This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.Building a CustoMac Hackintosh: Buyer's Guideġ. I think the way I do multipitch climbing in Yosemite is very safe-it’s just not as safe as playing golf. That’s a lot better odds than mountaineering or swimming the English Channel. I’ve gotten injured three other times where I had to back off, but I’ve never been rescued before. I’ve been up El Cap 178 times-more than anyone. It’s always more fun to come back and climb the next day than it is to get a record or accomplish some goal. I’m placing a piece of gear every five feet. It’ll likely be a year before I’m fully healed up.ĭespite whatever image there is out there of me as a speed climber with flowing blond hair, people who have actually climbed with me know that I’m very safe. Now I have to wait for the swelling to go down enough for surgery, which will be probably ten days from now. On the right side, they just put an external splint. They put this crazy skeleton bar system on the outside of my left leg to lock my bones solidly in place. On my right side, the calcaneus-the heel-was broken into at least six pieces. At the trauma center, they found that the bottom of my left tib/fib had broken into a couple pieces, and both the tib and fib were broken where they connected. The next morning, they helicoptered me out, threw me in an ambulance, and took me to Fresno. They checked in with me every two hours that night to make sure I wasn’t running out of pain meds.Ī nurse points out where Florine fell. I had to sleep on top of El Cap with two medics and two nurses, because the winds were not perfectly calm, and flying a helicopter at night in the wilderness is a recipe for accidents. They lowered from the top and hauled me up by about 10 p.m. The accident happened a little before 2 p.m., and the rangers arrived at 7 p.m. It was really tough-I was in a lot of pain. We thought, “Why not just lower all the way to the ground another 18 pitches?” But if we did that, Yosemite Search and Rescue wouldn’t have been able to help us, because their only options are a helicopter pluck-off or coming from the top. If I’d jumped out even a foot, I probably would have missed the ledge.Ībe lowered me down to the anchor, and then we opted to lower down another two pitches because the ledge we were standing on was small and the winds were strong. The nut just popped too quickly for me to react to. I had a good piece in I wasn’t running it out. I pulled myself onto the ledge, looked at my feet, and realized my left foot was torqued to the side.Īs good as I think I am at placing gear, a piece popped, and it happened to be the rope was a little bit long. Then I toppled backwards and hung upside down. I hit the triangle ledge that’s in the middle of the pitch and smashed my right heel and left ankle. Then I stood up on it, and it just popped. I placed a nut I usually use cams, but we dropped a small rack of cams earlier on the route and decided to keep going because, heck, they didn’t have small cams in the ’70s and ’80s. I had a bomber number one Camalot at my ankles. Once you do the fun part of the Flake, there’s a thin 5.11d section. I had fixed the rope and was self-belaying at the Pancake Flake, which is on the 22nd pitch, while Abe was below me cleaning the Great Roof. So how does one of the most experienced El Cap climbers of all time take a fall like that? We asked him. On the day of the accident, Florine and his partner Abraham Shreve were running a lap up the route for training and planned to complete it in ten hours. (Most climbers take three to five days.) In October 2017, Brad Gobright and Jim Reynolds brought it down to 2 hours, 19 minutes, and 44 seconds. Until recently, the 53-year-old held the speed record for the route, with a time of 2 hours and 23 minutes, which he set with Alex Honnold in 2012. Florine dropped about 25 feet and hit a ledge with his heels after a piece of protection popped out of a crack known as the Pancake Flake, about 2,200 feet up the 3,000-foot wall.įlorine has climbed the Nose more than 100 times. Last Thursday, pro climber Hans Florine broke bones in both legs in a fall on the Nose route of Yosemite’s El Capitan.
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