Dawn Wall Graphs

Blog post 1:

So it does seem a bit late to be talking about the Dawn Wall, but I've had so many conversations with fellow climbers about the difficulty of explaining the difficulty of the Dawn Wall to non-climbers. I had the idea of plotting the pitches of the Dawn Wall in a graph, but Andy Salo suggested that I compare them with the other El Cap free ascents. I came up with two different types of graphs. I am not an ElCap climber so the numbers and grades of some of the pitches may be off by a letter and I may have missed a pitch, but the message is the same: Magic Mushroom was a major leap forward in El Cap free climbing; The Dawn Wall moved it to another realm.



I wasn't particularly thrilled with the way the first graph came out, so I took my wife's suggestions and created a second. This graph may give a better picture because as the pitches get more difficult, the color of each pitch gets darker.