Excerpt
SUMMARY: Two climbers successfully scaled the near-vertical slab of El Capitan's Dawn Wall in Yosemite National Park, using their fingers and feet without additional aids. After 19 days, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson are the first to free climb the entire granite face. Gwen Ifill talks to Chris Weidner of the Boulder Daily Camera about their pinnacle achievement.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Two rock climbers made history today in California’s Yosemite National Park, completing what’s being called the hardest climb in the world.
Thirty-year-old Kevin Jorgeson and 36-year-old Tommy Caldwell became the first to free-climb a 3,000-foot sheer slab of granite to reach the summit of El Capitan. The two started their journey on December 27, and continued their half-mile trek up the Dawn Wall route to the peak. They marked their progress through different pitches or sections of the route. They used no climbing aids, other than safety ropes, to catch their falls.
Here’s Kevin Jorgeson on the Dawn Wall talking about the weather conditions they faced earlier in their trek.
KEVIN JORGESON, Climber: We looked at the forecast and saw that there’s this crazy arctic wind storm happening today. It’s getting pretty rowdy. The portal edge, despite being latched down, is getting tossed around like a rag doll.
GWEN IFILL: For more on this journey, I spoke earlier with Chris Weidner, a freelance writer for numerous publications and a climber himself.
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