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A few days before Halloween, I got to climb El Cap with Connor Herson. He’s 21 years old and is part of this next generation of climbers that will change our sport. Connor grew up as a competition climber and has spent much of his life training in modern climbing gyms. He’s also
the youngest person to free climb El Cap, with his ascent of the Nose at age 15. Connor has been climbing big routes in Yosemite with his dad, Jim, since he was in elementary school (Jim is an impressive climber in his own right and made one of the early free ascents of the Salathé Wall).
Connor and his family seem to be of a different breed. They live normal lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Connor has been a full-time student at Stanford for the last two years, quietly ticking off some of the
hardest climbs in Yosemite and Tuolumne on his weekends and breaks from school. Despite his impressive Valley resume, which includes two free routes on El Cap, Connor had never slept in a portaledge and has never dealt with Yosemite’s notorious camping limitations (you can only stay in the Valley for two weeks, officially). Before we headed up the wall, he professed he was “a total wall Gumby,” although I didn’t see much to back that up.
We spent three days free climbing the Heart Route, a wild, 30-pitch 5.13+. The climbing is sustained, with some of the most overhanging terrain on El Cap, a 10-foot down-dyno, and plenty of run-outs and dirty pitches. Just a few years ago there were only a handful of climbers in the world that would have been contenders to free climb this route.
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Watching Connor climb is almost disorienting; he is so solid that you can never tell if he is climbing 5.10 or 5.13. I witnessed him casually onsight a mid-5.13 pitch with everything from off-width crack to technical stemming to crimpy face climbing and tricky gear … certainly one of the more impressive onsights I have seen. Our downtime on the wall was spent discussing how many semesters he should take off engineering school to pursue full-time climbing. It struck me that climbing has always been just one of Connor’s many interests.
In the past handful of years, we have seen the levels of climbing ability skyrocket in the disciplines of bouldering, sport climbing and competitions. I always thought this would eventually make its way into trad climbing and big walls. Connor might be one, if not the first, to make this happen. I personally can’t wait to see where he takes it from here. And with the amount of talent I see in the younger generations, I imagine there will be more like him soon, hiking free routes on El Cap with what appears to be little effort.
I was struck again by how much things have changed after I got down from the Heart Route to celebrate Halloween on the Valley floor. As the sun set beyond El Cap, a group of former climber-outlaws walked the streets collecting candy from the rangers in what we formerly called “Tool Town” or the “Lion’s Den” because it’s where the law enforcement rangers live. Kids and parents were dressed up as octopuses, mermaids, superheroes and rodents. It was very wholesome, although Leo Houlding said he still had the urge to run and hide when he saw a police car or someone in ranger greens.
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This group of parents was likely among the first to spend large parts of their youth in climbing gyms. The strength and movement intelligence we developed as kids eventually translated to big walls, allowing us to be part of a generation that brought free climbing to El Cap. Climbing has exploded in popularity in the years since and now has a mass appeal. In the not-so-distant past, Yosemite climbers and park rangers used to be enemies. Climbing for months at a time in the Valley meant playing a constant game of cat and mouse that was a bummer on one hand and exciting on the other. When I was a teenager living in the Valley in the early 2000s, I enjoyed tapping into the rebellious spirit that lingered from the Stonemasters. Nowadays it seems, climbers are more often taking selfies with rangers instead of running from them.
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