“It didn’t feel that fast,” Honnold says of their latest record attempt, “but when I popped over the top I saw 1:57 and was like go, go, go, go!” For Honnold and Caldwell, the route is their morning workout.
For elite climbers, the time to beat is NIAD, or Nose-in-a-Day, climbing it all without an overnight. Most take three to five days to scale the challenging terrain, “camping” on the wall in portaledges anchored to the stone. Every spring, it draws the world’s most adventurous climbers to test their mettle.
It runs straight up the prow of the massive granite formation known as El Capitan and is the monolith’s most recognizable feature. The Nose is widely considered the greatest big-wall climbing route on Earth. “It’s like breaking the two-hour marathon barrier, but vertically,” says Hans Florine, who, with his climbing partner Yuji Hirayama in 2002, was the first to take the speed record on the Nose under three hours. On June 6, 2018, in California’s Yosemite National Park, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell accomplished the seemingly impossible-climbing the 3,000-foot Nose route of El Capitan in 1 hour 58 minutes and 7 seconds.
