YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK - Two climbers died Saturday in a fall from Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan, officials said.

The two people, whose identities have not been released, fell around 8:15 a.m. while climbing the Freeblast route on the renowned granite formation, park rangers said.

Rangers and a search and rescue team responded after getting 911 calls about the fall, which officials are continuing to investigate.

Ken Yager, president and founder of the Yosemite Climbing Association, said the Freeblast route is relatively safe. But sometimes when rappelling down, he said, climbers use fixed ropes nearby that are often in bad shape.

“I’m horrified,” Yager said. “It’s pretty unusual for two people to fall off at once, unless there was an anchor failure of some sort — that’d be my first guess.”

Freeblast is the lower third of the larger Salathe Wall route. Yager, who has climbed it more than a dozen times, said it can be done anywhere from 40 minutes to most of the day.

“It’s a dangerous sport, and people are always trying to move faster and emulate their heroes,” he added.
On Wednesday, two men broke the speed-climbing record at El Capitan, using the Nose route to scale the vertical 3,000-foot monolith in Yosemite Valley in 2 hours, 10 minutes and 15 seconds.

The deaths Saturday were the second and third at the park in two weeks.

A hiker who was using cables fell from Half Dome during a thunderstorm on May 21 — the first death there since 2011.

Story Date: June 4, 2018