The last time a climber was killed by falling rock at Yosemite was in 2013, when a Montana climber fell after a rock dislodged and sliced his climbing rope.

“Mother Earth changes every day, and we just have to get used to it, I guess,” he said.įoster’s former colleagues at the Up and Under outdoor gear store in Cardiff, Wales, recalled him in a statement as a man whose passion for the outdoors, “and mountains in particular, was enormous and infectious.” Ian Mort, 60, of Los Angeles could smell the dust from the rock fall Thursday while he sat in jammed traffic and headed into the park for his first trip, but he said he wasn’t concerned. “The general feeling is everybody’s a little scared.

“It’s kind of scary thinking that an entire cliff side can come off,” Edwards said. Some climbers were stressed Friday as they weighed whether to take one of about 100 routes up El Capitan or do another big climb in the park, said Josh Edwards, 21, of Bend, Oregon. When you hit the wall, you could hear echo all around you,” he said. “The entire wall seemed to be making hollow noises. Sheridan, 25, said he was spooked after hammering a pin into the wall that didn’t sound right. He said he and his partner, Peter Zabrok, had slept on the wall in the fall zone a couple of nights before the slab came crumbling down. “We were trying to outrun it it was like ‘Go! Let’s go!’ and at the same time my husband reached up and he was like ‘Oh, my head, my head’ because it was bleeding profusely and hurting.”Ĭlimber Ryan Sheridan, of Buffalo, New York, had been scaling the route for days with a partner when the granite slab fell Wednesday below them. “We didn’t know what had happened, but it shattered (the glass) and the dust just poured in,” Evans said. Rachel Evans, told KSEE-TV of Fresno () that the family had just finished a three-day visit to Yosemite. That fall injured Jim Evans, who was driving out of the national park when rubble broke through the sunroof of his SUV, hitting the resident of Naples, Florida, in the head, said his wife. The massive slab of granite that fell Thursday weighed 30,500 tons (27,669 metric tonnes), geologists estimate. The slide on Wednesday featuring the building-sized boulder killed Andrew Foster, 32, of Wales, who was hiking with his wife at the bottom of El Capitan and preparing to ascend El Capitan far from trails used by most Yosemite visitors. He also said climbers are relatively minuscule compared to the massive granite rocks they scale. “We don’t see a strong link between climbing and rock falls.” “I am a scientist, so I won’t rule it out entirely,” Stock said. Geologists don’t think climbers who pound stakes into the granite wall or hang from ropes during their treks have much effect on the stability of the mountainside. Detecting shifts in rocks could be a sign that one will break loose days or maybe years later, he said. In addition, Stock said it’s impossible to predict when and where a rock fall will strike. The park typically sees about 80 rock falls a year.Įlite climbers who make their way up the sheer rock faces with ropes and their fingertips understand the risk but also know it’s rare to get hit and killed by rocks. “It’s kind of an inherently dangerous sport,” Hayden Jamieson, 24, of Mammoth Lakes, California, said as he prepared to head up El Capitan early Saturday. Geological Service geologist were studying the mountain after the rock falls that awed but did not deter people in the close-knit climbing community. “If we felt any area was unsafe we wouldn’t be allowing people in there,” Yosemite geologist Greg Stock said Friday. One person was killed and two injured in the successive rock falls on Wednesday and Thursday at the climbing mecca. A geological analysis Friday found there was no more danger than usual of another giant rock fall after two huge slides, including one involving a slab of granite the size of a 36-story building, occurred this week on the famed El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park.

El captin rock fall before amd after