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Yosemite

January 04, 2012

This summer I went to Yosemite National Park and took some pictures. The most remarkable thing (to me) in the park is the famous rock formation El Capitan. Two related facts:

It is almost 1 kilometer tall.
People climb it. On purpose.

I've done some basic rock climbing, so I can sort of imagine what it might be like: terrifying. The climb takes several days, so you have to lift your own water, poop into a bag, etc. No thank you. (But the people who do it are clearly amazing.)

To give you a sense of the size of it, and what it might be like to climb, here's a simple diagram showing the rock with climbers on it. The orange boxes are correctly sized to within a pixel, so the climbers in the inset would be about 3/4ths of a pixel tall in the scene.

Posted by rus at 05:42 PM

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