El Capitan: The Nose and the Dawn Wall
El Capitan rises from the floor of Yosemite Valley in a sheer granite face nearly a thousand metres tall, the most famous big wall on Earth. Its history is the history of big-wall climbing: the first ascent of the Nose, the free-climbing breakthroughs, the Dawn Wall, and the legendary free solo of Freerider. To climbers, "El Cap" is the ultimate proving ground, a wall whose routes and ascents have defined what is possible in vertical granite. Find it on the map.
The Wall
El Capitan is a single, immense granite monolith, its southwest and southeast faces dropping in a sweep of clean, golden rock. The scale is hard to grasp from below — climbers on the wall appear as tiny specks, and routes take days to climb. The granite is superb, split by crack systems and broken by ledges and features that form the lines of the great routes. It is a wall that combines overwhelming scale with rock of the highest quality.
The Nose
The Nose, the prow of El Capitan, is perhaps the most famous rock climb in the world. First climbed in 1958 over many days of pioneering aid climbing, it follows a striking line of cracks and corners up the centre of the wall. It has since been freed, speed-climbed in remarkable times, and climbed by countless parties as the ultimate big-wall objective. The Nose is a benchmark of the discipline, and to climb it is a defining ambition for big-wall climbers.
The Dawn Wall and Free Climbing
El Capitan has been at the centre of free-climbing history. The Dawn Wall, freed in 2015 after years of effort, was hailed as one of the hardest free climbs in the world, a route of extreme difficulty up a blank-looking section of the wall. Earlier, the free ascent of routes like Freerider opened El Cap to free climbing, and the wall remains the ultimate stage for pushing the limits of what can be climbed free on granite at the grandest scale.
History and the Free Solo
El Capitan holds a central place in climbing history and culture. The pioneering aid ascents of the golden age, the free-climbing breakthroughs, and the famous ropeless free solo of Freerider in 2017 — captured in an acclaimed film — have made El Cap known far beyond climbing. These ascents represent the cutting edge of human achievement in the mountains, and the wall remains the stage where the discipline's history is written.
Climbing El Cap
Climbing El Capitan is a serious undertaking, typically taking several days, with climbers hauling supplies and sleeping on portaledges hung from the wall. It demands big-wall skills — aid climbing, hauling, sleeping on the vertical — as well as endurance and commitment. For most, an ascent of a route like the Nose is the achievement of a lifetime, and the experience of living on the wall for days is among the most intense in all of climbing.
Explore on the map
El Capitan is the heart of big-wall climbing in Yosemite and the ultimate granite objective. Use the interactive map to place it within the Yosemite Valley and the wider Sierra, and to understand its position at the centre of big-wall and free-climbing history.