Emily Harrington Free Climbs El Capitan's ‘Golden Gate'

A concise profile of what it takes to free a sustained 5.13 on El Capitan, and the concision is the strength. Emily Harrington frees Golden Gate in 2015, the route the Huber brothers first climbed free in a single push in October 2000, following the first 20 pitches of the Salathé before breaking onto its own line through the Golden Desert and the Razorblades. Louder Than Eleven shoots it, Fizzix Productions scores it.

This is for climbers who want the mechanics of moving a hard free route on a big wall: linking difficult pitches, working rests, managing rope and gear over continuous exposed terrain. Seventeen minutes is enough for that and no more. Skip it if you came because of the headlines. Harrington's one-day free ascent came years later, and this film is the multi-day ascent that preceded it.

What works is process over spectacle. The film shows preparation and technique on steep face and crack sections without pretending any single pitch is the whole route. What it gets wrong is that Golden Gate has between 36 and 41 pitches depending on how you count, and the film gives no sense of that length or of which pitches decided the ascent.

Free Climbing El Corazón on El Cap Over 8 Days is the self-made comparison: a 5.13b R over eight days, forty-four minutes, all the boredom included. This one is the produced version, tight and clean. Watch both and you know what a multi-day El Cap free ascent is from two directions.