[This Sharp End story originally appeared in Alpinist 89 (Spring 2025), which is now available on newsstands and in our online store. Only a small fraction of our many long-form stories from the print edition are ever uploaded to Alpinist.com. Be sure to pick up the hard copies of Alpinist for all the goodness!–Ed.]
Alice laughed. “… One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Dawn Wall free in a day. There, I thought it, said it, wrote it. Someday it’s sure to happen, yes?
Séb Berthe agrees. On January 31 the thirty-one-year-old became the fourth person to free climb the thirty-two-pitch 5.14d route on El Capitan after a fourteen-day push.
“I have actually been thinking a lot about that!” he responded when I presented him with that ridiculous statement. “I believe that would certainly be the hardest and … the coolest El Cap ascent ever done. I think it is possible, not for me, though. [It would have to be] for someone really committed to this project for several seasons.”
Committed is the key word. But to what? That is the question to be answered. Is it lunacy, or the mark of a visionary, to believe commitment to such a thing is worthwhile?
There’s a reason the quote from Carroll’s 1871 novel endures, repeated for generations. Saying, speaking, believing—these all make a thing that much closer to reality. Or, potentially, they only lead one deeper into rabbit holes of delusion. Fanciful, futuristic things are generally assumed to be delusion until they are made real by alchemists—people who maybe have to be at least a little bit mad to believe such possibilities in the first place.
Climbers constantly test themselves against delusion.
Lynn Hill became the first person to free climb El Capitan (Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La) via the Nose (5.14a, 2,900′) in 1993. It made people’s heads spin to think that a five-foot-two woman would succeed where so many bigger—presumably “stronger”—men had failed for so many years. It had also taken Hill years of effort, starting around 1989. Not satisfied, she returned in 1994 and free climbed the route in twenty-three hours.
Hill’s feats would not be repeated for more than a decade. In 2005, Beth Rodden and Tommy Caldwell freed the Nose as a team over four days. Caldwell sent the route twice more that year, first in twelve hours, then in eleven, becoming the second person to free climb Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La in a day. Another decade went by before the Nose saw another free ascent, by Jorg Verhoeven. And it wasn’t until 2019 that Babsi Zangerl became the third woman to send the route when she climbed it with her partner Jacopo Larcher.
It was also in 2019 that Berthe emerged onto the El Cap stage, when he became the first person to send the Nose ground up without pre-inspection (rehearsing the crux moves that are encountered high on the wall). Zangerl even supported his bid by supplying extra food when he was on the verge of giving up.
It’s worth mentioning that just months ago, from November 19 to 22, while Issue 88 was being sent to press, Zangerl became the first person to flash the Big Stone when she completed every pitch of Freerider (5.13a, ca. 3,300′) on her first try. It is, of course, the same route that Alex Honnold free soloed in 2017—which remains one of the most phenomenal events in climbing history—but that was accomplished after extensive rehearsal, unlike Zangerl’s ascent.
There are so many examples of humans surpassing “impossible” barriers on El Cap alone, I can’t possibly fit them all here.
Getting back to the Dawn Wall: as a free climb it sounded wacky when Caldwell started exploring its feasibility in 2007. The route he envisioned tackled the tallest, steepest and sheerest panel of granite on the monolith. Even after he ascertained that the individual moves were possible, the prospect of having enough endurance—and skin on his fingertips—to redpoint seven pitches of 5.14, eleven pitches of 5.13, nine pitches of 5.12 and five pitches of 5.11, in sequence from bottom to top without returning to the ground, was far from guaranteed. That’s not even taking into account the variable weather conditions that had to be endured; the challenge of living on the wall for so long; or that several crux sections rely on Birdbeaks placed into thin seams for protection against large falls. All of this adds up to what is probably the most sustained big-wall free climb on the planet.
In 2014, after years of effort and attempts with various partners, Caldwell left the ground with Kevin Jorgeson on December 27. They remained on the wall for nineteen straight days with help from a support team that kept them supplied. On January 14, 2015, the world watched them top out the climb on live television, and President Barack Obama called to congratulate them.
Less than two years later, Adam Ondra became the third person to free the Dawn Wall during his first trip to Yosemite. He completed the climb in an eight-day push with a smaller team supporting him.
Berthe’s journey to send the Dawn Wall began in 2022, when he sailed from Belgium to Mexico and then traveled by land to Yosemite to avoid the carbon footprint of flying. Maintaining an elite level of fitness while confined to a sailboat, and dealing with seasickness for weeks on end, added a huge challenge. He spent twenty-three days on the wall with Siebe Vanhee and made steady progress to the fourteenth pitch, a 5.14d traverse. He felt he was close to sending it, but kept slipping at the end. He ran out of supplies and the desire to continue in such a protracted style.
Last September, he once again sailed from Europe with friends. They used homemade hangboards to train during the fifty-day voyage to the Panama Canal. On land, they spent three weeks on a bus. They arrived in Yosemite in late November, where Berthe rendezvoused with Connor Herson.
Herson was on a break from college and had gotten a head start rigging fixed lines to enable more efficient practice of the moves. Once Berthe arrived, the bulk of the remaining rigging work was split between the two, Herson told me.
“It was really impressive to watch Séb climb. He moves so well on granite and was making 5.14 look easy, even on his first day in the Valley!” said Herson, who free climbed the Nose at age fifteen in 2018. He’s been steadily working through the other El Cap free routes since then.
For most of December, Berthe and Herson worked the route in a cycle of two days on, one day off. In a press release, Berthe wrote:
The Dawn Wall hadn’t changed—it was still an enormous undertaking, and everything about this process was hard: the climbing, the freezing winter temperatures mixed with the heat and sun exposure of this south-facing wall, the constant exposure, the unstable protection, the falling ice …
By late December they were exhausted. Herson had to return to his engineering studies. Berthe’s fitness level had dropped, so he went bouldering in Bishop, California, for a week, then rested for two weeks. He still didn’t feel ready when a window of dry weather entered the forecast and Berthe’s partner, Soline Kentzel, offered to belay him on a redpoint bid.
“To be honest, at that point, I didn’t feel entirely ready for a push attempt,” Berthe wrote. “Although I had successfully done almost all the hard sections, I felt I still had work to do—especially on the post-crux pitches.”
By himself on January 12, Berthe hauls enough food and water for two people to spend two weeks on the wall. In the process of hoisting so much baggage to the portaledge camp below Pitch 14, he injures his back. “I had intense lumbar pain with every movement,” he writes. “It took me four full rest days before I could even think about climbing again.”
He starts his push at 5 a.m. on January 17. The first two days see steady, but not easy, progress. On the first day, on Pitch 7, the first 5.14, he climbs through the cruxes but forgets to clip several pieces of protection: “Now, I’m well above my last piece, a rusty Birdbeak, and I feel exhausted. Falling here is not an option.… I’m completely at my limit. The risk is too high—especially with my back injury starting to hurt again—so, reluctantly, I grab the quickdraw.”
The moment sets the tone for what is to come.
He reaches Pitch 14 on the sixth day of his push. It nearly shuts him down again like in 2022. On Day 7 his back injury hurts too much to climb.
On Day 8, he manages the pain with ibuprofen and resumes climbing, but it’s getting cold: “My toes are freezing in my tight shoes.… Thankfully, Soline, the ultimate belayer, warms them up against her body between tries.” He squeaks through the crux on his tenth try amid falling snow.
On Day 10, he sends the next crux pitch (5.14c/d) on his third try. But he now faces a stack of difficult pitches he didn’t have time to rehearse before leaving the ground. Pitch 16, the Loop Pitch (5.14a), gives him more problems, and his skin starts falling apart.
After a rest day, a big storm is moving in. He has three days to finish the wall. “I decide to bend my ethics a little,” he writes of splitting the down-and-up section into two “5.13d” pitches, using a ledge in between.
He takes a gear-ripping fall on the next pitch. He’s nauseous with a headache. The forecast worsens. “Finishing before the rain seems nearly impossible,” he writes.
On Day 13, Erik Sloan gives Kentzel a break from belaying. Things go better, but six of Berthe’s fingers are bleeding.
To make it off the wall before the storm comes, however, he must climb through the night on Day 14. With Kentzel back at the belay, Berthe scrapes through, exhausted, taking multiple falls, even slipping on a 5.11 offwidth pitch. He sends the last two pitches (5.13a and 5.12a) as dawn breaks and stands on the summit at 8 a.m. on January 31.
Before heading down the East Ledges descent, the team poses with a banner: “El Cap Climbers Against Fascism.”
“Sure, this is ‘just’ a … sporting achievement,” Berthe writes. “[But] silence is complicity; resistance is a duty. What is happening right now in Belgium, France, Europe in general, and the United States is deeply concerning.”
Climbing is just climbing, but it teaches us to overcome barriers and believe in impossible things. Even world freedom, justice, peace and prosperity.
The question is, what are we committed to?
