When I climbed The Nose on El Capitan for the first time 11 years ago, it took my partner Bronwyn and I 4 days of struggle to reach the summit tree. That season, Cheyne Lempe and Dave Allfrey completed the Yosemite Triple Crown, linking up the Nose, Half Dome and Mount Watkins - three of the biggest faces in the Valley in under 24 hours. They were the third team to complete the challenge. I met them in the Search and Rescue site during my season, they seemed like nice humans but at the time their feat seemed superhuman to me. It was quite mysterious how anyone could cover that much technical ground that fast. Over the next 11 years I climbed in the Valley A LOT. Slowly building the skills and fitness to understand exactly how it might be possible.
In climbing (especially as a sponsored/professional climber), it’s easy to feel incentivized by being the first to do something (first to do a link up/ first ascent etc), it’s where a lot of the fame and publicity is found, but in this case it felt like a lot of my motivation was precisely because we weren’t the first. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Cheyne and Dave and the other eight teams who had completed the challenge to date, almost all of whom had become personal friends as well as inspirations during my seasons in the valley. I wanted to feel a bit of what they must have felt during the Triple, almost like joining a community of crazy climbers united in their shared passion and obsession for this silly game of scaling the walls of Yosemite efficiently.
Last spring, after two years of specific training, I completed the Triple in 22 hours with my friend Brant Hysell. This is the story of our day.
Brant and I had a leisurely, if somewhat nervous breakfast at our friend Michelle’s house in Yosemite village, before leaving by bike around midday. It felt weird to be starting the biggest day of our climbing lives at noon, but this was necessary to avoid the sun. If everything went to plan, we’d spend the next 24 hours in the shade. We’d climb the east facing Mount Watkins in the afternoon shade starting at around 4pm, then the Nose through the night, and finally, hopefully, Half Dome the next morning.
We ditched the bikes at Mirror Lake and hiked the three hours back up Tenaya Canyon to Mount Watkins. It was hot. The first proper heatwave of the year had rolled in and California summer was beginning in earnest. We dunked our heads in the river and then hung out at the base of the wall for nearly two hours waiting for the face to come into the shade. We were both buzzing with a kind of frenetic nervous energy. This was it. A season of preparation, not to mention over a decade of climbing in Yosemite had led us to this moment. I think we also both relished what was probably the last moment of stillness before constant movement for 24 hours - the challenge timer would start when we began Watkins, and run until we stood on the summit of Half Dome some time the next day.
As we started climbing I could tell we were moving fast - our team of two forming a well oiled wall climbing machine. We climbed in an anything goes style, not strictly free climbing, but very little pure aid either, instead a chaotic frenzied hybrid of the two. Pull on a cam, stand on a bolt, free climb… We’d spent the season building fitness for this style but also refining our tactics, learning and memorizing each route, down to each individual cam placement, each foothold. After each pitch, the leader would pull through a big loop of rope and fix it for the second to ascend using jumars, then unclip from the anchor and begin climbing again with a huge loop of slack at their feet - a style affectionately known by valley wall rats as “short-fixing with a death loop.”
We climbed the ~20 pitch Mount Watkins south face route in 3 hours and 7 minutes, beating our previous best time by nearly 45 minutes. The last four pitches are basically a continuous hand crack, I swam up the jams feeling free and joyous in the well practiced movement. A small team of friends met us at the top to help carry our gear on the hour hike back out to the road.
Five of us sat in the van barrelling down the road around to El Cap, while Brant and I tried to eat, drink and rack up for the next wall.
We began the Nose around 10:30 pm. This would be our sixth time up the route this season. I would lead the first half, Brant the second, just as we had practiced. Despite climbing in the dark by headlamp, I felt extremely familiar with the terrain. I usually find the first four pitches slick and stressful, but this time, I was dancing. I had that wonderful feeling of flow as the “Jacob” in my mind absent-mindedly watched my body perfectly perform the long sequence of actions it knew so well.
But, as I continued with my block, I started to feel worryingly tired. A kind of unfamiliar heaviness in my limbs grew as I kept going. As I led the Boot flake, the last pitch of my block, I could feel my energy systems redlining. Both arms were cramping uncontrollably, and I couldn’t keep my heart rate under control. As Brant took over leading halfway up the Nose, I yelled up “I don’t know if I’ve got this!?”. Brant calmly instructed me to eat all the food, and drink all the water - including his shares. We both understood that getting my body back into a sustainable state to keep going was of paramount importance to completing the challenge. The Triple is a team objective, and my partnership with Brant was nothing short of legendary.
As I jugged through the night, I felt a lot of uncertainty… would my body be able to sustain this level of effort for another wall?
“All you can do is try your best”
I repeated to myself. In a way, it felt like it took the pressure off. Somehow, despite not stopping, my body was able to rein in the cramps. We reached the top of The Nose around 5am, and I immediately knew I would at least hike up to Half Dome.
“Go fast, take chances.” This had been our team’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek mantra for the season. The only way to approach a challenge of this magnitude was to downplay it with humour and a “sneak up on it without it noticing” mentality. But, the risk definitely felt real and had been weighing heavily on my mind in the week leading up to our attempt. There was no getting around the fact that to climb these walls fast enough for the triple, we were pushing it. During my lead blocks on all three routes, I would climb entire pitches without placing a single piece of protection. Starting Half Dome, after already being awake for 24 hours and having climbed two walls, felt pretty close to the upper limit of my risk tolerance.
I took a moment at the base to breathe, and really reflect on if this was something that I wanted to do. The answer, emphatically, was “yes, but only if we can do it with a reasonable margin of safety”. As I led the first half of Half Dome I placed twice as much gear as I had on our practice attempts. My feet hurt a lot, my hands hurt a lot, but somehow I was sustaining, grinding upwards on pitch after pitch. I’m proud of how we climbed Half Dome, it wasn’t as fast as our practice runs, but it was solid. In a way, being able to make those kinds of risk assessments and complete the challenge safely was the culmination of the thousands of hours of practice I had put in on these walls.
As we neared the top of the route we began to see the heads of our friends peering over the top. A whole team of them had hiked many hours through the night to be there to see us top out.
As I pulled over the top my main thought was “finally I can stop moving”. I lay on my back in the sun, with my arms and legs singing and listened to the buzz of my friends chattering around me - deeply exhausted but content.
One of the things that stuck with me about our Triple was the incredible outpouring of community support, around 20 people individually showed up to support us in some way, hiking, driving, cooking for us. Perhaps more than during any other climb, I had an overwhelming sense of belonging, both on the beautiful walls of Yosemite Valley, but also within my community of climbers.
