Emily Harrington Free Climbed El Capitan's Golden Gate in One Day

Tell people what you did, because it's pretty crazy. Um, so I did what's called free climbing. I free climbed a route on El Capitan, which is a 3,200 foot cliff in Yosemite National Park, and he did it in under 24 hours. That is a long way to go. Yeah. 3,200 and... Something, 3,200 feet is what I say. I think it might just be like a little more than that. When you're halfway there, Emily Harrington becomes the first woman to scale El Capitan via its notoriously difficult Golden Gate route. Why is that route more difficult? Well, okay, so... Is it a router route? I don't think it really matters. I say route. Yeah, it's true. So essentially El Cap is this giant cliff face, and there's hundreds of routes up El Cap, different pathways you can take, and right now there's currently only like 15 ways to get up it via free climbing, free climbing being using only your hands and feet to ascend and a rope in case you fall. And I chose the route called Golden Gate, which is more difficult than the route Freerider, which people are very familiar with, because that's the route that Alex Honnold free soloed, meaning he climbed it without a rope. Yeah, that seems insane. So you're less insane than him. Oh yeah. Definitely less insane than him. Alex is a dear friend of mine, but there are some things I don't understand about him. Yeah, I don't know if he understands those things about him. No, I mean, I have an enormous amount of respect for him, but what he does is truly remarkable. You bonked your head while you're doing it too, huh? I could see the mark on your forehead. Yeah, you can see the scar. Yeah, and that's actually the second time I hit my head, trying to do this. Last year I had a really bad fall, wound up in the hospital, full concussion, the whole thing. This time it was slightly less serious, but maybe more dramatic, because it happened way higher up on the wall. How high were you up? 2,800 feet, I'd say, almost to the top. It was a whole, it was very dramatic. What happened? So the day was actually going really well. I've been trying to do this for a few years now, probably, I would say three years I've been working towards this goal. And I'd actually done the route in 2015 over the course of six days, and I really wanted to do the same route in 24 hours. Can I stop you there? When you do it over six days, do you sleep on the route? Yeah, that's how most people climb LCAP. They sleep on the wall. It takes five to seven days or so. That seems more sketchy. It's different, because there's a lot more logistics involved, right? Imagine you have to live in the vertical world for days on end. So think about everything you do from when you wake up to when you go to bed. Including pooing. Oh yeah. You have to poo vertically? Yeah, we use wag bags or little plastic bags and you go in that bag and then you put it in another bag. And then carry it with you? So you carry your poo for seven days? You put it in another bag and then you hang it below everything. And you take it up with you. And then you take it, yeah, you don't leave it. I know, I would imagine. Stuff it in a crack up there. Is that someone pooing? No, that's just someone hanging out. That's how you do it when you live on the wall. So you have that ledge. Like the Michael Jackson song. What? Living on the wall. No, that song? No. You know? I'm not familiar. It's a famous song. So you sleep in that thing. I would get zero sleep. I don't like sleep when I'm near the edge of my bed. I get nervous. It's amazing how exhausted you are at the end of the day and how used to the whole, like how used to it you get. You just adjust. The human body is like, humans are really remarkable in their ability to like adapt to things. And so it's pretty cool how, yeah, it's really scary at first, but then the more you do it, the more you're just like, okay, well, this is kind of normal. When you're sleeping in that thing, you're fully harnessed in and strapped in. You sleep in a harness and you just usually have like a loose rope or sling or something attached to the anchor point. So like if you roll out, you're one of those people that like rolls out of bed at night, then you don't fall to your death. Can you imagine? Up there, just the feeling of like waking up swinging, hanging from your harness. So he has actually, see how he has that sling around his waist? No. That's just like, yeah, that's like last resort. Like that's Tommy Caldwell. Tommy Caldwell, you're a psycho. He free climbed, perhaps the hardest big wall in the world, also on El Cap called the Dawn Wall. And he was up there for 17 days. So when you imagine 17 days, like. Look at all this stuff. That's like, he's like a homeless person up there. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff. You know, like the homeless people have those little camps. That is a, he's a maniac. That's a crazy person. Look at him, checking his fingernails. Yeah. You see, he's also, he's also actually missing a finger, which is pretty rare for an elite level rock climber. Oh wow. What happened to his finger? I believe it was a table saw accident, home improvement accident. Oh. And so he's using everything but his index. Yeah. He kind of climbs, he kind of climbs like this and uses the little. The nub. He's, yeah, definitely Tommy's one of my true heroes. Ultimate climbing hero. You have a, that is a very small clique, right? Yeah. Of savage psychos that are willing to climb. Yeah. Gigantic mountain faces. Yeah, it's a relatively small group. I mean, it's growing, climbing is definitely growing in popularity, but it definitely used to be like a little bit, like a small little community. And I think we still feel that way. Is there a danger in the climbing world, or not a danger, a concern I should say, of people who are seeing people like Alex Honnold and yourself become famous and get all this attention from these very dangerous climbs and they want to perhaps accelerate their progress and jump right in and try to do some really risky things? I mean, I could see that being a danger, especially with like what Alex does, climbing without a rope. I would still argue that what I do is a relatively safe form of climbing. I climb with a rope. When I fall, the rope catches me. It's super safe. When I fall, the rope catches me. Pre-climbing elk happened a day, what I just did. I definitely cut some corners and took more risk, but that's an achievement that not many people have done or really strive to do. And so I think for the most part, climbing is actually a very controlled, very safe activity, and you can make it as dangerous as you want it to be. Does that make sense? Yes, I understand what you're saying. So if you're a person like Alex is deciding, he maps these routes, he does them with ropes, and then he's like, I can do this. Yes, and Alex is so unique in a way, and I think anyone that watches the movie Free Solo, anyone that talks to Alex understands that what he does is, it's so well thought out and it's so well planned, and every single decision he makes is very calculated. And I think that that's a testament to what climbing is truly about. We're not out to go feel an adrenaline rush when we go climbing. If you're feeling adrenaline, it essentially means you messed up, something's wrong. Climbing is very much more about the movement and the challenge and the mental challenge of all of it than going out and trying to get a thrill. How did you get involved in this? I started climbing when I was 10 years old. I was at, I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and my parents used to take me to the Boulder Reservoir, this lake, me and my cousins. Do you have a Subaru? I did have a Subaru. Everyone in Boulder has a Subaru. I got a Subaru for my 16th birthday. That's like 70% of the cars out there. Yeah, green Subaru. These are so practical, they work in the snow. Yeah, I had it for years. So anyway, my parents took me to the lake and they had this little festival there, and I grew up, I'm an only child, I grew up with my two cousins who were boys, and we were just super competitive with each other all the time. All I wanted to do was be better than them at literally anything, it didn't matter what it was. So we were at this lake and they had a little festival with one of those tower, rock towers, the ones that they let the kids climb on. And we all tried to climb the wall, and I just remember it was like, well, I have to go to the top because they went to the top and there was no other option. But the interesting thing that happened when I was climbing was it was just this feeling of like, oh, this is what I meant to do. Like it was like, I just felt like I belonged up there. And I remember the feeling so vividly, even now, 23 years later, it was like I was scared, but I kind of liked it. And I just really, I got down and I was like, dad, I want to go climbing. Like that's what I want to do, I want to quit everything else. I was a gymnast, I played soccer, I was a ski racer. I was like, I don't want to do, I don't want to do any of that anymore, I just want to climb. Episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience are now free on Spotify. That's right, they're free from September 1st to December 1st, they're going to be available everywhere. But after December 1st, they will only be available on Spotify, but they will be free. That includes the video, the video will also be there. It'll also be free. That's all we're asking. Just go download Spotify. Much love, bye bye. Mwah! Mwah!