Climbers Complete 31-Pitch 5.14a in Yosemite
Jim Pope and Sam Stroh have made the fifth and sixth free ascents of Magic Mushroom on El Capitan
One of El Capitan’s most iconic big wall routes, Magic Mushroom, has been climbed by Jim Pope and Sam Stroh for its fifth and sixth free ascents. First climbed in 1972 by Canadians Hugh Burton and Steve Sutton, the route was one of the last totally independent lines on the wall before becoming one of El Cap’s hardest sustained free climbs.
Burton and Sutton were new to big wall climbing when they did Magic Mushroom. “We still didn’t have all the basics down. This was the second year we had been climbing,” Burton told Chris McNamara in 2011. Before Magic Mushroom, Sutton and Burton’s experience consisted of The Nose and “just a bunch of Squamish new routes.” Magic Mushroom became their first Grade VI first ascent. “We did The Nose and then were just like ‘F*#k it,” said Burton, “we want to do something bigger.’”
The route’s first free ascent came in May 2012, when Tommy Caldwell and Justen Sjong unlocked the hardest pitches. In 2017, Jacopo Larcher and Babsi Zangerl repeated it, confirming Magic Mushroom as a modern testpiece.
Before the final push to the top of Magic Mushroom this season, Pope wrote on his blog, “It feels a long way off from a certain send, but I think we stand a good chance, and the time on the wall will be a hell of an experience regardless of the outcome!”
Burton and Sutton had eyed the line for a year. “Had a real good photo from Ed Cooper that we used as a topo,” Sutton said. An initial attempt ended early when they were stormed off Mammoth Ledge. It snowed two feet and they only had Army down sleeping bags. When they returned, the ascent took eight or nine days.
They climbed with an enormous iron rack. “Iron rack probably weighed 100 pounds… Chrome molly everything. It all weighed a f*#king ton.” They carried no nuts or copperheads and didn’t have to do much drilling. Despite their inexperience, everything went smoothly, apart from the haulbag catching on fire.
“I looked down at the bag I could see smoke coming out of it,” said Sutton. A pack of matches had somehow ignited inside the haulbag. “I started hauling as fast as I could but the fire still burned for about 10 minutes. We had to empty the haulbag to put the fire out. The sleeping bags were riddled with holes.”
Above Chickenhead Ledge, Sutton described “a really hard, dicey pitch… The flake was thin and expanding.” Burton noted the route’s character as “awkward,” but added, “that’s climbing, it’s all awkward.” Still, he said it was a cool route with hardly any dirt. As Sutton put it, “Great route.”
