El Capitan

El Capitan is the granite wall that greets you at the western end of Yosemite Valley: a single, almost unjointed monolith rising roughly 900 metres from the valley floor to its rounded top. Its name comes from the Mariposa Battalion, who entered the valley in 1851 and rendered a local Miwok name for the cliff as "the captain"; another Miwok tradition connects the rock with an inchworm that rescued two bear cubs stranded on its summit. The rock is mostly pale, coarse El Capitan granite about 100 million years old, crossed by dark diorite veins that form the shape climbers call the North America Wall.

Glaciers shaped the valley, but because El Capitan's granite has so few cracks, the ice could not pluck it apart the way it did neighbouring cliffs. That is why the face is so sheer — and why it became the world's defining big wall. The most famous line, The Nose, follows the prow between the southwest and southeast faces. Warren Harding, Wayne Merry and George Whitmore first climbed it in 1958 over 47 days spread across a year and a half, using fixed ropes and bolts. Two years later a second team did it in a single push of seven days.

Since then, the wall has hosted almost every milestone in American climbing. Lynn Hill made the first free ascent of The Nose in 1993. In January 2015 Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson spent 19 days freeing the Dawn Wall, then the hardest multi-pitch rock climb in the world. On 3 June 2017 Alex Honnold climbed the Freerider route without a rope in 3 hours 56 minutes, a feat recorded in the film Free Solo. The wall is also dangerous: more than thirty climbers have died on it.

For non-climbers, the pleasure is looking up from the valley floor at a face so large that climbers on it are barely visible specks, and at the first view of it from Tunnel View, where El Capitan frames the left side of the valley opposite Bridalveil Fall. The top can also be reached on foot by a long trail that climbs out of the valley beside Yosemite Falls and heads west — a strenuous full-day hike.

Getting there

El Capitan stands inside Yosemite National Park, at the western end of Yosemite Valley. The nearest city by distance, Chowchilla, is about 87 km away; most visitors arrive on Highway 140, the park's year-round route, or on the seasonal Highways 41 and 120. Mammoth Yosemite Airport (MMH) is about 71 km away as the crow flies but lies on the far side of the Sierra crest, reachable only when the seasonal eastern section of Highway 120 is open. The YARTS bus system runs into the valley from Merced (with Amtrak connections), Fresno and other gateway towns.