See El Capitan Like You Never Have Before

A new gigapixel image has been developed of El Capitan that includes many of the climbs, thanks to BluePlanet VR. You can zoom in to explore any route in great details, from North America Wall to The Nose and Salathé.

The image was created by Eric Hanson and Greg Downing who shot El Cap in 2,000 images to create the base photos. The day before, the two took 2000 photos of Erik Sloan and Roger Putnam climbing The Nose in seven hours. The record-setting image has 228,000 pixels. Sloan is a longtime El Cap climber who’s used images by Hanson for his guidebooks.

“A massive post-production stitching job then began, taking over two years of off-hours to finalize. Boulder, Colo Sender Films then utilized sections of the image to help describe the Dawn Wall routes in their film The Dawn Wall. Meanwhile, Erik worked diligently tracing routes over the extremely high resolution image. Finally, the full image was completed, as shown interactively below, at only one third of the full resolution. 60″ wide display prints were then produced and are currently sold on Yosemitebigwall.com.” Purchase here.

See the photo here