After another bear-free but unpleasant night in Curry Village, we loaded up the car and headed west. We passed both Upper and Lower Yosemite Falls:
The valley floor was calm, but wind at the higher elevations swept the plume of the upper falls back and forth across the rock face.
Further down the road, we noticed a bunch of people standing in a meadow, all looking upwards towards a point somewhere above us. I pulled over, and walked out to see what they were looking at.
(Parenthetical photographic note: This picture epitomizes the Yosemite Picture Problem in that it is both clichéd and inadequate. Clichéd, because probably every single person who has ever stood in El Capitan Meadow has taken this exact picture; inadequate, because it does not even come close to imparting the immense size and physical presence of El Capitan. It is so big. For example, If you stood the Sears Tower up next to it, the building would only reach approximately half-way up the rock face.)
One of the watchers volunteered that they were observing some climbers working their way up the rock. With binoculars, we could make them out, packing up their previous night's bivouac on top of El Cap Towers, the knob of rock about halfway up the exposed portion of the cliff, just to the right of the "nose". (I tried to find them in the full-blown version of the image, but couldn't – they're just too small to show up.) Climbing El Capitan generally takes climbers two to five days, though somebody's done it in less than twelve hours. Here is a description of one climb; here's another (with pictures!). We watched for a few minutes, but there isn't a whole lot that's exciting about watching someone break camp, so we moved on.
Posted by David Fleck at 13 January 2007 12:19 PM