Black Cave 5.13b

The Black Cave is a 25-meter, 5.13b pitch on El Niño, a 25-pitch, roughly 2,500-foot trad line up the southeast face of El Capitan. The pitch starts from three spaced bolts and hard face moves into a roof, then a fixed-pin and small-cam protected section of wild, three-dimensional climbing mostly on jugs, and finishes with a boulder-hard sequence along a dike to the belay around the lip. At 5.13b it sits among the harder single pitches on the route, and on a big-wall free attempt the difficulty is compounded by days of accumulated fatigue and the logistics of hauling and fixing between pitches.

History

El Niño was first climbed as an aid route by the Huber brothers in 1998. It stayed a mixed free/aid line until 2018, when Sonnie Trotter, supported by Tommy Caldwell, added three new pitches called the Pineapple Express to link around the route's remaining aid sections, making the first complete free ascent at 5.13b/c on November 19, 2018. The Black Cave pitch sits within that Pineapple Express variation, alongside other named crux pitches such as the Black Dike and the Missing Link.

On film

Arc'teryx Presents: Ground Up (2024) follows Amity Warme and Brent Barghahn on a ground-up free attempt of El Niño via the Pineapple Express variation, shot over eight days on the wall. The Black Cave is one of the named pitches the pair have to climb clean in sequence rather than as an isolated redpoint, which is what makes a ground-up attempt on a route like this so much harder than climbing it pitch by pitch with prior practice.