Jul 2, 2008 9:18 pm US/Pacific
Climbing Record Set On Yosemite's El Capitan
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK (AP) ―
A rock-climbing duo from California and Japan now owns the record for scaling the granite nose of Yosemite's iconic El Capitan.
The Yosemite Climbing Association says 44-year-old Hans Florine and 39-year-old Yuji Hirayama beat the previous record by two minutes and 12 seconds.
Their time on the 3,000-foot climb was two hours, 43 minutes, 33 seconds. It was their third attempt at the record in a week, and their only trouble came midway through the climb when a rope stuck in the Stove Leg Cracks forced one of them to descend 5 meters to untangle it.
In October, German brothers Thomas and Alexander Hubner broke the old record set by Florine and Hirayama by three minutes. The new record comes almost 50 years after the first-ever ascent of El Capitan, which took 47 days.
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