Honnold is the only person to have climbed El Cap solo without a rope or any protection, a perilous feat that earned him both admiration and criticism for being reckless. Caldwell's knees and fingers were bloodied and Honnold got a nasty rope burn in a fall that tore a chunk from a finger.Ĭaldwell shared fame in 2015 with Kevin Jorgeson on a first ascent of El Cap's Dawn Wall, one of the world's hardest routes, using no assistance in a 19-day climb and only ropes and gear to protect against a fall. Honnold, 32, and Caldwell, 39, are arguably the biggest stars of rock climbing, but both suffered small injuries. Once Caldwell came to a rest, he chalked up his hands, swung over to a crack and resumed his upward progress. "I saw him hurtling upside down through the air and then bouncing on the end of the rope." "It was pretty scary because it was such a gargantuan fall," said photographer Austin Siadak, who has been shooting video of the team for a documentary. "It's a worst-case scenario, the stuff of nightmares really."Ĭaldwell survived two big falls unscathed, including a 100-footer (30.5-meter) in practice runs. "It's really hard to go for it 100 percent after something like that happens," said Honnold, who said the deaths of Jason Wells and Tim Klein weighed on them. Honnold and Caldwell were not climbing that day and they canceled plans to go for the record Sunday and instead did a training run. Spectators in the valley below who had been hoping to see Honnold and Caldwell were horrified. Two experts were speed climbing in that manner on El Cap's Freeblast route Saturday when one fell and pulled the other 1,000 feet (305 meters) to their deaths. Climbers are roped together for safety, and they clip their lifeline into protective pieces placed in cracks along the way to catch them if they fall.īut the amount of gear in a race against the clock is pared to the bare minimum to save weight, and climbers sometimes move in tandem with neither anchored to the rock. "It's a very complicated route," said Daniel Duane, author of "El Capitan." "It meanders all over the place and it has pendulum swings and bolt ladders and there are little variations where you can go this way instead of that way, so there's a ton of trickery involved in shaving off time." Department of Energy, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and HPE have teamed up with AMD to design El Capitan, expected to be the world’s fastest supercomputer with delivery anticipated in early 2023. Other cracks abruptly end in a smooth sea of granite, forcing climbers to swing left or right to find the next hand or foothold. To enable greater than 2 exaflops of double precision processing power, the U.S. Sometimes there is little more to grasp or perch on than a sliver the width of a few coins. The Nose is the best known and typically takes accomplished climbers four or five days.Ĭlimbers jam hands and feet into finger- and fist-width cracks to inch their way up the vertical wall. El Cap, though, looms largest and offers 58 distinct routes. Yosemite is mecca for climbers because of its vast array of soaring granite walls and peaks. Honnold said it would have been easy to stop after breaking records Monday and May 30, but they pressed toward the two-hour goal he considered the "human potential." The duo broke the record three times in the past week, carving more than 20 minutes off a 2017 mark. I had a wave of, 'Oh wow.' I'm pretty proud we saw it through." "It was slightly emotional when we finished it. A rockslide came off the east side of El Capitan on Monday, Feb. "Oh my God, we're doing it," he thought as he secured the rope to the tree and hoped Caldwell would hurry. FILE: El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, February 2023. Honnold didn't think they were on a record pace until he glanced at his phone timer as he ran for the tree that marks the finish line, he told The Associated Press by phone as he hiked down from the summit. The blistering time of 1 hour, 58 minutes and seven seconds capped weeks of practice and a few stumbles on the so-called Nose route that runs up the middle of the 3,000-foot (915 meters) sheer monolith. Tenacity paid off Wednesday as Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell reached the top of El Capitan, the most celebrated slab of granite on Earth, in less than two hours, breaking a barrier compared to the four-minute mile.
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