First Ascent in Yosemite Valley

A document, not a production, and the right kind. Taylor Martin rope solos a new route on Sentinel Rock, the dark, serious face on the south side of Yosemite Valley, over July and August 2025, and posts the footage raw. No narration, no edit-suite polish, just the work.

This is for anyone who came for solo big wall aid climbing. Hauling, jugging, the slow logistics of moving up a wall with no partner to swap leads with: it is all here at length. Skip it if you want a story. There is no arc and no explanation of the line, and the film assumes you understand why a new route on Sentinel matters.

What works is the record itself. New routes established alone usually leave nothing behind but a topo and a name, and this one leaves thirty-three minutes of exactly what it took. What it gets wrong is that raw footage without a voice is hard to follow. I could not always tell what pitch I was on or what problem Martin was solving.

Climbing an El Cap A4 in Under 14 Hours, Oliver Tippett's film with Martin on Lunar Eclipse, is the same climber with a partner, a camera plan and a first-person account. That one is easier to watch. This one is more honest about what a solo first ascent feels like, which is mostly slow.