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Comment by jdale27 | Hacker News Reader

That is fucking amazing. I can't even comprehend what it must be like to be living on that wall for eight days (let alone 19 or 28). The mental and emotional state it must put you in...

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I've been on El Cap for 4 days. You get used to the exposure and you're usually too tired to do anything but sleep when you aren't climbing.

If you want to get a sense of what this was like in the "old days," read about Charlie Porter spending nine days, alone, climbing a new, difficult route on Mount Asgard [0], in the Baffin Mountains.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Asgard

Or 39 days…

You might be interested in the ascent of "Wings of Steel" which originally took Mark Smith and Richard Jensen 39 days, later also completed by Ammon McNeely and Kait Barber. The first ascent team had to deal with a lot of problems too. Not only less modern gear, but open and dangerous hostility from some of the local climbing community.

http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/assault_on_el_capitan

http://www.rockandice.com/lates-news/el-caps-hardest-wings-o...

http://gripped.com/news/dec-16-2011-top-climber-confesses-to...

This has been getting a bit easier, emotionally. He had a phone and Internet (he posted on Instagram from the wall, if I read the article correctly)

No amount of internet would change my mental state when trying to sleep on a tiny platform 2,000 feet above the ground.

It seems crazy, but it is really no different than sleeping in a hotel room or going camping. You initially are uncomfortable and it takes a bit of time for your brain to acknowledge it is safe to sleep in a strange place. Then you realize you are exhausted and pass out.

And unless you REALLY toss and turn in your sleep, you are as safe as your anchors (and if you are doing this, you know how to make anchors. Or are so incredibly stupid that you are trying to win a Darwin award).

The people who do this probably know, not only rationally but also emotionally, that the difference between 100 and 2000 feet is only a few seconds: the seconds that you stay alive longer if you fall from the latter height.

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