Here’s an excellent 3.4 gigapixel image of El Capitan from the NY Times. Zoomed out to make the whole wall visible, it’s hard to see the portaledges (aka tents) and impossible to see a climber.
aka Caldwell.
That doesn’t really give me a sense of scale at all…it’s like showing me a map of a small town to get a sense of how big the United States are. The New York Times super-high res composite image and interactive graphic posted above that show the climber as a tiny, basically imperceptible speck on what seems like an impossibly massive chunk of rock – to me, those really help one grasp just how impressive this is.
I would certainly hope so. But I am not a rock climber.
No matter what you do, some people are going to complain about how you did it.
“The dogs bark, but the caravan marches on.” Uphill, apparently.
Regards,
Shodan
When they did fall, were they allowed to use the rope to get back where they were or did they have to redo the climb from where they stopped their fall to where they slipped?
The enitre climb is broken up into 20+ individual climbs called pitches, checkpoints if you like. If one of them fell they had to start again at the bottom of that particular pitch.
Yeah, pretty much. Plus, injury is still a risk. This isn’t a “take 20” action.
That is an awesome shot!
And yes, this is an amazing feat. Props to those guys and hope to see their movie at the Banff Mountain Film Festival next year 
Speaking of the BMFF, the annual tour is making it’s stop in my town in a couple weeks. Can’t wait! It’s one event I never miss. I love seeing how pathetic my adventures are and always keeping that in mind as a bit of motivation.
Can’t make it again this year. I’ll be skiing in France when it comes to Boston. 
You can see one of the climbers not too far above the portaledges.
Hopefully telemark skiing.
You have much better eyes (or a much bigger screen) than I do if you can see the climber while fully zoomed out.
In that sense, the picture is accurate. I’ve been to the meadow at the bottom of El Capitan; needed the zoom lens on my camera to see the climbers.
Quite so. People who have never been to Yosemite may have a difficult time visualizing just how big El Capitan is (along with some of the neighboring faces and domes). El Capitan from the valley floor to the top is about 2x the height of the new World Trade Center in NYC.
I have been to Stone Mountain in GA and some say that is the largest chunk of granite in the world. Impressive as it is, I have a hard time accepting that having seen the granite walls and domes of Yosemite Valley up close. Pictures have a tought time doing them justice - the place is just huge.
Pitons are only one way (the old way) of aiding a climb. It’s normally faster and easier to use temporary aids, wedged into cracks in the rock.
In this case, they are arguably cheating a bit, since it seems that they were free-climbing each section of the face, placing aids, going back to their temporary camp to sleep, climbing their ropes back to the point they’d got to, and continuing from there.
Also, it seems odd to me that anything in Yosemite could be described as “the hardest rock climb in the world”, as the media have described this. It is a very long climb: Yosemite has fabulously long climbs. It has some difficult bits: even Yosemite has some difficult bits. It’s taken them years to work this out: it is a very long climb with some difficult bits, and since nobody goes to Yosemite for difficult climbing, it hasn’t been done before.
But no doubt the publicity has been carefully planned as well, since they were apparently making a doco about the climb.
Say what?
Yeah that bit has me scratching my head to. This article from Redbull.com claims that the route “Nightmare on California St” on El Capitan is one of the hardest climbs in the world and has only been done once:
http://www.redbull.com/en/adventure/stories/1331645010407/the-seven-hardest-climbs-in-the-world