Two climbers recently rappelled the upper reaches of El Capitan to conduct a traditional “Nose Wipe.” They hauled out garbage by the bag-full, but an estimated 500 pounds of debris remains on Yosemite’s best-known route.
In just over 20 hours on November 6 and 7, Cheyne Lempe rope soloed the Salathe Wall (VI 5.9 A2, 2,900′, Frost-Prett-Robbins, 1961) of El Capitan, the fastest solo ascent of the route yet made. Shortly after finishing the climb, Lempe produced an edit of his time alone on the wall.
New Zealander Iain Burgon had climbed the Roggspitze a number of times before, but never alone and with a camera. Herein, his edit of the experience.
“Sean has bad case of diarrhea, Nico has bit of a sunstroke and is vomiting, Stephane has bad headache and Evrard has sore back. So nothing unusual to report really,” the four-man team wrote from Kyzyl Asker (5842m) on the Chinese-Kyrgyzstani border. And they hadn’t even started climbing.
When I was a new teenage climber, I had to talk my parents gently through the mechanics of leading, following and rappelling, but it was their worries that taught me to think beyond the accepted norms of those around me. I came home gushing: my friends were putting up a first ascent from the ground up. Yet my mother didn’t adopt the same enthusiasm….
