Plan A

Yosemite Valley is kinda like the centre of the rock-climbing universe. It's been the setting for all sorts of progressions and wild adventures and incredible achievements in rock-climbing. Because of its gigantic size, immaculate steep stone and half decent weather it's the place where many of the best climbers in the world have gone to push the limits. Ever since I started climbing over a decade ago I figured that, if I ever thought I had the ability to climbing something there, then it would be an amazing place to visit and experience some of that history.

Well it's taken a while but I reckon now is a good time to head over there and give it a go. The plan is to try and free-climb one of the major routes on El Capitan. El Cap is the big imposing piece of granite - about a 1000m high. The easiest free-route up El Cap is freerider, and that's what I aim to climb. The route line is marked in on the pic to the left, and for a bunch of beta on climbing free-rider you can't do better than Jake Bresnehan's description over at whipper magazine. There's a whole lot of other things to climb there and Derek is sure to have some wild ideas on things to climb, but for me getting on one of the big free routes on El Cap is certainly the main event. From accounts I've gathered from people who've been up on freerider some of the easy pitches sounds terrifying and the hard pitches sound desperate. But that sounds quite good to me. Well, good in that I am really want to try something that I really don't know if I'm capable of. The crux pitches halfway up freerider are about as hard as I can climb starting off the ground on a fine day with a fair wind and a well rested body. So trying them up on a wall like that will be interesting. Can't wait!