An Unlikely Ascent of El Capitan: My Experience Climbing the Nose

“Core shot!” The words echoed off the cliff walls. I looked down to see Logan banging his first into the wall while yelling profanities. “This high up too,” he added, looking a few hundred feet down to the ground.

As he was climbing up the route, he noticed a deep cut into the sheath of the rope, compromising its strength. With an unsafe rope, we’d have to bail.

At first, I was strangely relieved to hear the rope was cut, knowing that it meant we were done climbing. I just finished one of my most stressful leads. It was an awkward C3 overhanging diagonal crack. The gear I thought was good kept falling out, and all the while, I was fully exposed with hundreds of feet of air between my feet and the ground. The pitch took three hours to lead . . . three straight hours of being terrified. I’ve led every pitch so far, and after hours of being on the sharp end, I was ready to stop.

Looking down to Logan, shortly before we discovered the rope got coreshot.

Once it really set in that we had to go down, the disappointment set in. I just finished the crux pitch of the climb, and the rest of the pitches were straightforward. This was our third attempt on this wall, and we wanted to get it over with. Two years ago, we tried this wall twice, and both times we got turned around at the same spot. We both had very limited trad experience and no aid experience. We didn’t even make it halfway up the first pitch. We were both way over our heads, and too ambitious for our own good.

We rappelled down to a big ledge where we would stay overnight before starting our descent in the morning. Our motivation felt crushed. We came to Yosemite to climb El Capitan – a life dream for both of us. The climb we were on, the Leaning Tower, was supposed to be a warmup big wall climb before going on El Capitan, but even this warmup shut us down.

The next morning, as we made our way to the valley floor, we thought of what we wanted to do with the rest of our two-week break. Maybe we’d go backpacking, something casual now that we wouldn’t be climbing El Capitan, it seemed far too terrifying. I didn’t have trust in my rope anymore, and it seemed it would take a while before I could.

Before we would drive back to the Bay Area, we took one last look at El Capitan. It looked bigger than before; if you tried to trace one crack with your eyes it would quickly get lost in an intricate overlapping of various crack systems, clouds loomed right near the top of it commanding its own weather system, and all the climbers on it were just dots in a landscape, it was so big that it’s hard to recognize what it is. Looking over at Logan, we felt smaller than before.

Before heading back to the Bay Area, we decided to stop at the Yosemite climbing store to get a new rope. By that evening, we were back on the wall practicing our aid climbing. We’d figure we’d try to see how high up we could get before having to turn around.

Golden Dreams: Starting the climb

After taking a rest day, we started our climb on Monday. The plan was to go up to Sickle Ledge and leave fixed lines to the bottom—the most common strategy. Without having to haul, and only a few pitches off the ground, it didn’t feel like we were climbing El Capitan yet. Bailing from this point would be very easy.

Monday, I had work to finish, so stayed in town using up a Starbucks’ Wi-Fi. That evening, we drove back to the valley. With lines fixed up to Sickle Ledge, we would haul our bags up, and if time allowed, we’d climb another pitch.

We severely underestimated how heavy the haul bags would be. We planned for 5 days of food and water – the water alone weighed over 80 pounds. Altogether, the bags may have weighed close to 150 pounds. Hauling this much weight was unlike any wall I’ve done before. It took a tremendous amount of effort to just raise the bags a few inches.

We weren't the only climbers. Here's a frog (4 pitches up) on sickle ledge.

Once we got to Sickle, it was close to midnight. The topo describes the ledge as a bivy spot for one, so we planned to set up our portaledge. Logan peed on the wall a way up, but it ended up running down to our ledge, and low and behold, we were not able to set up the portaledge because of awkward bolt positioning. That night, we both tried to sleep on this tiny urine-soaked ledge.

Logan slept with half his body hanging off the ledge. I slept on a sloping ledge where my harness was pulled taunt against the rope, keeping me from continuing to slide down. Both of our bags were marinating in Logan’s pee, and we would only smell worse as our climbing endeavors continued.

Chased By Pirates: Our First Real Day

After a surprisingly okay night of sleep, we set off to reach El Capitan Tower – a major feature that was 8 pitches away. The first pitch was relatively easy at 5.9+, although the bags still felt nearly impossible to haul. The second pitch was tricky and required a few pendulums. The end of the pitch was a thin 5.9 layback crack. I used my aiders for the first few moves, planning to free climb the rest. Somewhere, somehow, switching between aid climbing to free climbing, one of my etriers fell.

Our first real day on the wall, and I already lost a key piece of equipment—finishing the climb felt unlikely.

We kept going up quite slow with numerous flukes. On one traversing pitch, I forgot to take the haul line with me, a mistake that cost about an hour. On that next pitch, a cam got wedged deep into the crack, sinking the rope far out of reach, preventing me from finishing cleaning the pitch.

We arrived at El Capitan tower a little past midnight completely exhausted. Too tired to inflate our sleeping pads, we just threw our sleeping bags on the granite ledge and called it a night.

Chased By Pirates: Our Second Full Day

We woke up with the sunrise, around 6:30, but had a slow start to the day, still exhausted. We were a little under halfway done with El Capitan, although the hardest pitches still awaited. After this point, bailing would be difficult.

From the ledge we could see the King Swing, perhaps the wildest pitch in the entire climb. It requires a climber being lowered down almost an entire pitch length, where they would run side to side, trying to generate enough momentum to access a crack system.

Getting there would be difficult. The first pitch was the infamous Texas Flake – an unprotected 5.8 chimney. Climbing up it, however, felt relatively secure, but on the following pitch we lost one of our cams.

Logan stepped up to take the King Swing, he would have a better shot being 6 feet tall and just graduating from the Naval Academy, was in far better athletic shape than I was. For about 30 minutes, he’d sprint and jump with all his force, trying to build up enough momentum to make the swing. As we later found out, he was too high up. This whole time, I could only watch and saw the rope rubbing along the sharp edge of the ledge I was standing on. With the core shot rope still fresh on my mind I was getting very nervous. He got close, slipped off the wall, and took a massive swing back, hitting his back harsh against the wall, leaving a massive bruise. After taking a minute to catch his breath, he looked up and said, “alright it’s your turn.”

Good looks but bad beta. Logan should have been below the small roof to the left.

If Logan couldn’t finish the pitch, I had major doubts that I could. Being terrified of the rope cutting, I tied into the haul line as a backup. When I got lowered down into the swing, I went much lower than he did, and after a few attempts, finished the pitch. It probably took us about 4 hours to finish the pitch, or in other words, 4 hours to move just 50 feet.

We thought the next pitch would be more straightforward than the King Swing. Considering how long it took us, anything could have been easier. We were faced with our next challenge.

The pitch was unusual, in that it led up to a bolt, where the leader would get lowered down and pendulum into a ledge. In other words, the rope was higher up than where you ended, the follower would have to pull the rope through like you would if you were rappelling. When I went to pull the rope, it got stuck on a detached flake, far away from where we were.

It was devastating. I thought we were done for, especially after how long it took us to get through the King Swing. I couldn’t think of a safe way to retrieve the rope without relying on the help of another party to catch up to us.

Logan stepped up and came up with a plan. Logan climbed up the stuck rope using a prussic, while I belayed him using our haul line. The pro was sparse, so he was looking at a big fall, and to make matters worse, the flake was moving. Once he got to the flake the rope came out easily, but he would have to make a few free moves to get to the bolt and lower off. Since the flake was loose, the cams he placed were basically no good. With only his approach shoes on, and not knowing hard the climbing would be, I was prepared to catch him from a major fall. Luckily, he made it.

We kept climbing through the night. We wanted to stay track on with our schedule, which required climbing six pitches a day to not run out of food or water, and we were only four in. By the time we got our portaledge set up, it was past 3:00 AM. It was about a 20-hour day.

Bubble Blowers: Day Three

We woke up around 9 AM. I had a sore throat, runny nose, and feeling overall foggy and disorientated. There was a new party heading up to us -- they took a separate route up El Capitan that joined the final portion of our route. They said they were running low on water and were anxious about running out. Since we were still in our portaledge, we told them they could pass us. While looking like the nice guys, this bought us some more time to hang out in the portaledge, which we desperately wanted after yesterday’s long night.

Since starting El Capitan, this was the first free time we’ve had. We were enjoying our time on the portaledge, we took photos, blew bubbles, and made facetime calls to friends to show off where we were. After a few hours on the ledge, we became stressed, there was a reason they were running out of water. For one of the climbers, it was his first big wall, and was running into a few issues. It took them nearly 6 hours to finish the pitch. We were in our portaledge until 4 PM and growing increasingly anxious of how much daylight we’d have left to climb, not wanting to climb until 3 AM again.

However, once they finished the pitch and we were able to start climbing, the day went relatively smoothly. We went to bed at the reasonable time of 11:30 PM. No matter what, we had to finish the route by this point. It would be far safer to keep climbing up than turn around. But what challenges laid in front of us, still felt far unknown.

The Mental Tax of El Cap: Day 4

Climbing for me has always been a faucet for self-discovery. To discover how I felt in high-stakes scenarios, to see how I confront fear, to discover self-confidence in remote wilderness. It’s been several months, and I still don’t know how to accurately describe how I felt that morning. It was a mental state that I have never experienced before, and haven’t come close since.

By then, the fourth day on the wall, I was completely conditioned to be nothing but stressed and scared. Every day, at least one thing unexpectedly went wrong where it would make it harder for us to summit, where we would have to turn around, or even put us in a dangerous situation. With so many things going wrong over the last few ways, my mind became conditioned to always expect something to go wrong. It was a feeling that was impossible to shake. I was in a constant state of anxiety, where you don’t know what it’s going to be or how bad it’s going to be, and being over 2,000 feet off the ground, it’s the last place you want something to go wrong.

This anxiety wouldn’t be so bad if I still felt fresh. However, by the fourth day, I was seriously struggling. I was a lot sicker when I woke up that morning and it was getting hard to process my thoughts. With a lack of food and sleep, and from constant stress and fear, my body and brain were taking the toll. It felt like I couldn’t use any more than half my cognition, and I caught myself making tiny mistakes over and over like forgetting to fully lock carabiners.

I didn’t feel like myself, and it caused me to be completely in my head. I was only thinking about how I wasn’t okay, which drove me to be completely paranoid. My little slip-ups were making me scared I was going to have a big slip-up. At the same time, I was anxiously waiting for the next big thing to go wrong. I didn’t trust my current mental state to safely get myself out of that situation and being over 2,000 feet from the ground, it was the last place where I would want to deal with a dangerous situation.

As we started to climb, the biggest problem is that nothing was going wrong. There were a few hiccups: the last crux pitch, Changing Corners, was harder than I thought and took a while to figure out; I dropped a quickdraw; we got passed by a NIAD team which slowed us down, but the unexpected event we were anxious for wasn’t happening.

The closer we got to the top, the more anxious I became. This unforeseen event had to happen. Climbing the last pitch was one of the most anxiety-filled moments of my life. I have fully convinced something bad was going to happen. And when I was standing on top of El Capitan. I was in a total state of disbelief; it didn’t make sense. It didn’t feel like we climbed it.

Officially on the top of The Nose

Off the Wall

Climbing El Capitan was, without a doubt, the hardest thing I’ve done in my entire life.

Every day I woke up, I tightened my harness so it would fit my thinning waist and continue climbing up all while a voice in my head told me to stop before something else goes unexpectedly wrong that was worse than the last situation.

I started up the wall, believing that I would never finish. Even now, it feels unlikely that I did finish. I lost close to ten pounds within those five days and was sick for a week afterward. It was a climb that gave me a new outlook on risk, comfort, and stress.

The biggest lesson, El Capitan taught me: everything is worth trying, even if you don't think it'll work out. You might just get lucky.