A series of rockfalls on El Capitan this week — at the height of prime Yosemite climbing season — killed one climber, left a 130-foot scar on the monolith and sent a chill through the climbing community.
On Thursday, 1,300 tons of granite tumbled from 1,800 feet above the valley floor on El Cap’s southeast face. The previous day, a smaller slide killed 32-year-old British tourist Andrew Foster. His wife was reportedly injured and airlifed to a hospital. According to Instagram posts by climbers, the British couple were celebrating their anniversary and were about to begin climbing a route.
These climbers snapped photos from above during the incident.
In all, seven separate rockfalls occured on Thursday over a period of four hours. Dust billowed high up the face of El Cap and lingered in the air long after the rocks had settled at the cliff’s base.
Dozens of climbers were on El Cap during Wednesday’s incident, including multiple teams who witnessed it from above. Witnesses describe the impact like bombs going off, echoing through the steep-walled valley.
Ryan Sheridan was on the wall for a multi-day climb when one of the rockfalls occured. In fact, the bivy ledge where they had slept the night before was obliterated. Sheridan remarked on Facebook at how he found some features on the route suspiciously loose:
Peter Zabrok’s party shot this video from immediately above the slide just moments after it took place.
“These flakes seemed so loose that I had to stop and take a photo mid pitch. I couldn’t imagine how they inexplicably clung to the wall. I later found out this was part of the recent rockfall. I free climbed past this section and was shaken by how insecure the entire pitch was. I felt as though all my gear would peel from the wall due to the expanding nature of the placements. I found out today that my intuition was correct and this section now lays on the ground”
Climbers are still taking inventory of the damage caused to the cliff, but it appears parts of the Waterfall Route between the routes Secret Prophet and Lost in Translation, routes that ascend the southeast face, are damaged or entirely lost. In the spring, water pours off this flank of the mountain.
The cracks and corners that make Yosemite granite so attractive to climbers is of course indicative of the fact that El Cap, Half Dome and the other formations are made of numerous pieces, sometimes deeply fissured. A natural part of erosion occurring over millennia, rock fall is unpredictable but often occurs during or after heavy rain or snow, like the unusally snowy 2017-18 winter.
