Capitan Courageous
When Yosemite park ranger Eric Gabriel was called to aid distressed climbers on El Capitan, his story became a real cliffhanger.
By John Allen
Up or down?
As Eric Gabriel ’88 dangled on a strand of rope less than half an inch thick, he wondered which way to plot his course: up or down?
He was three-quarters of the way up the granite monolith known as El Capitan — the Captain, to rock climbers, the iconic cliff at the heart of California’s Yosemite National Park. Above him were 800 feet of stone, often sheer, occasionally broken. Below were 2,400 feet of the same. Before him was a ledge called the Glowering Spot, which is about the size of an office desk and was occupied by two men in obvious distress. Behind him, the September sun was setting.
Up or down? Gabriel, a ranger working search and rescue at Yosemite, knew he couldn’t stay put. Though one of the two men was in fair condition and could survive a night on the cliff face, the other could not. With both legs broken, and the bones from one of those fractures protruding through his skin, climber Miguel Jimenez Morante’s condition was looking dicey, and the falling temperature of the coming night might mean his end.
“He was heading into shock, and distally, he was shot,” says Gabriel, who is also trained as an emergency medical technician. “His limbs were cold, and I could tell that his sensory and circulatory function had diminished. He was likely, at least, to lose a limb.”
Had it been daytime, Gabriel might have called in a helicopter to fly the men off the ledge. But helicopters aren’t allowed in Yosemite after dark — navigating among the cliffs and peaks is too dangerous. And so Jimenez would have to be removed by human effort alone, using ropes and pulleys.
Up or down? Up would be safer — it was a shorter distance and, since Gabriel had rappelled down from the cliff top, he’d recently covered that ground. But there was limited help there for Jimenez. There were more rangers, sure, but they were armed only with the first-aid equipment they could pack into a field kit. The trails down to find a road were rough and steep. If Gabriel took Jimenez upward, he’d have to spend the night there in the rangers’ care, rather than a surgeon’s, and he’d definitely lose a limb.
Down meant quick access to a road, and thus an ambulance, and a good chance of getting Jimenez to the operating room he so badly needed. But down had dangers, too. Half a mile of vertical granite threatened many opportunities for accidents — a slip or tumble, the rope snagged in a crack or maybe severed on a sharp spur of rock.
As for advice, the two men were little help. Jimenez was heading into shock, and his climbing partner, Jose Maria Villapalo Brasazo, was near panic. Further, both were from Spain and spoke very little English, while Gabriel’s linguistic capacity was nearing overload.
“I don’t speak Spanish all that well to begin with,” he says. “And in classes, they never teach you the important phrases, like the names of various pieces of climbing gear, or ‘Are you allergic to morphine?’ ”
Ultimately, Gabriel decided that the risk of death was better than the certainty of crippling. “At the top,” Gabriel says, “the patient probably wouldn’t have died, but he would certainly have lost one leg, probably both. If I took him down, at least we had a chance of getting him to an OR.”
And so down it was. The decision launched him on a daring nighttime descent of the Captain, and, ultimately, earned him the Department of the Interior’s highest award for valor.
By John Allen
Up or down?
As Eric Gabriel ’88 dangled on a strand of rope less than half an inch thick, he wondered which way to plot his course: up or down?
He was three-quarters of the way up the granite monolith known as El Capitan — the Captain, to rock climbers, the iconic cliff at the heart of California’s Yosemite National Park. Above him were 800 feet of stone, often sheer, occasionally broken. Below were 2,400 feet of the same. Before him was a ledge called the Glowering Spot, which is about the size of an office desk and was occupied by two men in obvious distress. Behind him, the September sun was setting.
Up or down? Gabriel, a ranger working search and rescue at Yosemite, knew he couldn’t stay put. Though one of the two men was in fair condition and could survive a night on the cliff face, the other could not. With both legs broken, and the bones from one of those fractures protruding through his skin, climber Miguel Jimenez Morante’s condition was looking dicey, and the falling temperature of the coming night might mean his end.
“He was heading into shock, and distally, he was shot,” says Gabriel, who is also trained as an emergency medical technician. “His limbs were cold, and I could tell that his sensory and circulatory function had diminished. He was likely, at least, to lose a limb.”
Had it been daytime, Gabriel might have called in a helicopter to fly the men off the ledge. But helicopters aren’t allowed in Yosemite after dark — navigating among the cliffs and peaks is too dangerous. And so Jimenez would have to be removed by human effort alone, using ropes and pulleys.
Up or down? Up would be safer — it was a shorter distance and, since Gabriel had rappelled down from the cliff top, he’d recently covered that ground. But there was limited help there for Jimenez. There were more rangers, sure, but they were armed only with the first-aid equipment they could pack into a field kit. The trails down to find a road were rough and steep. If Gabriel took Jimenez upward, he’d have to spend the night there in the rangers’ care, rather than a surgeon’s, and he’d definitely lose a limb.
Down meant quick access to a road, and thus an ambulance, and a good chance of getting Jimenez to the operating room he so badly needed. But down had dangers, too. Half a mile of vertical granite threatened many opportunities for accidents — a slip or tumble, the rope snagged in a crack or maybe severed on a sharp spur of rock.
As for advice, the two men were little help. Jimenez was heading into shock, and his climbing partner, Jose Maria Villapalo Brasazo, was near panic. Further, both were from Spain and spoke very little English, while Gabriel’s linguistic capacity was nearing overload.
“I don’t speak Spanish all that well to begin with,” he says. “And in classes, they never teach you the important phrases, like the names of various pieces of climbing gear, or ‘Are you allergic to morphine?’ ”
Ultimately, Gabriel decided that the risk of death was better than the certainty of crippling. “At the top,” Gabriel says, “the patient probably wouldn’t have died, but he would certainly have lost one leg, probably both. If I took him down, at least we had a chance of getting him to an OR.”
And so down it was. The decision launched him on a daring nighttime descent of the Captain, and, ultimately, earned him the Department of the Interior’s highest award for valor.
“ADD at Heart”
“Yosemite attracts some strange people,” says Gabriel, and though he may not realize it, he’s one of them.
A native of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Gabriel ought to have been more at home on flat Midwestern prairies than among California’s mountains and valleys. “But,” he says, “I’ve felt all my life that I was born in the wrong spot.” From his earliest years, he looked for ways to live on the edge — or over it.
“Eric was always something of a thrill-seeker,” says Gabriel’s brother Paul ’82, JD’86. “I have a clear memory of him when we were kids. I was at the breakfast table, and I looked up, and he came flying by the window. He’d jumped off of the second story of the house using a homemade parachute.
I think he broke his collarbone.”
Paul says that Eric “takes his risks in more measured doses now,” but one of the ways he pursues them is through rock climbing, a hobby he took up as a teenager. When he enrolled at the UW, Eric Gabriel joined the Union’s Hoofers outdoor adventure club. With them, he went climbing at Devil’s Lake State Park north of Madison, but when they couldn’t get there, or to any other location with natural cliffs, he and his friends would scale buildings on campus instead.
“The Red Gym was particularly good,” Gabriel says. “And so was Science Hall. They both had rhyolite [stone] for the first eight or ten feet, and then brick, which offered pretty good handholds.”
Although he earned his degree in secondary education, Gabriel never sought a career in teaching, preferring instead to pursue professions that wouldn’t interfere with climbing. He trained as a carpenter and as an emergency medical technician — jobs that were universal enough that he could do them anywhere in the country, and for which employers wouldn’t mind a spotty resume for those times when he’d decide that the climbing was better somewhere else.
“I’ve read that a leisure class exists at both ends of the financial scale,” Gabriel says. “I was enjoying exploring the lower end.”
In 1990, he finally connected climbing with a career when he took on a seasonal position as a ranger at Yosemite National Park. Over the following years, as he scaled the cliffs — including the Captain, five times — he also climbed the ladder at the National Park Service, from seasonal to permanent, working at a variety of the country’s large parks: Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain, and others, eventually returning to Yosemite.
National Park Service rangers come in a variety of types — the most familiar are interpretive rangers, who, dressed in the green-and-gray uniform and Smokey-the-Bear hat, help visitors understand and enjoy federal parks, monuments, and other service areas. But there is a wide variety of professionals who perform a park’s business — firefighters, maintenance and administrative workers, dispatchers, business and revenue managers, and search-and-rescue (SAR) personnel. Gabriel became a visitor and resource protection ranger (law enforcement). Carrying a gun and badge (number 187), he’s responsible for seeing that visitors enjoy the park in its intended state while protecting its resources and other visitors.
Since 2003, Gabriel has been one of Yosemite’s supervising rangers. Under the direction of the park’s chief ranger, Steve Shackleton, Gabriel is responsible for the more than four hundred square miles of the Mather District of Yosemite Valley, and at the height of tourist season, as many as fifty rangers and volunteers report to him. His duties cover all aspects of the ranger job description. “That’s the great thing about rangering for me,” he says. “I think I’m a little ADD at heart.”
One of the areas Gabriel is involved in is the park’s search-and-rescue operation, where his climbing skill and EMT training are highly valued. The SAR personnel aid park visitors who are injured, lost, or suffer an accident anywhere within Yosemite’s territory. They aid victims of auto and boating accidents, find hikers lost in the wilderness, and seek climbers who fall or become trapped. The SAR group takes half a dozen or more calls daily, and in the course of a year, runs fifty missions on El Capitan. Most end well, though there are, on average, twelve deaths a year in the park.
Keith Lober, the park’s SAR coordinator, is grateful for Gabriel’s help. “The guy’s a search-and-rescue stud,” Lober says. “He’s one of the top guys in the park as far as authority, but he’s also one of the troops, in the trenches, and he’s being dragged kicking and screaming into upper management.”
A native of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Gabriel ought to have been more at home on flat Midwestern prairies than among California’s mountains and valleys. “But,” he says, “I’ve felt all my life that I was born in the wrong spot.” From his earliest years, he looked for ways to live on the edge — or over it.
“Eric was always something of a thrill-seeker,” says Gabriel’s brother Paul ’82, JD’86. “I have a clear memory of him when we were kids. I was at the breakfast table, and I looked up, and he came flying by the window. He’d jumped off of the second story of the house using a homemade parachute.
I think he broke his collarbone.”
Paul says that Eric “takes his risks in more measured doses now,” but one of the ways he pursues them is through rock climbing, a hobby he took up as a teenager. When he enrolled at the UW, Eric Gabriel joined the Union’s Hoofers outdoor adventure club. With them, he went climbing at Devil’s Lake State Park north of Madison, but when they couldn’t get there, or to any other location with natural cliffs, he and his friends would scale buildings on campus instead.
“The Red Gym was particularly good,” Gabriel says. “And so was Science Hall. They both had rhyolite [stone] for the first eight or ten feet, and then brick, which offered pretty good handholds.”
Although he earned his degree in secondary education, Gabriel never sought a career in teaching, preferring instead to pursue professions that wouldn’t interfere with climbing. He trained as a carpenter and as an emergency medical technician — jobs that were universal enough that he could do them anywhere in the country, and for which employers wouldn’t mind a spotty resume for those times when he’d decide that the climbing was better somewhere else.
“I’ve read that a leisure class exists at both ends of the financial scale,” Gabriel says. “I was enjoying exploring the lower end.”
In 1990, he finally connected climbing with a career when he took on a seasonal position as a ranger at Yosemite National Park. Over the following years, as he scaled the cliffs — including the Captain, five times — he also climbed the ladder at the National Park Service, from seasonal to permanent, working at a variety of the country’s large parks: Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain, and others, eventually returning to Yosemite.
National Park Service rangers come in a variety of types — the most familiar are interpretive rangers, who, dressed in the green-and-gray uniform and Smokey-the-Bear hat, help visitors understand and enjoy federal parks, monuments, and other service areas. But there is a wide variety of professionals who perform a park’s business — firefighters, maintenance and administrative workers, dispatchers, business and revenue managers, and search-and-rescue (SAR) personnel. Gabriel became a visitor and resource protection ranger (law enforcement). Carrying a gun and badge (number 187), he’s responsible for seeing that visitors enjoy the park in its intended state while protecting its resources and other visitors.
Since 2003, Gabriel has been one of Yosemite’s supervising rangers. Under the direction of the park’s chief ranger, Steve Shackleton, Gabriel is responsible for the more than four hundred square miles of the Mather District of Yosemite Valley, and at the height of tourist season, as many as fifty rangers and volunteers report to him. His duties cover all aspects of the ranger job description. “That’s the great thing about rangering for me,” he says. “I think I’m a little ADD at heart.”
One of the areas Gabriel is involved in is the park’s search-and-rescue operation, where his climbing skill and EMT training are highly valued. The SAR personnel aid park visitors who are injured, lost, or suffer an accident anywhere within Yosemite’s territory. They aid victims of auto and boating accidents, find hikers lost in the wilderness, and seek climbers who fall or become trapped. The SAR group takes half a dozen or more calls daily, and in the course of a year, runs fifty missions on El Capitan. Most end well, though there are, on average, twelve deaths a year in the park.
Keith Lober, the park’s SAR coordinator, is grateful for Gabriel’s help. “The guy’s a search-and-rescue stud,” Lober says. “He’s one of the top guys in the park as far as authority, but he’s also one of the troops, in the trenches, and he’s being dragged kicking and screaming into upper management.”
The Captain
If Yosemite attracts strange people, climbers are among the strangest. From around the world, people such as Jimenez and Villapalo go there to scale the park’s steep heights.
Among the most popular of these is El Capitan. At 3,593 feet from floor to peak, the rock is more than twice as tall as the Sears Tower from street level to the top of its antenna.
There are more than seventy distinct routes to scale El Capitan, and the names climbers have given those routes reflect their culture of humor and machismo: Magic Mushroom, Tangerine Trip, Lurking Fear, Iron Hawk, Realm of Flying Monkeys. Jimenez and Villapalo were attempting a route called the Nose, which follows the vertical ridge that divides the cliff’s east and west faces.
The Nose was the route taken by the first climbers to scale El Capitan. Over the course of eighteen months in 1957 and 1958, they spent forty-five days on the cliff, slowly creeping up its face and pounding bolts and rivets into the rock to secure their ropes. Because those climbers left their bolts behind, the Nose has since become by far the most popular route on the Captain. Big Walls of Yosemite, the authoritative topographic climbing guide to the park, describes it as “the best rock climb in the world.” Though its authors rank the route as “technically easy,” they note that, “like all El Cap routes, [it] is huge, exposed, and terrifying.” The record for speediest ascent up El Capitan — two hours and forty-three minutes – was set on the Nose in the summer of 2008.
But those were elite climbers, and according to Gabriel, it typically takes a good climber three to four days to scale the Captain’s Nose — days spent hauling up dozens of pounds of equipment, as well as diminishing supplies of food and water and an increasing burden of waste. There are no garbage cans or toilets on the Captain’s nearly vertical face, and climbers cannot simply drop their refuse for fear of hitting those lower on the cliff.
On September 16, 2007, Jimenez and Villapalo had made it three-quarters of the way through that journey before Jimenez slipped, slid, and tumbled partway down the cliff face, shattering both of his ankles.
They had come prepared, however, and used a cell phone to call for help. In the mountainous wilderness of Yosemite, cell reception is spotty, but they eventually raised Jimenez’s wife, who was located about an hour away, in the northeast part of the park. She relayed the call to SAR headquarters at 2:33 that afternoon. But with the language barrier adding to confusion, the SAR team lost precious time converging in the wrong direction. Had they known that Jimenez was on El Capitan, they might have, in the remaining daylight, used their helicopter to pluck him off — a dangerous maneuver called a short haul, though less dangerous than rappelling all the way down.
But it took hours to discover the true location and nature of the accident. Once SAR coordinator Keith Lober had all the information, he determined that he’d have to call on Gabriel to perform the rescue. “There are things in Eric’s experience and background that other [rangers] haven’t developed yet,” Lober says. “His medical training and the experience of having climbed El Cap several times meant that he was the only guy for the job.”
Among the most popular of these is El Capitan. At 3,593 feet from floor to peak, the rock is more than twice as tall as the Sears Tower from street level to the top of its antenna.
There are more than seventy distinct routes to scale El Capitan, and the names climbers have given those routes reflect their culture of humor and machismo: Magic Mushroom, Tangerine Trip, Lurking Fear, Iron Hawk, Realm of Flying Monkeys. Jimenez and Villapalo were attempting a route called the Nose, which follows the vertical ridge that divides the cliff’s east and west faces.
The Nose was the route taken by the first climbers to scale El Capitan. Over the course of eighteen months in 1957 and 1958, they spent forty-five days on the cliff, slowly creeping up its face and pounding bolts and rivets into the rock to secure their ropes. Because those climbers left their bolts behind, the Nose has since become by far the most popular route on the Captain. Big Walls of Yosemite, the authoritative topographic climbing guide to the park, describes it as “the best rock climb in the world.” Though its authors rank the route as “technically easy,” they note that, “like all El Cap routes, [it] is huge, exposed, and terrifying.” The record for speediest ascent up El Capitan — two hours and forty-three minutes – was set on the Nose in the summer of 2008.
But those were elite climbers, and according to Gabriel, it typically takes a good climber three to four days to scale the Captain’s Nose — days spent hauling up dozens of pounds of equipment, as well as diminishing supplies of food and water and an increasing burden of waste. There are no garbage cans or toilets on the Captain’s nearly vertical face, and climbers cannot simply drop their refuse for fear of hitting those lower on the cliff.
On September 16, 2007, Jimenez and Villapalo had made it three-quarters of the way through that journey before Jimenez slipped, slid, and tumbled partway down the cliff face, shattering both of his ankles.
They had come prepared, however, and used a cell phone to call for help. In the mountainous wilderness of Yosemite, cell reception is spotty, but they eventually raised Jimenez’s wife, who was located about an hour away, in the northeast part of the park. She relayed the call to SAR headquarters at 2:33 that afternoon. But with the language barrier adding to confusion, the SAR team lost precious time converging in the wrong direction. Had they known that Jimenez was on El Capitan, they might have, in the remaining daylight, used their helicopter to pluck him off — a dangerous maneuver called a short haul, though less dangerous than rappelling all the way down.
But it took hours to discover the true location and nature of the accident. Once SAR coordinator Keith Lober had all the information, he determined that he’d have to call on Gabriel to perform the rescue. “There are things in Eric’s experience and background that other [rangers] haven’t developed yet,” Lober says. “His medical training and the experience of having climbed El Cap several times meant that he was the only guy for the job.”
“The Dope on the Rope”
But Lober mobilized far more than just Gabriel. Some thirty rangers performing various functions became involved in the operation that would become known as the Morante SAR (due to confusion over Spanish naming conventions).
First sent to the scene was John Dill, a ranger with thirty-eight years of climbing experience in Yosemite. Dill took up station on the floor of Yosemite Valley, a mile from the cliff’s base, where he served as the rescue’s spotter.
“It was my job to find a vantage point and use eyeballs, binoculars, a telescope, whatever, to figure out where the victims were,” Dill says. “Then I had to talk to the team on top to give them the path to lower Eric down.”
At the top of the cliff, connected by radio to both Dill and Gabriel, was a team of edge attendants — thirteen SAR rangers whose job it was to manage the rope and its passage over the side of the cliff.
“The most dangerous places on a descent are anywhere that rope runs over rock,” says Dill. “That’s where you get friction, and friction has the potential to cause all sorts of problems.”
A rope could be severed by a sharp spur or jar free a loose stone, and either could lead the rescue to a fatal conclusion. And so the edge attendants climbed out around the top edge of the cliff to protect the rope with rollers and pads, and they monitored the line to ensure that it remained securely fixed at the top and passed freely over the side.
“There are really a lot of people involved in any rescue,” says Gabriel. “My position was really just what we call ‘the dope on the rope.’ I was the guy who was dumb enough to go down. There were twelve strong men and a woman at the top who did the real lifting.”
Gabriel began his descent at 6:40 that evening, and with Dill’s direction, he picked a path down the Captain’s face for more than eight hundred feet until he could see for himself the clues that would lead him directly to Jimenez and Villapalo — a ten-foot-long blood smear pointed directly to the Glowering Spot, the small ledge on which they had landed.
Still, it took half an hour to lower Gabriel from the cliff top to the ledge. “It was a pretty standard fall-in,” says Dill. “Getting Eric down there wasn’t wild-ass crazy dangerous or anything.”
But from there down, it would get much more difficult. With the coming of evening, Dill could no longer assist. “In the dark, I couldn’t see enough to direct him,” Dill says. “I couldn’t even be a spectator.”
As well as he could, Gabriel informed Villapalo that he’d have to spend the night on the cliff, then be hauled up to the top after dawn.
“He didn’t like it much,” says Gabriel, “but he didn’t really have a choice.”
Gabriel injected Jimenez with morphine, splinted his legs, and strapped him onto a stretcher. Then the two dropped off the ledge and into the dark.
First sent to the scene was John Dill, a ranger with thirty-eight years of climbing experience in Yosemite. Dill took up station on the floor of Yosemite Valley, a mile from the cliff’s base, where he served as the rescue’s spotter.
“It was my job to find a vantage point and use eyeballs, binoculars, a telescope, whatever, to figure out where the victims were,” Dill says. “Then I had to talk to the team on top to give them the path to lower Eric down.”
At the top of the cliff, connected by radio to both Dill and Gabriel, was a team of edge attendants — thirteen SAR rangers whose job it was to manage the rope and its passage over the side of the cliff.
“The most dangerous places on a descent are anywhere that rope runs over rock,” says Dill. “That’s where you get friction, and friction has the potential to cause all sorts of problems.”
A rope could be severed by a sharp spur or jar free a loose stone, and either could lead the rescue to a fatal conclusion. And so the edge attendants climbed out around the top edge of the cliff to protect the rope with rollers and pads, and they monitored the line to ensure that it remained securely fixed at the top and passed freely over the side.
“There are really a lot of people involved in any rescue,” says Gabriel. “My position was really just what we call ‘the dope on the rope.’ I was the guy who was dumb enough to go down. There were twelve strong men and a woman at the top who did the real lifting.”
Gabriel began his descent at 6:40 that evening, and with Dill’s direction, he picked a path down the Captain’s face for more than eight hundred feet until he could see for himself the clues that would lead him directly to Jimenez and Villapalo — a ten-foot-long blood smear pointed directly to the Glowering Spot, the small ledge on which they had landed.
Still, it took half an hour to lower Gabriel from the cliff top to the ledge. “It was a pretty standard fall-in,” says Dill. “Getting Eric down there wasn’t wild-ass crazy dangerous or anything.”
But from there down, it would get much more difficult. With the coming of evening, Dill could no longer assist. “In the dark, I couldn’t see enough to direct him,” Dill says. “I couldn’t even be a spectator.”
As well as he could, Gabriel informed Villapalo that he’d have to spend the night on the cliff, then be hauled up to the top after dawn.
“He didn’t like it much,” says Gabriel, “but he didn’t really have a choice.”
Gabriel injected Jimenez with morphine, splinted his legs, and strapped him onto a stretcher. Then the two dropped off the ledge and into the dark.
Gravity Is the Most Feared
As Gabriel and his nearly unconscious cargo slipped downward from the Glowering Spot, their world was reduced from three dimensions to two: left, right, up and down. Before them was impenetrable rock, and behind them, empty darkness. Even the vertical plane they inhabited was limited to the area illuminated by Gabriel’s helmet lamp — a radius of about a hundred feet.
The best stretches of the descent were when the cliff was vertical or sloped inward, back away from Gabriel. “At those times, you’re basically the fall line,” he says. “You just go where the rope dangles you.” Though Gabriel had no contact with the rock and couldn’t direct their progress, they were at least marginally safer. Dangling meant that their line was passing through open air and free from potential snares. A lack of contact with the cliff also meant a slightly more comfortable ride for Jimenez.
“With the morphine, he was pretty much out of it,” Gabriel says. “But whenever we hit the cliff, he’d still scream.”
And yet it wasn’t an empty world. At night, as the air on El Capitan cools, the wind stills and voices can carry over hundreds of yards. And as September is one of the most popular climbing seasons in Yosemite, the Captain had many other groups bivouacking for the night.
As he dropped onto a long ledge called the Great Roof, Gabriel ran into a climbing party. “I said hey to them,” he says. “They were pretty cool about seeing us pass.”
Friendly though they were, climbers were another obstacle — people and equipment that could become entangled with Gabriel’s line. Below the Great Roof, the cliff sloped toward Gabriel again, and he decided to kick off to the right, east along the cliff’s face, away from the Nose and its climbers.
But as they fell below the level of the Great Roof, the danger grew more acute for Gabriel and Jimenez. They were now 1,200 feet below the top of the cliff. The SAR team’s ropes are 1,200 feet long — nearly ten times the length of typical climbing ropes, but still just a third of the length down the Captain. At the top, the edge attendants would have to knot Gabriel’s line onto a second, and then a third rope to get him to the bottom. Each of those knots provided a new obstacle, a tumor in the line, far more liable to catch in a crack or hang up on a flake. If that happened, there was nothing but jagged rock between Gabriel, his patient, and the valley floor.
“Climbing is basically all about physics, about forces,” Gabriel says, “and gravity is the most feared.”
On and on they crept, yard by yard, Jimenez’s screams beating out the irregular rhythm of the descent. From the Great Roof to the valley floor, they had to travel more than 2,000 feet, past four camp sites and twenty-two belaying stations — ledges on which climbers might have tied off their equipment — all the while avoiding dozens of cracks, stone spurs, and knobs, and the bolts left behind by previous climbers.
At an area called the Gray Bands, Gabriel found that he was heading into trouble. “We were going more or less to the east, to the right, with the rope skidding along the rock,” he says. Then he noticed they were heading into a major dihedral, an inward-facing corner, and a particular danger for a long rope. The angled walls of the rock could funnel
the line in toward the tighter part of the corner, until it became stuck.
“You never want your rope to catch in a crack,” says Gabriel. “It’ll get pinched or cut — something like that would definitely catch a knot.”
So Gabriel kicked off the cliff as hard as he could, angling back to the west, Jimenez screaming out as they pounded back against the granite. But that was the worst moment on the descent. Soon after, as they reached a ledge 1,300 feet above the valley, Gabriel received a boost from his colleagues. A searchlight came on, flooding the cliff face with light. Three hundred feet farther on, they reached a spot called Dolt Tower, and he saw something even more heartening.
“At a thousand feet above the deck, I started seeing the individual lights of the people working on the ground,” he says. “I got this warm feeling. Once I could see the folks working below me, I realized this was really going to work. We were going to make it. I stopped for a moment, just to gaze at them and appreciate it. Then I gave the patient another shot of morphine so we could finish the descent.”
When they reached the ground, it was 10:40 p.m., eight hours after the accident. A team of SAR rangers was waiting to assist, but it still took nearly an hour to carry Jimenez over the broken ground at the cliff’s foot to get him to the valley road. From there, an ambulance drove Jimenez and Gabriel to Craneflat Helibase, where a helicopter was waiting to fly them to a hospital in Modesto. At around 1:00 in the morning, Jimenez went into surgery, and though his legs required several operations, he still had both feet when he returned to Spain.
Gabriel hasn’t seen or spoken to him since — which is not unusual, though almost every other aspect of
the Morante SAR was: the darkness, the descent, the language barrier. For his actions that night, Gabriel received the U.S. Department of the Interior’s valor award — a gold medal (“It feels like gold,” he says; “anyway, it’s heavy”) inscribed with his name and the department’s seal. That and the time-and-a-quarter hazard pay were his only reward for the nighttime descent on the Captain.
“You can’t really do this job for the money,” Gabriel says. “You’ve got to do it because you love it. To this day, I can still hear certain people saying, ‘Federal employees — what do they do for their paychecks? Nothing!’ But the folks who wear the ranger uniform — they absolutely bleed green and gray.”
The best stretches of the descent were when the cliff was vertical or sloped inward, back away from Gabriel. “At those times, you’re basically the fall line,” he says. “You just go where the rope dangles you.” Though Gabriel had no contact with the rock and couldn’t direct their progress, they were at least marginally safer. Dangling meant that their line was passing through open air and free from potential snares. A lack of contact with the cliff also meant a slightly more comfortable ride for Jimenez.
“With the morphine, he was pretty much out of it,” Gabriel says. “But whenever we hit the cliff, he’d still scream.”
And yet it wasn’t an empty world. At night, as the air on El Capitan cools, the wind stills and voices can carry over hundreds of yards. And as September is one of the most popular climbing seasons in Yosemite, the Captain had many other groups bivouacking for the night.
As he dropped onto a long ledge called the Great Roof, Gabriel ran into a climbing party. “I said hey to them,” he says. “They were pretty cool about seeing us pass.”
Friendly though they were, climbers were another obstacle — people and equipment that could become entangled with Gabriel’s line. Below the Great Roof, the cliff sloped toward Gabriel again, and he decided to kick off to the right, east along the cliff’s face, away from the Nose and its climbers.
But as they fell below the level of the Great Roof, the danger grew more acute for Gabriel and Jimenez. They were now 1,200 feet below the top of the cliff. The SAR team’s ropes are 1,200 feet long — nearly ten times the length of typical climbing ropes, but still just a third of the length down the Captain. At the top, the edge attendants would have to knot Gabriel’s line onto a second, and then a third rope to get him to the bottom. Each of those knots provided a new obstacle, a tumor in the line, far more liable to catch in a crack or hang up on a flake. If that happened, there was nothing but jagged rock between Gabriel, his patient, and the valley floor.
“Climbing is basically all about physics, about forces,” Gabriel says, “and gravity is the most feared.”
On and on they crept, yard by yard, Jimenez’s screams beating out the irregular rhythm of the descent. From the Great Roof to the valley floor, they had to travel more than 2,000 feet, past four camp sites and twenty-two belaying stations — ledges on which climbers might have tied off their equipment — all the while avoiding dozens of cracks, stone spurs, and knobs, and the bolts left behind by previous climbers.
At an area called the Gray Bands, Gabriel found that he was heading into trouble. “We were going more or less to the east, to the right, with the rope skidding along the rock,” he says. Then he noticed they were heading into a major dihedral, an inward-facing corner, and a particular danger for a long rope. The angled walls of the rock could funnel
the line in toward the tighter part of the corner, until it became stuck.
“You never want your rope to catch in a crack,” says Gabriel. “It’ll get pinched or cut — something like that would definitely catch a knot.”
So Gabriel kicked off the cliff as hard as he could, angling back to the west, Jimenez screaming out as they pounded back against the granite. But that was the worst moment on the descent. Soon after, as they reached a ledge 1,300 feet above the valley, Gabriel received a boost from his colleagues. A searchlight came on, flooding the cliff face with light. Three hundred feet farther on, they reached a spot called Dolt Tower, and he saw something even more heartening.
“At a thousand feet above the deck, I started seeing the individual lights of the people working on the ground,” he says. “I got this warm feeling. Once I could see the folks working below me, I realized this was really going to work. We were going to make it. I stopped for a moment, just to gaze at them and appreciate it. Then I gave the patient another shot of morphine so we could finish the descent.”
When they reached the ground, it was 10:40 p.m., eight hours after the accident. A team of SAR rangers was waiting to assist, but it still took nearly an hour to carry Jimenez over the broken ground at the cliff’s foot to get him to the valley road. From there, an ambulance drove Jimenez and Gabriel to Craneflat Helibase, where a helicopter was waiting to fly them to a hospital in Modesto. At around 1:00 in the morning, Jimenez went into surgery, and though his legs required several operations, he still had both feet when he returned to Spain.
Gabriel hasn’t seen or spoken to him since — which is not unusual, though almost every other aspect of
the Morante SAR was: the darkness, the descent, the language barrier. For his actions that night, Gabriel received the U.S. Department of the Interior’s valor award — a gold medal (“It feels like gold,” he says; “anyway, it’s heavy”) inscribed with his name and the department’s seal. That and the time-and-a-quarter hazard pay were his only reward for the nighttime descent on the Captain.
“You can’t really do this job for the money,” Gabriel says. “You’ve got to do it because you love it. To this day, I can still hear certain people saying, ‘Federal employees — what do they do for their paychecks? Nothing!’ But the folks who wear the ranger uniform — they absolutely bleed green and gray.”
Events
- Global Hot Spots Lecture Series - November 13
- Global Hot Spots Lecture Series - December 11
