Brazilians who faced the El Capitan rock challenge – 01/11/2024 – É Logo Ali
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If an increasing number of Brazilians who until recently had only seen cubed ice in their caipirinha do everything they can to show off on social media by climbing high snowy peaks, dreaming of Everest, a handful of athletes have been striving for decades to overcome scary rock walls. It can be said that, for them, a formation like the impressive El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park, in California (USA) is almost an Everest of the sport.
At 910 meters high, the El Cap wall, as it is called by its intimates, offers one of the most difficult and technical climbs in the world. The name was given by the first explorers who reached the valley, in 1851, and until 1958, when the North American Warren Harding’s team reached its summit, its conquest was considered impossible due to the aggressive verticality. Currently, with the improvement of techniques and equipment, the great granite monolith receives hundreds of climbers every year, and already has a wide variety of routes for climbing. Demand is so great that the park requires a special permit to be requested in advance — free of charge and with no maximum number of registrations — for anyone who intends to climb it. A way to try to stop the mess and preserve the place, say its managers.
It’s worth explaining that, when I said that El Capitan is “almost like Everest”, I meant that, despite its fame, it is not the largest granite wall on the planet. This title belongs to the Great Trango Tower, in Pakistan, whose cliffs are considered the most difficult to climb to the summit, which is at an altitude of 6,286 meters, with a prominence (the distance from the mountain’s neck to its peak) of 800 meters. But the fact that El Cap (whose prominence, by the way, is 438 meters, with an altitude of 2,308 meters above sea level) is so much closer to the western universe that Trango has generated a whole mystique around the northern giant -American. That said, let’s move on.
Among the Brazilians who know the most and best about the challenges of El Capitan are the athletes and professional guides Eliseu Frechou and Gisely Ferraz, who tell us a little about their experiences.
Photographer, documentary filmmaker, and owner of a brewery in São Bento do Sapucaí (SP), Frechou, 55, started climbing in 1983, like many Brazilians on the routes of Pico do Jaraguá, in São Paulo. In 1989, he moved to São Bento do Sapucaí and founded the first climbing school in Brazil, which to this day offers regular courses in the sport’s many disciplines.
“When I went to São Bento do Sapucaí, what really got me was climbing walls, the bigger the better”, he remembers. It was natural, then, that he aimed for El Cap, next to Half Dome, which he also intended to climb, and for whose climb he fought for a year for sponsorship.
“I really wanted to see what it was like to climb such an impressive mountain that we only saw here in Brazil in magazines, it was something very far from our reality”, he says. “El Cap was seen around the world as a symbol of extreme difficulty and this quest for challenge was what drove me,” she adds.
Frechou ended up climbing El Cap twice. The first, alongside Antonio Carlos Meyer, via the Zenyatta-Mombata route, in 1994, which at the time was considered the most technical in the world, with an A5 level of difficulty. [o nível mais técnico e perigoso numa escalada]. It took them nine days to reach the summit, three of which were hanging from the rock and immobilized 400 meters high, waiting for a strong unforeseen storm to pass and having to ration water and food.
Four years later, he returned to Yosemite with Márcio Bruno, to face the deadliest route on the wall, the Plastic Surgery Disaster (in free translation, Plastic Surgery Disaster, a very suggestive name to scare away the unwary). “I wanted to end my story on that mountain, so the thing was to take the hard way, because if I want to teach, I have to know”, he concludes.
If there’s one thing Frechou doesn’t like, it’s being asked if he’d like to climb Everest. “There are a lot of other things that are more difficult, much cooler, because Brazilian ascents on this mountain are always accompanied by a lot of structure, but ice climbing has nothing to do with us, as we were born in a tropical country, this obsession is something that we inherited from the Europeans, who instilled in the minds of the rest of the world that true mountaineering is on ice, when it is just one of the facets of climbing”, he complains.
And what does it feel like to reach the summit of El Cap? “It’s painful, constant tension, you have to have a lot of confidence in what you know how to do and try to enjoy it, because no one is there just to scare you”, explains Frechou.
At 40, I decided to live my dream
Professional athlete, climbing guide and crack climbing instructor Gisely Ferraz, 46, climbed her first walls in Serra do Mar, in the state of São Paulo. Looking at international magazines about the sport, she dreamed of El Capitan, which she saw as the sport’s greatest challenge. “I saw it as a landmark, the place everyone dreamed of, and I wanted to get there one day,” she says, and would keep her dream alive for more than 15 years.”
“When I got there and saw El Capitan, in my head I said I would have to climb that mountain”, he remembers. “That totally changed the direction of my climbing, I stopped just being a sport climber, looking for single-rope walls, and I started looking for the styles and techniques I needed for that difficulty,” he explains.
After climbing several times using different routes, Ferraz now trains to do free climbing, that is, using his own body, with feet, hands and fingertips, to propel himself looking for points, gaps or natural cracks in the rock, ” trying not to fall.” Between her training for this task, she climbed the neighboring mountain Half Dome, also an icon of Yosemite, which she completed in 16 hours, developing the ability to gain speed for the routes. “Climbing too slowly can expose you to a sudden, violent change in weather, and you could end up in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she says.
To achieve her goals, Gisely relies not only on physical preparation, but also on psychological preparation. “You have to be willing to face the elements, prepare yourself by exposing yourself to them so that, when you are on the mountain, you can make important decisions,” she defines.
And what would have been your best moment on El Cap? “I saw that it was possible”, he summarizes. “We are created with many limitations, and when we turn the corner and see that, yes, it is possible, you just have to believe, it is a moment of great glory.”
“People often try to convince you that you can’t do it, the family tries to protect you out of fear, but that’s their fear”, adds Ferraz. She guarantees that, at 46, she climbs “much more dangerously than when I was 20 years old, because today I believe in my potential.” This, despite the difficulties, like finding yourself taking what you thought was unexpected rain on a starry night, hanging to sleep on a wall in El Cap, only to discover the next day that, in fact, it had been urine carried by the wind, coming from another climber who camped a little higher. Yes, these things happen when the nearest bathroom is several meters below basic needs and you are suspended from a base a few centimeters attached to the rock.
“I’m a mother, I have a 29-year-old son, and I grew up thinking that I would never be able to do these things, that it would be very difficult for me physically and financially”, ponders Ferraz. “When I turned 40, I decided that I was going to live my dream, and that’s what I’m doing now. Not only living my dream, but leaving a legacy for the new generation that just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you always have to go after it, you can do everything the same way, in addition to bringing different knowledge, adding to the team”, says the winner of the 2023 Mosquetão de Ouro trophy, in the Climbing category.
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