which you can find El Capitan, is about 7 miles long.

El Capitan is certainly stands out for its big wall climbing, and all of Yosemite is a big wall paradise. Famous routes like The Nose, Golden Gate, and Freerider , just to name a few, are some of the most well-known big wall routes in the world.

However, El Capitan has dozens more big wall routes ranging from 4 to 35 pitches. Some of the longest, hardest big wall routes on El Capitan can take days, sometimes even over a week of multi-pitching , to complete. Big wall routes on El Capitan can be a mix of free and aid climbing, though free climbing certain routes, like The Nose , significantly increases their difficulty. While El Capitan houses some of the most challenging big wall climbs in the world, it offers a wide variety of route difficulty, ranging from beginner 5.

As mentioned, El Capitan offers a mix of trad, meaning that you only use gear to protect you and not to pull yourself up the wall, and aid, which is using gear to propel yourself up the wall, climbing, and depending on how you choose to complete a given routes will determine its difficulty. However, if you choose to incorporate aid climbing into your ascent, the grade drops to 5. Out of the dozens of climbing routes on El Capitan, The Nose is by far the most famous. But he felt like he had not yet made the mark he hoped to on climbing history.

In January , when Caldwell and Jorgeson summited the Dawn Wall , a project they had spent years studying and training for, Honnold was there to meet them. Honnold asked himself. But he already knew the answer. The route Honnold chose to reach the top of El Capitan, known as Freerider, is one of the most prized big wall climbs in Yosemite. The route has 30 sections—or pitches—and is so difficult that even in the last few years, it was newsworthy when a climber was able to summit using ropes for safety.

It is a zigzagging odyssey that traces several spidery networks of cracks and fissures, some gaping, others barely a knuckle wide. Along the way, Honnold squeezed his body into narrow chimneys, tiptoed across ledges the width of matchboxes, and in some places, dangled in the open air by his fingertips.

Environmental factors, like sun, wind, and the potential for sudden rainstorms, are also factors that Honnold had to carefully calculate. But the true test for Honnold was whether he could maintain his composure alone on a cliff face hundreds or thousands of feet up while executing intricate climbing sequences where positioning a foot slightly too low or high could mean the difference between life and death.

Some of his poise can be attributed to his detailed preparation. He is obsessive about his training, which includes hour-long sessions every other day hanging by his fingertips and doing one- and two-armed pullups on a specially-made apparatus that he bolted into the doorway of his van. He also spends hours perfecting, rehearsing, and memorizing exact sequences of hand and foot placements for every key pitch. He is an inveterate note-taker, logging his workouts and evaluating his performance on every climb in a detailed journal.

His tolerance for scary situations is so remarkable that neuroscientists have studied the parts of his brain related to fear to see how they might differ from the norm. Honnold sees it in more pragmatic terms. On Freerider, one of the most daunting physical and mental challenges Honnold faced was two pitches of steep, undulating expanse of rock about feet up. Polished smooth by glaciers over the millennia, the granite here offers no holds, forcing a climber to basically walk up it with his feet only.

He had to keep his weight perfectly balanced and maintain enough forward momentum to avoid sliding off. The pair reached the top in a little over five and half hours, breaking their own speed record in the process. He found it dry and in perfect condition.