A Timelapse of the Fastest-Ever Climb of El Capitan in Yosemite

On October 2017, rock climbers Brad Gobright and Jim Reynolds broke the record for speed climbing The Nose on El Capitan in Yosemite by making it to the top in 2 hours, 19 minutes, and 44 seconds. Photographer Tristan Greszko witnessed the climb and made this beautiful 7-minute timelapse showing how it went down.

The Nose is a nearly-3,000-foot vertical route for El Capitan, a mountain that was once considered unclimbable. Since the first ascent in 1958, the record time for The Nose had gone from 17 hours and 45 minutes in 1975 to 2 hours, 23 minutes, and 46 seconds for the previous record set by Hans Florine and Alex Honnold in 2012.

Late last year, after 11 previous attempts, Gobright and Reynolds managed to break that standing speed record with their unbelievable time.

A couple cool shots taken by @christian_cattell of @chimney_jim and I on the last hundred feet of the Nose. We got the speed record yesterday at 2:19:44! In this final section our stoke was high as we knew we had it in the bag! Maybe the hardest physical thing I've ever done. @gramicci

A post shared by Brad Gobright (@bradgobright) on Oct 22, 2017 at 2:09pm PDT

“Watching this as it happened was one of the more incredible spectacles I’ve ever witnessed,” Greszko writes. “[A]n amazing display of superhuman mastery unlike anything I’ve seen before…”