How Adam Ondra Crushed Yosemite's Hardest Rock Climb



How Adam Ondra Crushed Yosemite's Hardest Rock Climb

Adam Ondra, a world champion Czech climber, just achieved the second free ascent of Yosemite’s hardest big-wall free climb, the Dawn Wall—in record time. Rock climber Adam Ondra free-climbing El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Ondra is a Czech professional rock climber, specializing in lead climbing and bouldering. Rock & Ice magazine described Ondra in 2013 as a prodigy and the leading climber of his generation.

On the afternoon of November 21, Adam Ondra, a 23-year-old world champion sport climber from Brno, Czech Republic, arrived on the summit of the 3,000-foot monolith in Yosemite National Park known as El Capitan. In doing so, he achieved an audacious goal of completing the second free ascent of the Dawn Wall, called the hardest, longest free climb in the world. “It feels amazing right now,” said Ondra, minutes after arriving on the summit. “This is one of the best feelings I've ever had in climbing. Wow, so good. I think it'll be a long-lasting happiness and joy due to the length and effort of the route.”

Ondra’s success is noteworthy for many reasons, but perhaps most impressive is the speed with which he dispatched the Dawn Wall’s 32 incredibly difficult pitches. (A pitch is a rope-length of climbing, usually around 100 feet long. The goal of a free ascent is to climb each pitch without falling or resorting to hanging on gear; ropes and gear are used in free climbing, however, as a safety net in case of a fall. Free climbing is different than free soloing, which is climbing without any ropes at all.)

Ondra began his ground-up push last Monday, November 14, at 1:30 a.m. Pacific time. Just under eight days later, he reached the top, victorious. “In the end it was just as hard as I expected, but it took more time than I expected, because I was a total beginner to this style of climbing in Yosemite,” says Ondra. “There’s no doubt this is the hardest big-wall rock climb in the world.”

The first free ascent of the Dawn Wall, meanwhile, took American climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson 19 days. Their historic ascent, which they completed in January 2015, became a media spectacle that was covered by virtually every major newspaper and cable television news station in the world. Even President Obama reached out to the two instant celebrities with a note of congratulations. 

For Caldwell and Jorgeson, free climbing the Dawn Wall was a grueling, multi-season process that took them at least seven years. Much of this time was spent swinging around on ropes on the flanks of El Capitan, trying to find a continuous 3,200-foot path upward. Located just to the east of the Nose, the Dawn Wall is the tallest, steepest, and perhaps “blankest” (i.e., most devoid of handholds and footholds) section of the entire mile-wide granite monolith

Caldwell spearheaded this multi-year process with the heedful decision-making demanded by any first-ascent process, including how to best break up the route into pitches and the prudent placement of mechanical expansion bolts. According to National Park Service rules, those bolts must be drilled into the dense stone by hand, rather than by a cordless hammer drill.

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