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The El Capitan that Alex Honnold climbed without a rope in the documentary Free Solo is mostly climbed on Grade VI routes, which take an average team two or more days. Those teams haul 3–4 liters of water per person per day up the wall, sleep in portaledges hanging in space, and carry their waste down in tubes.
That is big wall climbing. This is Part 2 of the Other Climbing Disciplines series. It explains how a big wall team works, what aid climbing is, how to read route grades, and what you need to add to your skills before a first big wall. For rigging a haul system, see Hauling on Multi-Pitch Routes; setting up a portaledge is outside this guide, so take a course or use a dedicated manual.
Before you start: what you need first
A big wall is a very long multi-pitch route. If you haven't read these yet, start here:
- Placing trad gear
- Building anchors
- Multi-pitch basics
- Self-rescue basics
- Crack climbing (Yosemite's walls mostly follow cracks)
Climbing.com's big wall guide opens with a warning: don't embark on a wall until you have many long multi-pitch routes under your belt. Almost every wall has obligatory free climbing, which feels harder with the extra gear, so you should be comfortable leading at least 5.9 on gear.
What is a big wall
The Wikipedia article on big wall climbing describes long, sheer multi-pitch routes of at least 10 pitches or 300–500 m that take a full day or several to climb. There is no fixed pitch count.
The more common dividing line is the NCCS grade. The AAC comparison chart published by Alpinist defines:
| NCCS | Time for an average team |
|---|---|
| I–II | Half a day or less of technical climbing |
| III | Most of a day |
| IV | A full day |
| V | Typically an overnight on the route, or done fast and free in a day |
| VI | Two or more days |
| VII | Remote walls climbed in alpine style |
Grade V and up usually counts as a big wall. Yosemite's rules use the same line: you may bivouac only on routes of Grade V or higher and at least one pitch off the ground (NPS wilderness climbing permits).
How a team moves up: lead, haul, jug
Climbing.com lays out the basic procedure in four steps:
- The leader climbs a pitch, free and/or with aid, trailing a second rope, the haul line.
- At the anchor, the leader ties in and fixes the lead rope to the anchor.
- The leader sets up a haul system and hauls the bag (see Hauling on Multi-Pitch Routes). Meanwhile the second ascends the fixed lead rope with ascenders, removing the gear on the way.
- When the second arrives, the team sorts ropes and gear for the next pitch, and repeats until the night's bivy.
The biggest difference from multi-pitch at Long Dong is that the second usually doesn't climb but jugs the rope. Taiwanese climber Hsiao Po explains why in her column (in Chinese): while the second jugs, the leader can haul instead of belaying, which makes the team more efficient.
What goes in the haul bag? Wikipedia lists portaledges, sleeping bags, poop tubes, food and, heaviest of all, water: about 3–4 liters per person per day.
What is aid climbing, and is it cheating?
Aid climbing means standing on gear. The leader places a cam in a crack, clips an aider to it, bounce-tests it hard, and if it holds, steps up and places the next piece from higher up. Climbing.com puts the bounce test bluntly: you try to rip out the piece by shock-loading it with your bodyweight before you fully commit; if you can't rip it out, you move onto it with confidence.
For how to operate and choose aiders, daisies, fifi hooks, ascenders and progress-capture pulleys, see How to use aid climbing gear.
The opposite is free climbing: gear only catches falls, and you move up by holding the rock. Sport and trad are both free climbing.
Is aid climbing cheating? It depends on what you are trying to do. The Wikipedia article on aid climbing notes that aid has waned on single pitches as free climbing grew, but on big wall and alpine routes, aid is accepted for sections far harder than the rest of the route.
The Nose on El Capitan is the classic example. Wikipedia records that the 1958 first ascent took about 45 days of climbing, 600 pitons and 125 aid bolts. Those days were not continuous: the article on The Nose describes a team that started in July 1957 and topped out in November 1958, going up in several pushes and fixing lines between camps. Today it is usually given as VI 5.9 C2: mostly free climbing, with the hardest sections aided without a hammer. In 1993 Lynn Hill made the first free ascent of the whole route, as the Chinese Wikipedia article on big walls notes. The same route can be aided or freed; both are legitimate climbing with different challenges.
How aid is graded
Aid grades measure how many placements hold only bodyweight rather than a fall, not how physically hard the climbing is.
Original A0–A5 definitions (expand)
From the AAC chart published by Alpinist:
| Grade | Meaning |
|---|---|
| A0 | Occasional aid moves, often done without aiders or on fixed gear; sometimes called French free |
| A1 | All placements are solid and easy |
| A2 | Good placements, but sometimes tricky |
| A3 | Many difficult, insecure placements, but little risk |
| A4 | Many placements in a row that hold only bodyweight |
| A5 | Enough bodyweight placements in a row that one failure means a fall of at least 20 m |
In the 1990s Yosemite climbers created a "new wave" version that extends to A6, adds "+" from A2 up, and gives fall distances for each grade (about 15 m at A3, 30 m at A4).
A versus C: A means you may need a hammer for pitons or copperheads; if the whole pitch goes without a hammer, the A becomes a C (clean). C2 is hammerless aid at roughly the A2 level.
Grades drop over time. Wikipedia cites Chris McNamara's Yosemite Big Walls (2011), using a new A5 route in Yosemite as the example:
- First 5 teams: A5, with almost no fixed gear on the wall.
- Teams 6–20: about A4, with half the copperheads now fixed.
- Teams 21–40: A3/A4, with almost all copperheads fixed.
- After team 41: settles at A3+, with pin scars so beaten out they take hammerless gear.
Later teams use the placements earlier teams left. In the same book, McNamara is blunt about the new wave system: originally touted as more precise, it "only brought more confusion". Treat aid grades as a rough guide.
Reading a big wall grade
The Nose's "VI 5.9 C2" breaks down as:
- VI: NCCS commitment grade, two or more days for an average team.
- 5.9: the hardest obligatory free climbing.
- C2: the grade of the aid sections, no hammer.
Two other El Capitan routes are Zodiac at VI 5.8 A2+ and The Shield at VI 5.7 A3 (per Wikipedia's Aid climbing article; its Big wall article gives slightly different free grades, around 5.7–5.8). Lower free grades than The Nose, harder aid — which is the point of listing three grades: you can see where the route is hard.
Yosemite rules: permits, human waste, fixed ropes
If your first wall is in Yosemite, know these rules first (NPS wilderness climbing permits, checked October 2026):
- Everyone staying overnight on a big wall needs a wilderness climbing permit. Permits are free with no quota; you self-register 24/7 at a kiosk near El Capitan Bridge, the day before or the day you start. The AAC's explainer adds that the system began as a pilot in 2021 and became permanent in January 2023.
- Solid human waste must be packed off the wall in a suitable container and disposed of in dumpsters or pit toilets.
- Ropes may not be left unattended for more than 24 hours, and fixed ropes must be labelled with name, date and contact details.
- Food must be hung at least 50 feet (about 15 m) above the base of the route, because of bears.
Yosemite's climbing regulations page mentions that in 2001 volunteers and rangers removed more than four thousand feet of trash rope from the park's walls. These rules exist because of real problems.
A learning path: from trad to your first Grade V
Hsiao Po's column offers an "academic" path, assuming you want to share the work equally with a partner and climb walls independently:
- Basic trad: lead single-pitch trad, belay a second from above, get both of you safely down and clean all the gear.
- Anchors: build good anchors in varied terrain.
- Multi-pitch: climb lots of two- to five-pitch routes first, then add length and difficulty. She stresses that big walls are at least Grade V, and plenty of Grade III and IV experience prepares you for V.
- Alongside: self-rescue and crack technique.
- Big-wall-specific skills (in any order): aid climbing, jugging and cleaning, hauling, and living on the wall — packing, eating, toileting, setting up a portaledge, retreating with a haul bag.
Climbing.com gives a concrete first step: practise clean aid on short cracks, then try a few three- to five-pitch routes where you can rehearse every wall skill and transition.
In Taiwan
Taiwan has no routes of big wall scale. The climbstone.com Long Dong guide puts Long Dong's cliffs at up to 70 m, a long way from an overnight Grade V.
But the first four steps of the path above can all be done at Long Dong: trad, anchors, multi-pitch and self-rescue. Basic aid moves and jugging can be practised on short cracks too. If Yosemite is the goal, getting your multi-pitch transitions automatic at Long Dong is the most practical preparation.
For big wall stories, the climbing books knowledge map includes Lynn Hill's memoir of freeing The Nose and Tommy Caldwell's account of the Dawn Wall.
Practice: three scenarios
Answers are below each question. Think first, then check.
1. A topo marks a section "A0". What does it mean?
Answer
Occasional aid: pulling or stepping on existing fixed gear (bolts, pitons) to pass a hard move, usually without aiders. Also called French free. On many mostly-free routes, A0 is a common way through one or two hard moves.
2. Ten-year-old info says a section is A4; your friend says it's probably A3 now. Who is right?
Answer
Possibly both. After repeated ascents of a hammered aid route, copperheads and pitons stay in place and pin scars widen, so later parties place gear more easily and the grade drops. Find the latest topo and trip reports before you go and trust the newest information.
3. You lead 5.8 trad reliably at Long Dong and have done two three-pitch routes. You want to climb El Cap next month.
Answer
You are a long way off. Climbing.com suggests being comfortable leading at least 5.9 on gear with many long multi-pitches done; Hsiao Po suggests plenty of Grade III and IV experience before a V. You also need aid, jugging, hauling and self-rescue. Make next year's goal building long multi-pitch mileage at Long Dong and elsewhere, and start your first wall on a shorter, popular route.
Next
Big walls stretch out multi-pitch; the next post changes the medium entirely, to ice. Read Part 3: Ice, mixed and dry tooling, or go back to the series overview.
Update log
- 2026-10-24: The haul system now links to Hauling on Multi-Pitch Routes.
- 2026-10-24: Added a link to How to use aid climbing gear.
References
- How to Climb a Big Wall (Climbing.com)
- Big wall climbing (Wikipedia)
- Aid climbing (Wikipedia)
- Big wall climbing (Chinese Wikipedia, in Chinese)
- Climbing Grade Comparison Chart (Alpinist, courtesy of the American Alpine Journal)
- Wilderness Climbing Permits (Yosemite National Park, NPS)
- Climbing Regulations (Yosemite National Park, NPS)
- The Yosemite Big Wall Permit System: Impact and Logistics (American Alpine Club, 2025)
- Hsiao Po: Learning to climb big walls (Don1Don, in Chinese)
- Long Dong climbing information (climbstone.com)
- Multi-pitch basics
- Placing trad gear
- Building anchors
- Self-rescue basics
- Crack climbing
- Climbing books knowledge map
- How to use aid climbing gear