Yosemite National Park: El Capitan's Impossible Climb

National Park Scouts

El Capitan: The Wall With No Cracks

Host: Jenni · Topic: El Capitan, free soloing, granite geology, glaciers, Yosemite wildlife

Intro

Picture this. You're on the side of a cliff. Not holding a rope, not wearing a harness, just your fingertips pressed into cracks in the rock. And your shoes barely gripping a ledge the width of a pencil. Below you, three thousand feet of straight down air. That's taller than the tallest skyscraper in America. Stacked on top of itself twice. And here's the part that should make your stomach flip. There's no rope anywhere. If your fingers slip, there is nothing. Nothing to catch you. Just 3,000 feet of empty air between you and the pine trees below.

On June 3rd, 2017, a climber named Alex Honnold looked at the biggest, smoothest wall of rock in Yosemite National Park, a cliff called El Capitan, and decided to climb it exactly like that. No rope, no net, no gear of any kind. On purpose. Today, we're finding out how anyone does that, and why this particular wall of rock might be the hardest one to try it on. Let's go!

Welcome to National Park Scouts, the show where curious kids discover America's wildest places. I'm Jenni. We're back in Yosemite National Park in California. Last time we talked about the glaciers; giant, slow-moving rivers of ice that carved the whole valley into the shape it is today. Today we're looking at one single piece of that valley. A wall of rock so enormous, so smooth, and so famous that people fly in from all over the world just to stand at the bottom and stare straight up. We're talking about the climb that made it famous, the rock itself, and a tiny neighbor who's been doing its own version of a rope-free climb every single day for generations.

Meet the Cliff

In 1958, three climbers, Warren Harding, Wayne Merry, and George Whitmore, became the very first people to ever reach the top of El Capitan. And it took them 45 days of climbing, spread out over a year and a half. They didn't climb it in one trip. They'd climb as high as they could, hammer metal spikes into cracks in the rock, attach ropes, and then climb back down. Days or weeks later, they'd come back, use those ropes to get back to their highest point, and keep going, a little bit at a time, hauling all their food and gear up in pieces. 45 days of work, just to be the first ones up.

Now, fast forward to June 3rd, 2017. Alex Honnold steps onto the rock to climb El Cap with no ropes, no nets, and no gear. But he didn't just walk up and guess his way to the top. Honnold spent nearly 10 years dreaming about this, and over two years practicing every single inch of the cliff. He climbed El Cap with safety ropes dozens of times. He practiced the tricky parts of the climb over and over. He memorized thousands of individual hand and foot movements, writing them all down in a private notebook until he had every crack, edge, and thumb hold memorized like a song. He even visualized the entire climb in his mind with his eyes closed, over and over, so he wouldn't panic on the wall.

So when he woke up on June 3rd and started climbing at 5:32 in the morning, it wasn't a reckless gamble. It wasn't a lucky day. It was pure execution. He reached the top in three hours and 56 minutes. What took the first team 45 days of brutal work, Honnold did alone before lunchtime. Not because he was fearless, but because he was completely prepared.

Guess That Park Sound

Okay, scouts, it's time for Guess That Park Sound. I'll play you a sound from here in Yosemite, and you get to guess what's making it.

Ready? Take your best guess.

We'll come back to it right after the break.

The White-Throated Swift

Thank you to Lauren Harder for providing us with our park sound today. That was a white-throated swift, a small black and white bird that lives its whole life around cliffs just like this one. Here's the wild part: white-throated swifts have such tiny feet that they can't really perch like a normal bird. They can only cling sideways to a rock wall. So they build their nests deep inside tiny cracks in cliffs, like El Cap. And some people who've watched them say they're among the fastest fliers anyone has ever clocked, though nobody's totally sure of the exact number, because good luck holding a stopwatch on something that fast.

A bird that lives its whole life on a cliff, gluing its nest inside a crack with its own spit. Cracks; that's our clue, scouts. Let's go find out what this entire cliff is actually made of, and why there are so few cracks for this bird, or Alex Honnold, to find.

What's in a Name

Quick one before we go further, scouts. El Capitan is Spanish. Anyone want to guess what that means? It means "the captain." Soldiers passing through this valley gave it that name in 1851. But here's the twist: the Southern Sierra Miwok people, who lived in this valley for thousands of years, called the cliff Tutok Anula, and it means almost the exact same thing; the captain. Two totally different groups of people, hundreds of years apart, looked at the same wall of rock, and both times it looked like it was in charge.

One Giant Block of Granite

Okay, scouts, I want you to picture two things. First, a tray of ice cubes; a bunch of separate little cubes, each sitting in its own compartment. Now, picture a giant block of ice, like the size of a cooler, frozen all in one solid piece. No lines, no seams, nothing splitting it apart. Which one do you think is easier to break? The ice cube tray, obviously. It's already got built-in breaking points. Pop one cube out, the rest don't even notice. But the solid block? You'd have to smash it over and over just to chip off one little piece.

Here's the thing about El Capitan: it's the giant block, not the ice cube tray. About a hundred million years ago, deep underground, melted rock called magma cooled down here slowly, evenly, over a very long time. That slow, even cooling is what turned it into granite; one giant solid piece of rock. Not stacked, not layered; it's one continuous slab with no weak spots at all. Which means almost no cracks. Which means almost nowhere for a climber's fingers, or a swift's nest, to grab onto. That's the whole reason Honnold's climb was so unbelievably hard, scouts. It's not just that El Capitan is tall. Plenty of things are tall. It's that El Capitan barely gives you anywhere to hold on.

The Glacier That Couldn't Break It

Remember those glaciers from our last episode? The slow-moving ice bulldozers that carve this whole valley. Here's a question those glaciers never quite answer: if ice was tough enough to carve an entire valley, why didn't it just plow straight through El Capitan too?

Turns out it tried. Picture the glacier grinding past, feeling around for any crack or weak seam it could grab onto and rip away, almost like fingers scrabbling for a hold. All around El Capitan, the rock was more fractured, more cracked, so the glacier found plenty to grab. That rock got plucked apart piece by piece and carried away. But when the ice reached El Capitan itself, it hit a wall of pure, unbroken armor. Nothing to grab, no cracks, no weak spots. So while the rock around it slowly wore away, El Capitan just stayed. The glaciers came and the glaciers went, and El Capitan came out the other side looking almost exactly like it did before the ice ever showed up.

Wildcard: Guess That Number, El Cap Edition

Okay, scouts, it's wildcard time. Today we're playing Guess That Number: El Cap Edition. I'll give you a fact, and you tell me: is the real number higher or lower?

El Capitan has a 3,000-foot vertical drop. Its neighbor Half Dome also has a famous sheer rock face. Is Half Dome's straight-down vertical cliff higher or lower than El Capitan's?

Lower. While Half Dome sits higher above sea level overall, its actual vertical rock wall face is about 2,000 feet tall, making it roughly a thousand feet shorter than the massive face of El Capitan.

To free solo El Cap, Alex Honnold didn't just show up and climb. He practiced the route with ropes so many times he knew every single hold by heart. Did he climb that same route with ropes more or less than 10 times before he ever tried it without a rope?

More; a lot more. Plus hours hanging on ropes, memorizing and practicing the hardest sections.

Yosemite Falls is the tallest waterfall in North America. Is its total drop higher or lower than the 3,000-foot summit of El Capitan?

Lower. Yosemite Falls drops a massive 2,425 feet, which is incredibly tall, but it still falls just short of El Capitan's towering 3,000-foot wall.

Scout Question of the Day

It's time for the scout question. I asked: how do you feel about heights? Would you ever want to try rock climbing yourself one day? Let's hear what some of you had to say.

Henry, age 8

"I like rock climbing a lot and it's really fun. I'm not very afraid of heights unless the cliff is a billion feet tall. I climb at the bouldering gym two times a month, about 15 minutes away. My favorite route is a three or four, and my favorite grip is a sloper. A sloper kind of looks like a half soccer ball, and you have to use your palms to grip onto one."

Grant, age 9

"I think it would be fun to rock climb, and I would like it a lot."

Scouts, I love hearing from you. Visit NationalParkScouts.com/contact and send me an email; let's get you on our next podcast adventure.

The Big Idea

What did I learn today that most adults don't know? I learned that El Capitan is basically one giant unbroken piece of rock, cooled slowly into a wall with almost no cracks anywhere on it. And that's not just a fun fact, it's the whole reason this cliff is so extraordinary. It's the reason a glacier could carve out an entire valley and still couldn't touch El Capitan. Almost nothing can get a grip on a wall that smooth, which is exactly why the few cracks it does have are so special. It's why a tiny bird can glue its whole nest inside one of those rare cracks in that wall. And why climbers spend years training just to find a handhold most of us would never even notice.

A hundred million years of cooling, slow and even, made one solid slab of granite so smooth and so strong that it just stood there while the whole valley changed around it. That's El Capitan, scouts; still standing, still nearly unbroken.

Scout Mission

Your Mission

If you're at home, find a sturdy playground pull-up bar or a low tree branch. With an adult watching, hang from it using your fingers for as long as you can. Time yourself. Can you last 10 seconds? 30 seconds? Now imagine how strong your fingers and hands would have to be to climb a cliff.

If you're visiting Yosemite, head to El Capitan Meadow, right along the road at the base of the cliff. If you've got binoculars, bring them. Climbers look like tiny colored dots against all that granite, especially in the morning or late afternoon light. Pick one dot and watch it for a full minute. Try to imagine that's a real person, thousands of feet up, holding on with nothing but their hands.

Outro

El Capitan has stood in that exact spot for a hundred million years; tall, smooth, and nearly impossible to hold onto. Whether you're a glacier or one of the best climbers alive, El Capitan reminds us how small we are, and how big and beautiful this world can be. Next time, we head next door to Half Dome, to solve the mystery of Yosemite's most famous broken shape.