Here is the "the valley."
Yosemite National Park is in California and is the first instance of the federal government setting aside land for the distinct purpose of preservation and public use (1864).
Eight years later, thanks to some of the ground work laid, Yellowstone became the first National Park. It wasn't until a Scottish-born alpinist by the name of John Muir took the president camping in the area for three days that he convinced the president to make Yosemite a National Park (see pic below). It took three more years for the federal government to make it a National Park in 1906, previous to that it had been a state park for California. How cool would that be to go camping with the president in the Yosemite Valley!?
All that was all done about 10 years before there was even the National Park service. Who, when it came on line, took over the care and preservation of the park.
El Capitan, commonly referred to as "El Cap" in the climbing world, is one of the more prominent features of the Yosemite valley. Another well known feature of the valley is Half Dome, which if any of you have a North Face jacket are constantly reminded of it. Both are pictured below.
El Capitan (Think Spanish!)
Half Dome, the real thing.
Half Dome, cool eh?
El Cap is a vertical wall just under 3/4 mi. in height. It completely dwarfs the giant sequoas at its base. The first successful attempt at climbing this giant stone was headed up by predigious mountaineer Warren Harding in 1958. It took him 47 days over the course of 18 months to successfully navigate his way to the top. The second great milestone was by Royal Robbins & co. in 1960 who were able to climb "the Nose", the prominent prow on the wall, in seven days.
Later in 1975 the Nose was climbed in 1 day. What a feat! Now the record is 2 hrs 36 min and 45 secs, set on 6 November 2010 by Dean Potter and Sean Leary.
So, as far as our little trio goes...we hope to catch it somewhere between the one day to seven day mark. It typically takes climbers, depending on the route - and there are hundreds to thousands of them on El Cap alone- 3 to 5 days. That is most likely the timeframe we will be working in.
Since it takes several days to climb, we have to take along extra gear for the required bivys (bivouacs or encampments). In order to do this the whole climbing pattern adapts to the gear load and the longevity of the route. This style of climbing requires camping on the side of a cliff, either on natural ledges or man-made portaledges as pictured below.
Portaledge, exciting huh!?!
It will also entail climbing techniques like aiding, jumarring, pendulums, hauling, and much more. It is quite the undertaking, but I am super excited at the chance to take it on.
Info gleaned from NPS and Wikipedia and miscellaneous climbing books I've read.
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