The Nose 5.14a or 5.9 C2

Five years ago my brother George and I got the idea to try to onsight the Nose in a day due to an accident. Originally we were planning to climb the Nose as our first El Cap route, but the day before our scheduled departure date I tore some ligaments in the gym during one last finger crack workout and ended my season. By the time I was healed, and partly because we had never bivied on a wall up to that point, we had hatched the plan to hold off on climbing the Nose until we could do it in a day.

Years passed by quickly as we gained experience climbing other routes, but we didn’t pick a specific target date and never felt quite ready for the climb. A June 2008 ascent of the Salathe was eye-opening in that the magnitude of El Capitan was in a completely different league than any other Valley formation we’d climbed, and further postponed any plans to try the NIADO.

This year we finally had enough time and motivation to set a definitive goal. We began training in earnest in early June for a mid-September attempt. Our schedule was somewhat haphazard, basically just doing a lot of stairmaster during the week and going to Yosemite on weekends to climb long routes and practice aiding and short fixing. We had an awesome summer, doing classic routes including the Zodiac, East Face of Washington Column, SW Face of Liberty Cap, RNWF HD, Southern Man, and SFWC.

Finally, we felt ready to go for it on Sept 20th. This video is a summary of our climb. As usual, it has mostly the fun (read: early, sunny) parts of the day overrepresented and doesn't show very well just how worked each of us was at different points in the night. Suffice it to say it was both the hardest and most rewarding day of climbing I've ever had.


[Click to View YouTube Video]
(available in HD)