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El Capitan was born of fire.
The subterranean granite reserve, or batholith, was 300 miles long and 70 miles wide.
They called the bountiful valleyAhwahnee, or “Place Like a Gaping Mouth.”
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They hunted wild game, fished the Merced River, and harvested more than 100 types of edible plants.
Ahwahneechee names for El Capitan varied.
In some reports, the cliff was calledTo-tock-ah-noo-lah, translated as “Rock Chief.”
El Capitan at sunset.Artur Debat / Getty Images
Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, the first European to explore California, sailed from Mexico in 1542.
But it took three more centuries for white men to “discover” El Capitan.
This was the first time a white man laid eyes on El Capitan.
Images of El Capitan captured between 1893 to 1904.Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
The battalion forced the Ahwahneechee to a reservation west of the mountains.
The next year, two ambitious miners opened a 45-mile horse trail leading into Yosemite Valley.
He wrote to a friend that he had found the Garden of Eden.
Albert Bierstadt’s “Looking Down on Yosemite Valley.".Albert Bierstadt / Gift of the Birmingham Public Library / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Even by then, only a few hundred people had seen Yosemite Valley in person.
At the entrance, his father presented him with a life-changing gift: a Kodak Brownie box camera.
Yosemite Valley became the big-wall climbing capital of the world.
Climber leading The Nose, a route on El Capitan.Cavan Images / Getty Images
But its biggest wall, El Capitan, was presumed impossible to scale for its height and verticality.
Soon, others began refining Harding’s techniques to scale the Nose more quickly and efficiently.
Still, retracing Harding’s original ascent remains one of the world’s great outdoor challenges.
Yet with every climb, Florine, says he discovers something new.
