California

“Unseasonably Warm”: Free Climbing Yosemite's El Capitan at Night

Unseasonable warmth during the day now has the pair of veteran climbers hitting the granite face at night.

Two adventurous climbers are no longer just trying to make history by being the first to scale part of Yosemite's El Capitan with only their hands and feet. They're also now climbing the granite monolith at night.

Kevin Jorgeson, 30, of Santa Rosa, California, and Tommy Caldwell, 36, of Estes Park, Colorado, have been climbing the half-mile section of "El Cap," one of the most difficult routes in the world, since Dec. 27.

But they're now hitting the rock face at night, since there's "unseasonably warm weather" in Yosemite, climber and photographer Tom Evans wrote on his ElCap Reports blog. "The men have been forced to climb at night, so the rock will be cold enough for their specialized climbing shoes to get maximum traction."

Video that Evans shot, edited by Ted Distel, shows Jorgenson and Caldwell in precarious situations, climbing mostly with just their bare hands and feet, headlamps attached to their helmets. While it was snowing Sunday, Evans blogged that by Tuesday the weather was becoming "way too warm on the Cap."

Thursday was the pair's Day 13 of climbing the Dawn Wall, as the section of El Capitan is known. It looms 3,000 feet above the Yosemite Valley floor.

Evans noted that Caldwell is "really on a roll now" and has passed the major technical difficulties of the climb. Jorgenson is "nursing finger injuries," but can "get past the hardest parts" if he rests, Evans said.

Many people have climbed the granite face. But the pair would be the first to climb the section using only ropes only as a safeguard against a fall.

"If they can pull this off," Evans said in an interview this week, "it will be the hardest rock climb ever done and set a standard so high that it will most likely not be done again for decades."

Evans said that his best guess is that the two might finish next week, somewhere between Tuesday and Thursday.

Contact Us