On a cool June morning in Yosemite, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell became the first climbers to ascend the Nose of El Capitan in under two hours, topping out in 1 hour 58 minutes 7 seconds.
A season built on minutes
The pair had been refining their systems for weeks. On May 30 they claimed the record in 2:10:51, then shaved nine minutes off that on June 4 with a 2:01:53 run.
That near-miss was defined by a snagged rope that forced Caldwell to rappel just three pitches from the summit. Two days later, on June 6, they started at roughly 6 a.m. and left nothing to chance.
Topping out before eight
Honnold called the time from the summit shortly before 8 a.m., his voice carrying across the 3,000-foot granite wall. Hans Florine, the climber with more El Cap ascents than anyone, watched from the meadows alongside other big-wall veterans.
The ascent came in the shadow of loss. Two speed climbers had fallen from the Freeblast section of the Salathé Wall just four days earlier, on June 2. Honnold and Caldwell lingered on top before hiking down at 10 a.m.
A marker in granite history
The sub-two-hour Nose had been a mythical target since the first one-day ascent in 1975 took 17 hours 45 minutes. Honnold himself had held the record once before, with Florine in 2012, at 2:23:46.
This new mark was nearly 26 minutes faster, and it stood as only the second sub-two-hour climb of any major El Cap formation. Across one week, the pair climbed over 2,600 vertical metres of Yosemite granite at speed.
"Yay!" Honnold wrote in a text message afterwards — understatement after a feat he had called a lifetime goal.
