SUMMARY:Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi created the film “Free Solo,” which won the award for best documentary at the Oscars. The film chronicles free climber Alex Honnold, who scales without ropes in Yosemite National Park. Chin and Vasarhelyi discuss what it was like to work on a project where every day of filming occurred on the brink of death.
SUMMARY: On a clear night in Yosemite, only a few times each year, the full moon hits a misty spray of the highest waterfall in the park, creating a nighttime rainbow that is visible only through a camera lens. But this year, Yosemite Falls, which normally flows until August, will be dry by June, making more moonbow sightings uncertain. Special correspondent Sandra Hughes reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now a look at some of the wonders of the country’s first wilderness preserve.
Special correspondent Sandra Hughes reports from the Western Sierra Nevada Mountain Range.
SANDRA HUGHES (NewsHour): In its 125th year as a national park, Yosemite remains as beautiful as it is popular. On most weekends, just getting inside the park takes patience.
But the 1,100-square-mile natural wonder in Northern California is worth the wait for the 4 million visitors who travel here every year from all over the world.
CHILD: Yosemite.
GARY HART, Photographer: I think it’s the most beautiful place in the world. This time of year in particular is kind of — I call it — spring kind of the postcard Yosemite.
SANDRA HUGHES: Gary Hart understands Yosemite’s draw. A nature photographer who has shot every corner of this park…
GARY HART: I got it.
SANDRA HUGHES: … Hart leads photography expeditions for students out to capture Yosemite’s famous and lesser known wonders.
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.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Firefighters in California reported more progress today in the two-week battle against a huge wildfire near Yosemite National Park.
A NewsHour team has been covering one of their top priorities: protecting an ancient grove of giant sequoias in the park.
MAN: Well, we're almost to the big tree.
KWAME HOLMAN (Newshour): Even as wildfires raged miles away on the other end of Yosemite, a steady stream of visitors this week hiked up a scenic trail to see one of the park's biggest attractions, the giant sequoias.
These massive trees, which are unique to California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, are among the oldest living organisms on Earth. The grandest in Yosemite's Mariposa Grove is the so-called Grizzly Giant, estimated to be 1,800 years old, and it's no stranger to fire.
Many sequoias here bear huge black scars from natural wildfires that have burned through these forests for thousands of years. But now an unprecedented fire, the largest in Sierra history, is threatening two of Yosemite's three giant sequoia groves. ---- JOHN WALLACE, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: These fires are just becoming more and more common now.
I mean, since 2000, we have had all these 500,000-acre, 600,000-acre fires, these mega-fires. Before 2000, a 100,000-acre fire was huge. But things have been warming up, drying out. And then we have got these high fuel loads in a lot of places. And that's contributing to these bigger, more intense fires.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
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