The Nose on El Capitan
- Caitlin Roake
- Jun 5
- 11 min read
Trailhead: El Capitan Meadow
Elevation: 7573
Route: The Nose
Difficulty: 5.9 C2 Grade VI
I never wanted to climb the Nose until the moment I was climbing it. I'd first seen the monolith while driving into Yosemite valley as a teenager with a school trip - we arrived at night and I could see the lights up on the wall, which some teacher or parent explained were the ledges of climbers. The fact that i can remember this means it made somewhat of an impression on me but I don't remember any motivation to further investigate this strange fact.
Later post-college i returned to Yosemite as a "climber," or at least someone who had done some gym climbing and a few anchor and lead clinics through the Stanford Alpine Club and thought I could learn to climb trad in the valley.
Learning trad in the valley was harrowing. I spent a lot of time being off route, on the wrong climb completely, terrified, run-out, lacking in appropriate gear to protect the climb. My first valley 5.10 climb was supposed to be the 5.9 next door. I only realized this as I passed the halfway point of the rope - too far to be lowered down with a single rope. i built an anchor and discussed this with my belayer. when i say discussed I really mean yelled back and forth semi-hysterically because i was out of my depth. I could not go down because of math - I'd used up maybe 120 feet of my 200 ft rope. I felt like i could not go up. I was a new climber and had not learned all of my tricks yet.
My belayer found out that i was on a 5.10 called 'lunatic fringe' which I thought was fitting for that moment. i decided the only thing to do was keep climbing, but of course i did not have enough gear, so i asked to be lowered down so I could collect gear I had placed lower (discovering the concept of back cleaning at this moment.) once I had regenerated my rack, I went up, falling at least once at the crux, and fought my way ingloriously to the anchor. At which point I sent my belayer to collect the second rope from the car so that I could get down.
This was generally how things went for many years, so suffice it to say that 30 pitches of tricky aid and free climbing on El Capitan did not even enter my head as a goal.
Somehow we improved as climbers in the following decade, climbing in Cochise, Red Rocks, the high Sierra and always seeming to return to Yosemite to see what else was possible. There was a sense of becoming technically more competent but what was most noticeable is the type of dramatic shenanigans that had plagued our early climbing years became less and less frequent.
When you start running everyone asks obnoxiously 'have you run a marathon? These people i think are trying to get a sense of whether you are a "good" or "serious" runner. but having run a marathon is not a reliable indicator of either how fast you are or how dedicated you are - possibly the best runner i have known personally, genuinely olympic level, had never run a marathon the last time i checked in with her. And some of the slowest runners I know do run marathons, religiously. but to a lifelong runner the marathon is accessible enough that I did run a few (a couple accidentally, as I miscalculated mileage while out in the mountains and found later I'd done more than 26 miles).
In climbing it tends to be 'have you climbed Everest' (which is something I certainly won't do, there's no time here to get into the commercialization of Everest and the extreme hazard posed by other unqualified people) but in California you also get a good amount of 'have you climbed el cap.' Shaking my head, I started to wonder, "why not?"
I started looking at it when I drove into the valley. I learned how to pick out the landmarks - the heart, mammoth ledges, the sickle, boot flake, the great roof. A graduating resident gave away his haul bag and I took it, thinking 'maybe someday.'
I needed a partner. I had climbed two other walls with GG, Washington column and touchstone wall in Zion so he was the natural choice. but those walls had been short and we'd essentially done them each in a day by pre-fixing lines. He made it clear he would not be interested in a multi-day ascent. He floated trying to do the nose in a day (NIAD), a fast and light strategy. But I wasn't sure either one of us would be able to get fit enough to do a NIAD while I was still a resident.
And then, almost as if fate was intervening, I met JY the last year of residency. In January we met in camp 4 and climbed to the sickle on the nose route. slippery, with tricky free climbing and devious aid, it was weird but also intriguing. However it was also a fantastically smooth and fun day and though it was only 4 of the maybe 28 pitches on the nose I started to look hard at the most historic route on El Capitan. Later in March we returned with plans to climb to dolt tower. winter storms the previous week had blanketed the rim of Yosemite in fresh snow. A pitch above the Sickle, i sat at the belay and noted a trickle of water dripping on me from above. By the time JY had reached the belay it had become a shower of snowmelt. We retreated, squelching the water out of our shoes.
As a resident in emergency medicine time is my most limited resource. I doubt there is truly a way to fast track preparation for climbing a big wall but I certainly tried. the plan was to prepare for the blue collar work of big walling by weight lifting twice a week, climbing in the gym, and a day of Yosemite climbing per week (this being perhaps the most difficult to finagle). I installed a climbing anchor and fixed line on the roof of our house to practice jugging and hauling. i read a lot of Andy Kirkpatrick and the alpinesavvy blog.
About ten days before the date we had chosen for El cap I joined JK and one other climber for a one-day ascent of The Prow on Washington column. I was coming off of a run of nights and in hindsight was exhausted and sluggish, but I drove up to the valley at 3 am to join my new friends. I started off following and cleaning, and noted that the jugging felt hard from the first pitch. When it came time to lead I felt nervy, but led a strange pitch called the 'weird dihedral,' managing to overcome a hook move, without major incident. My next lead was C1 ('easy aid') in the guidebook, but the sun was starting to set and I felt some pressure to move quickly. We still had maybe 3-4 pitches to go. For my second placement I placed a small cam and stood up on it. Nothing happened for a few seconds and then it popped, dropping me below the level of the belay. 'I'm good!' I shouted, feeling stunned. My partners looked concerned but cheered me on as I started leading again. A fluke, I thought, and continued up the corner. The cam placements felt hard, so I placed a few nuts and continued up. I turned around another corner, hoping to find easier ground but the cracks appeared rounded and wet with runoff. I struggled to place an offset cam in a pin scar. The placement was not perfect, but it held on a tentative bounce test. I stood on it, and heard another pop this time falling 20 feet and gaping in horror as my aider slipped from my hand and fluttered down hundreds of feet to the base of the tower. JY called me over to the belay. We hugged, he cleaned the pitch, and we bailed into the coming darkness.
I spent the next ten days rattled and anxious as I'd ever been. God aid climbing was scary, and El Capitan dwarfs Washington Column in size. When I arrived in the valley JY was anxious too - the weather was uncertain and he'd watched several stronger parties bail off of the Nose due to difficult hauling conditions and crowding on the route. We considered switching to another El Capitan route - Lurking Fear or Zodiac. We considered scrapping the plan entirely and packing to climb Half Dome instead. Standing in El Cap meadow that afternoon, however, the route up the Nose appeared uncrowded, perhaps because the forecast called for weekend rain. JY proposed we start the route and endure any weather in our Portaledge. Being generally bullish on California weather, I agreed.
That evening we fixed lines to the first pitch of the route using Pine Line to facilitate hauling the next day. I led these easy free pitches, looking for some redemption and to shake off the rust of a week without climbing. We packed in the parking lot and I fell asleep in my car waiting for the 3 am wakeup. Waking up in the pre-dawn, I glimpsed upwards and saw moonlight reflecting off the monolith, the Nose in sharp profile, and for the first time I genuinely wanted to climb this mountain.
Our most severe anxiety concerned hauling. We expected to have at least one climbing day impacted by rain and thunder, so we'd packed 5 days of generous water rations, a whopping 70 pounds of water alone. Fully packed, I could barely lift the haul bag, and we estimated it was close to equal to my own weight. On the low angle lower half of the route, this weight would be compounded by the friction of the bag scraping up the slabs. I began the haul up Pine Line and found I could move the bag (barely) with a poor man's 2:1 hauling system and my actual maximum effort. But I'd done approximately a million squats prior to this trip and found this was shockingly sustainable. The bag arrived at the first belay. I started leading the first block.
I was slow and anxious on my first leads. But I will allow myself some grace on this recollection, because I'd just had two aid falls in the prior weeks and this route was the biggest thing I'd ever done. I'd also just arrived at the end of four years of residency training at a rather old-school work hard residency program, and I'd not only managed to maintain my climbing but to actually see some improvement. And I didn't complain, or whimper, or fall on my block, just continued quietly upwards as the sun rose over the valley. At the end of my block JY took over and led to the Sickle, and then onward towards the Stove Legs.
It was here we ran into our first true set of snags and what made that first day the most complicated day of climbing I've ever had. Hauling the first pitch past the Sickle, the haul bag snagged under a roof far to the right of where I was jugging the fixed line. JY nearly gave himself a hernia trying to free it from above at the belay so to save him a run in with the general surgeons, I finished cleaning the pitch and rapped down to the bag, body checking it several times to free the thing. I then had to re-ascend the line, breathing hard. The next pitch traversed hard right, and JY lowered from some abominable tatty slings that made us both sick to watch (hey Yosemite climbing community, why aren't we cutting down and replacing the death gear on El Capitan? although to be fair, I did not have on me webbing or cord to spare to fix this particular horror show). After I lowered out from the same slings using the lead rope, I was unable to free the end from the lower-out point. I radioed JY, but there was genuinely no way for him to help me, and we obviously needed the lead rope to continue (or to bail...). I found an alternate anchor and went in direct. I attempted to haul on the stuck end from each side of the rope, attempting each strand twice without any hint of movement. I did not want to ascend the stuck rope - the thought of that manky tat up there failing made my heart race. This, I thought for myself, may end in a rescue.
I tried each strand again, using 2:1 hauling. On the second strand there was a loud pop and the end of the rope flew down the waul behind me. I let out a hoot of wild joy, and continued upwards.
We had lost substantial time on shenanigans and the sun was getting low in the sky. I started leading again in the upper stove legs. Initially I moved fast, freeing and french-freeing my way through hand cracks and laybacks. I entered the 5.10 offwidth section and slowed to a crawl. Diving into the back of the crack to place gear and aid awkwardly, I became aware that darkness had fallen. JY called on the radio, inpatient. I had nothing to say so continued slowly, finally reaching the belay. There was no where to place a portaledge up there. Dolt tower remained 150 feet above us and the climbing looked like a complex mix of free and aid. I fixed the lead and haul line and rapped to find a freezing JY trying to set up the portaledge from a hanging stance. I still don't know how we got through this moment - it required lowering the haul bag, unpacking and assembling the ledge in the beams of headlamps, all while JY hung from the anchor and I swung around, still on rappel from the fixed lines. But around 11 pm we sat on the ledge in our sleeping bags, JY eating unseasoned tuna from a packet while I unwrapped an uncrustable. Realizing that it might rain that night, I had to rappel down to the haul bag to retrieve bivy sacks - upon returning, I realized that JY had fallen asleep in a sitting position. I curled up on my side of the ledge and drifted off as well.
As often happens we were cheerier in the morning. Clouds had rolled in overnight dropping light precipitation and heavy winds threatened to overturn the ledge, so we hunkered down drinking coffee and watching another team fight through the weather just above the Sickle. In the afternoon the weather cleared, so we led uneventfully up to El Cap tower, grateful to have a ledge to stand on and day light to spare.
In retrospect, enduring that first day is the reason we completed the route, as everything eased as the days passed. We fell into a calm wall rhythm, stacking and managing the two lines neatly, handing over gear efficiently at each belay, hauling the ever lightening haul bag. After the first night tuna in a bag and PB&J fiasco we started cooking breakfasts and dinners. I learned how to use a pee funnel while wearing a harness with moderate success, although I did notice that the urine smell I had initially attributed to the camps seemed to be following me upwards and getting stronger.
I never became truly confident on the wall, and my one regret is I continued to hand over the most outrageous leads to JY - he got us through the Texas flake, the King Swing, the Great Roof, and Changing Corners. But my leads became quicker and remained uneventful, and as a follower I lost only one piece of gear, a blue stopper. We saw no other wall parties, and continued at a leisurely pace, starting around 8 each morning and stopping around 5 or 6. We were passed by a parade of NIAD parties and a few speed climbers but otherwise had this historic route to ourselves in what was perhaps the biggest surprise of the trip.
We topped out on the fifth day in the early afternoon and called our respective partners from the tree. The East Ledges were uneventful and we made it to the pizza deck before close, drinking beers and chatting walling with a few LA physicians who happened to sit at our table. I returned to my car and promptly fell asleep in the front seat, waking at 4 am to see the moon glowing on the wall once again.
Comments