Made it

Kristin J. Bender and Scott Smith have a Time article about the El Capitan climbers:

A pair of Americans completed what had long been considered the world’s most difficult rock climb, using only their hands and feet to conquer a three-thousand-foot vertical wall on El Capitan, the forbidding granite pedestal in Yosemite National Park in California that has beckoned adventurers for more than half a century.
Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson (photo) became the first to “free-climb” the rock formation’s Dawn Wall, a feat that many had considered impossible. They used ropes and safety harnesses to catch them in case of a fall, but relied entirely on their own strength and dexterity to ascend by grasping cracks as thin as razor blades and as small as dimes.
The effort took weeks, as the two dealt with constant falls and injuries. But their success completes a years-long dream that bordered on obsession for the men.
The trek up the world’s largest granite monolith began on 27 December 2014. Caldwell and Jorgeson lived on the wall itself, eating and sleeping in tents fastened to the rock thousands of feet above the ground and battled painful cuts to their fingertips much of the way.
El Capitan soars three thousand vertical feet above the Yosemite Valley. The climbing community once considered the granite pillar insurmountable. Warren Harding proved otherwise. He was the first climber to lead a team up a route known as the Nose, which today is considered one of the great classics of “big wall” climbing. Harding worked on the project over two climbing seasons, a collective 47 days, and finally managed to reach the top in November of 1958.
Royal Robbins, a climbing pioneer, made an unprecedented ascent up the Salathé Wall route on El Capitan. Robbins and his climbing partners, Tom Frost and Chuck Pratt, weren’t the first to ascend El Capitan. However, Robbins proved that using lots of climbing gear wasn’t always the best way to reach the summit. Climbing Salathé, he heavily relied on the natural features of the rock, and only thirteen bolts and a few fixed ropes to aid in the ascent. Not long after summiting Salathé, Royal Robbins was making history again. With Yvon Chouinard, Tom Frost, and Chuck Pratt, he made the first ascent of the southeast face of El Capitan, in the area called the North America Wall. Unlike the southwest face, the southeast façade didn’t have “trails” of cracks that climbers could follow up. The rock was steeper, with overhanging ledges, and more difficult than what had been previously attempted. But as an added challenge, Robbins decided against using “fixed” ropes, which are used to ferry supplies to the climbers and quickly ascend or descend in an emergency. This meant the team had to reach the top in one push.
Warren Harding (no relation to the President) and Dean Caldwell (no relation to Tommy Caldwell) were the first to climb the Dawn Wall in 1970. At the time, the route was called Wall of the Early Morning Light. The team heavily relied on ropes and bolts, yet still the climb was a struggle, because vast swaths of the route are very sheer and very steep. To boot, the team’s progress was stymied for several days by a severe storm. Park rangers attempted a rescue mission but Harding, determined to make it to the top, shooed them away.
Free-climbers do not pull themselves up with cables, or use chisels to carve out handholds. Instead, they climb inch by inch, wedging their fingertips and feet into tiny crevices or gripping sharp, thin projections of rock. In photographs, the two appeared at times like Spider-Man, with arms and legs splayed across the pale rock that has been described as smooth as a bedroom wall.
Both men needed to take rest days to wait for their skin to heal. They used tape and even superglue to help with the process. At one point, Caldwell set an alarm to wake him every few hours to apply a special lotion to his throbbing hands. They also took physical punishment when their grip would slip, pitching them into long, swinging falls that left them bouncing off the rock face. The tumbles, which they called “taking a whipper”, ended in startling jolts from their safety ropes.
Caldwell and Jorgeson had help from a team of supporters who brought food and supplies and shot video of the adventure.
The thirty-six-year-old Caldwell and thirty-year-old Jorgeson ate canned peaches and occasionally sipped whiskey. They watched their urine evaporate into thin, dry air and handed toilet sacks, called “wag bags”, to helpers who disposed of them.
There are about a hundred routes up the rock known among climbers as El Cap, and many have made it to the top, the first in 1958. Even the Dawn Wall had been scaled. No one, however, had ever made it to the three-thousand-foot summit in one continuous free-climb until now.
The pioneering ascent comes as a result of five years of training and failed attempts for both Caldwell and Jorgeson. They only got about a third of the way up in 2010 when they were turned back by storms. A year later, Jorgeson fell and broke an ankle in another attempt. Since then, each has spent time on the big, blank rock practicing and mapping out strategy.
On this try, as the world watched and followed on Facebook and Twitter, Jorgeson was stalled by a lower section that took eleven attempts over the course of seven days. “As disappointing as this is, I’m learning new levels of patience, perseverance and desire,” Jorgeson posted online. “I’m not giving up. I will rest. I will try again. I will succeed.”
Caldwell, of Estes Park, Colorado, is no stranger to El Cap. He has free-climbed eleven different routes and was the first to make such ascents of the Dihedral Wall and West Buttress. He was the third to free-climb the Nose on El Cap. He also made his way up a challenging El Capitan route in fewer than 24 hours, becoming only the second person to do so, only months after accidentally severing his left index finger with a table saw in 2001.
In 2000, Caldwell and three other climbers went to the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan to scale the towering rock walls of its southern mountains. Seventeen days in, they were captured by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Caldwell shoved a guard over a cliff, and the climbers fled, eventually reaching a Kyrgyz army outpost. The guard survived the fall.
Jorgeson, of Santa Rosa, California, has an impressive list of climbs in the US, Europe, and South Africa. He works as a climbing instructor and co-founded an advocacy group for the climbers.
Still, the difficulty of the climb was not a surprise. John Long, the first person to climb up El Capitan in one day in 1975, said recently of Caldwell and Jorgeson’s free-climb that it was almost “inconceivable that anyone could do something that continuously difficult”.

Rico says it's yet another adventure he'll pass on, thank you, but he's glad they made it... (Rico will await the video.)