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First Trip Up El Capitan
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Took some time to write up my first time up El Cap. Hope it gets the stoke up or helps give people beta for this epic adventure! Get after it! |
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Can't open it on mobile? Im getting this: about:blank#blocked |
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I don't think you can upload files like that, even though the editor gives you a cute Clippy icon making you think it's going to work.  |
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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aNH32MR20UZ7xcjwBlvrdCItuopo4Rww/view?usp=drive_link Good catch. Maybe this will work! |
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Good stuff and congrats! I really enjoyed the read. Hope I'm not pushing, but who is Josh? His letters seemed like a big part of the story and I gotta know! |
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Thanks Paul! I was able to access the files through your link. |
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Good read, grats on the send. Definitely brought out the stoke for me! Who wants to help me on my first wall next season? |
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Epic story and well-written. Thanks for sharing - palms are sweaty and stoke is high! |
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"I was jugging up to the bivy ledge on lower angle terrain and I pulled on my top ascender, and it popped off for a quick moment and I fell a few feet before it caught..." Can you explain this? How did it "pop off" and reconnect and then catch?
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Congratulations. Great write-up. The fact that you got to meet Tom Herbert on the Nose may well be the coolest part of all. |
Mark Hudon wrote: Thanks for asking, Mark. Maybe you can help figure out what happened. I was using the BD index ascenders. The only thing I can think of is since it was low angle, I was applying a pulling force a bit horizontally to the rope and since I was also feathering the cam to progress the ascender up, I might have weighted it when the cam was still not fully engaged (which could have been made more likely since I was pulling at a weird angle away from where the cam engages). Then I just fell a little (not all the way to my backup) just until the cam engaged — definitely not ideal for the rope or ascender. |
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Those were the ones I figured you had, and that’s what I figured you had done. (Back up knots, baby, back up knots!!!) IMHO they are the best ascenders on the market but they do have a sort of on purpose design flaw, actually, a limit of the design and handling. I’m sure you’ve heard of ascenders truly “popping off the rope”. Not in the sense that yours did, yours did not pop off the rope, you were holding them in such a way that the cam was forced all the way down, the rope was running over the top of the cam and not engaging the teeth.. I have a pair of 15-year-old PETZL ascenders that, fully locked, and on a 10+ millimeter rope, I can completely pull off the rope. The way I do it is completely unnatural to climbing, and it doesn’t bother me a bit to use these ascenders on walls. I haven’t though, because my wall partner has a pair of the black diamond index ascenders and I just simply like them far better. The problem with the PETZL ascenders is that the groove that the rope runs through is not really deep. If you were to open the cam (with the safety engaged) there is only a few millimeters between the edge of the cam and the outside edge of the groove. In addition, the groove the rope runs through is a fair bit wider than the width of the cam, leaving a fairly large gap between the cam and the side of the groove. BD solved this problem by making the groove deeper and tighter tolerances between the groove and the cam. The built in flaw of these ascenders is that if you made the cam taller, you would need more distance to open the cam to get the rope into the groove. I don’t own a pair these ascenders, and I don’t have my PETZL ascenders with me or I would try to take some photos to show you what I mean. I hope you get the idea. |
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Came across this piece I wrote last year and thought it could be of some interest in this thread and wanted to share! Reflections on Finding Meaning on El Capitan and in Life 7/13/23
This past month, I spent four days on the side of perhaps the most famous rock in the world: El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. A few days after returning to San Francisco from my trip to Yosemite, I went out for Salt and Straw ice cream with a friend I have known since growing up in suburban Chicago. In childhood, I had very little exposure to the outdoors and even less exposure to adventuring in outdoor spaces. I didn’t go camping until I started climbing in college. My family would go on hikes when we visited extended family in Colorado, but I didn’t understand the importance of the outdoors and never enjoyed these hot walks with seemingly no destination. It wasn’t until I started climbing, first in the climbing gym after seeing a video of Alex Honnold on YouTube (a common trope for the 21st century climber), that my life was taken over by a love for the outdoors and I structured my days and life around climbing. I would spend as many weekends as I could driving seven hours down to the Red River Gorge in Kentucky, climbing in the gym on the days I couldn’t climb outside. It became a major part of my identity and years later I found myself sleeping on the side of El Cap on my way to climbing this 3000-foot monolith. It was an accomplishment that I had dreamed of and worked towards for years and felt like it was one of the proudest achievements of my life. But why does this matter and have so much meaning? What makes big wall climbing meaningful? Can the principles that make climbing El Cap meaningful to me be extrapolated to find meaning in other endeavors?
Ever since I started climbing, I had dreamed of climbing El Cap. It is the biggest and most impressive wall in the best climbing area in the world (from an American perspective) and climbing it is a rite of passage for any climber. I had spent the past five years working on skills that I thought would directly help me climb this route and had now accomplished this goal I had dreamed about for so long. A large part of what makes climbing something like El Cap meaningful to me is that it was something that I had to work towards and spend time to gain the skills to do. However, there are so many activities where you need to spend time learning skills to achieve a goal. So, while it is important to find goals that push your abilities and force you to redefine your limits of what you think you can do, there is something more that climbing provides that heightens this sense of meaning.
In my mind, that added component is risk. In general, risk in climbing is palpable and obvious: if you fall off a mountain you will die. But why does that clear sense of consequence matter? And how is that tied into making something meaningful? While reflecting on these questions, I began thinking about the relationship between meaning and sacrifice. For many people, sacrificing something to achieve a goal can ascribe more meaning to that achievement. Commonly that is sacrificing time or comfort to achieve something challenging. However, when life and death seem to be part of the equation (even if it is not truly there), more meaning can follow. This can be seen in tropes in books and movies of a hero sacrificing their body or life to save someone else. For some reason, humans interpret this willingness to sacrifice oneself for something or someone to be one of the most meaningful actions. And it is this aspect of human nature that I think higher risk sports tap into which brings people back day after day to activities like climbing.
If there was seemingly no risk in climbing something like El Cap, I do not think I would find as much meaning in it as I do. That is a strange thing to grapple with as someone who does not seek out excess risk and does not glorify risky behavior and actions. However, this can be clearly seen in the response of the climbing community to the “youngest ascent of El Cap” in recent years. A child followed his parents up El Cap, jugging every pitch and making it to the top after a few days on the wall. Mainstream media picked up this achievement and were very quick to make it a big story. While many climbers do not like any climbing story to reach mainstream media, this one was met with an even more critical response as people did not consider jugging El Cap as a true ascent of the monolith. This comes back to the strange game that climbing is and the importance for some risk to be present to make climbing matter. Since he did not lead any pitches and take on the risk that that entails, many people do not consider this to be a true ascent even though he literally ascended the wall. As an aside, this is especially silly when considering how routes are established where bolts are placed in the wall in certain places to make it safe enough to climb but not too safe to the point where there is no more risk. Who decides that it is ok to put a bolt ladder up on a few hundred-foot section of the wall? How is this not reducing the risk too much in a similar manner as just jugging up the wall if there is now no risk to climbing it?
That topic can be debated and reflected on for years without any conclusion, but it is clear that some sense of risk is important to make climbing matter. And with that risk comes sacrifice. By being willing to sacrifice something to accomplish a goal, that goal becomes that much more meaningful. There is no bigger sacrifice than one’s life, so by ostensibly putting that at risk (even though with modern gear there is very little to no real risk of that), climbing becomes a meaningful endeavor and climbing something like El Cap which is the biggest wall to risk one’s life on becomes meaningful.
However, I think an important takeaway from these musings is that while climbing is a meaningful activity for me, the aspects of it that form its meaning can be found in many other parts of life. In general, reflecting on my time climbing and in particular climbing El Cap, meaningful experiences involve doing an activity in which you strive towards a goal that you are unsure that you can accomplish that involves some kind of risk and sacrifice to achieve (below).
Meaningful experience = Goal with real possibility of failure + Risk + Sacrifice
It is important to note that risk and sacrifice can have a variety of meanings to different people. Instead of risk of death or injury, a risk of failure or embarrassment can be just as meaningful. Golf is a very different endeavor than rock climbing, but the meaning found in committing to taking a risky shot and executing that shot is just as real as doing a dangerous climb. Risk here is not risk of dying or being injured but rather risking making a mistake and putting a big number on your scorecard or embarrassing yourself in front of that teenager in your foursome who has a scratch handicap. Taking time to find out what kind of risk feels good to you allows for you to apply it to your areas of interest and have even more meaningful experiences.
Similarly, sacrifice can take on different meanings in different contexts. Instead of sacrificing one’s safety or body, it can be a sacrifice of time or comfort that leads to meaning being formed. Doing something that is uncomfortable like going to a foreign country and learning how to communicate and interact with the local culture is an inherently meaningful experience because one is forced to sacrifice their own comfort to grow. Taking time to reflect on ways to push one’s comfort zone and sacrifice something will allow for more meaning to be realized on a day-to-day basis.
As a quick aside, it is interesting to differentiate risk and sacrifice as there is a fair amount of overlap. I see risk as something optional that you take on as a part of the goal itself (such as a climb that has a big fall potential or golf shot where you could easily hit it into the water). The goal itself involves this certain type of risk and it is inherent to the goal. In contrast, sacrifice is something that you must take on in order to achieve the goal, but it is an aspect of the process of achieving the goal and not part of the goal itself. It is independent of the goal but is something that the person must do to achieve the goal (such as give up time to train or endure pain or discomfort). The goal itself is not in seeing how much time one can give up or how much pain they can endure but this sacrifice is necessary to achieve the goal. A combination of risk and sacrifice is vital to meaningful experiences.
By heightening any aspect of this formula (meaningful experience = goal that might be impossible + risk + sacrifice) even more meaning can be found. In practice, this looks like working towards a goal that really seems impossible or involves a lot of risk or a lot of sacrifice. In climbing, this is why climbing El Cap was my most meaningful experience. It was something that I did not think was possible for me that involved the most risk of any climbing that I had done while also forcing me to sacrifice a lot physically and emotionally. Since this was a pinnacle for me in each of the three aspects of meaningful experiences, it led to being a true pinnacle of an experience for me. While you don’t have to sleep on the side of a mountain to find meaning, I urge people to keep looking for ways they can push themselves to take on goals that seem impossible that require some form of risk and sacrifice to accomplish. Life is truly built around experiences like these, and it is so obvious to feel true purpose when working towards meaningful goals. It is really what makes life worth living. |
