“That was, like, a skin-of-your-teeth, skin-of-your-fingers ascent,” Berthe tells me a week after his ascent of the Dawn Wall (Free) on El Capitan, the world’s hardest big-wall free climb. “I never had such bad skin. By the end, there was tape on all my fingers.” Adding to the gripping ascent, a storm was building, dropping rain on the summit soon after he topped out after an all-night push. “How you call it?” the professional Belgian climber asks me. “Epic?”

This marks the fourth free ascent of the Dawn Wall (Free), first climbed by Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson after 19 days on the wall and a combined seven years of work, sending the 3,000-foot 5.14d route. “It has 12 pitches of 5.13, six of 5.14, including back-to-back 5.14ds,” I wrote for the day the team topped out on Jan. 14, 2015. After an eight-day continuous push, Adam Ondra got the third ascent on Nov. 21, 2016.

All told, the Dawn Wall took Berthe two years of effort. After season one in 2023, he went home empty-handed. During his successful ascent, Erik Sloan belayed him for one day, but Soline Kentzel mainly joined him for the final push.

Late in the day, during his successful ascent, even after dispensing the technically hardest sections, he still had nearly half the route remaining, and a storm was looming that would leave the final pitches soaking for days or longer. He climbed throughout the night and topped out the morning of Jan. 31, mere hours before a four-day storm rolled in.

He told me he had to dig so deep that he could not do a single pull-up a week after his ascent.

Before our call, Berthe sent over his 10-page process and story, which broke down his climb. He opened it with, “Several times…for different reasons, the adventure almost came to an end, and the final hours were so painful that I sincerely believe I came face to face with my physical and mental limits for the first time. It was so close… It could have gone either way.

“I climbed my very best in those last days and fought hard. At the end of this journey and these 14 days on the Dawn Wall: a dream, an incredible achievement, and a major milestone in my climbing life, of which I am more than proud!”

The document says that after a 50-day sail across the Atlantic Ocean from France to the US and three weeks traveling by bus, he arrived in November and joined forces with Connor Herson. They started up the wall on their first day in Yosemite, where they led pitches—“and re-discovered the moves”—and fixed lines to their highpoint. Climbing with two days on, one day off style, they reached pitch 14, the first of two back-to-back 5.14d traverses.

All said, Berthe spent a month on the route. Herson then retreated and returned to his studies at Stanford University.

Due to exhaustion, Berthe took a two-week break from the route, returning when a clear spell of weather was forecast for January. Kentzel joined him, and starting from the ground, he began a continuous ascent. His goal was to redpoint each pitch in order. On Jan. 12, he set up alone to pre-haul nearly 300 pounds of gear, food, and water up 1,300 feet. Hauling tweaked his back, and the pain plagued him throughout the route and afterward. He said he plans to see a doctor to get it checked out.

Berthe and Kentzel left the ground at 5 am on Jan. 17, making it up six pitches on Day 1. On pitch 7, a slippery 5.14a, Berthe nearly took a huge fall before grabbing a quickdraw clipped to bolt—above that, he would have committed to hard climbing protected by a fixed bird beak—and lowering back to the belay to try it again the next day.

The following day, he ticked pitch 7 and continued to the back-to-back cruxes on pitch 14. The first 5.14d pitch stymied him repeatedly, as he continually slipped off the crux moves. With his back pain increasing to excruciating levels, he took two rest days on the wall before trying again. After rest, he gave the pitch nine attempts and got it on his tenth go. “The best moment was when I sent Pitch 14. It was out of nowhere, and I did it somehow,” he says.

Then came pitch 14. Berthe sent it as clouds moved over the Valley, and snow began falling on him as he neared the anchors. “Snow began to coat the holds and make them wet, which somehow took the pressure off. I had nothing to lose anymore,” he says. Pitch 15 took him fewer tries than 14, but it didn’t go down without a fight. “But then, I felt trapped by the weather. I was falling on 16 and 17 again and again, and I could see my skin, like my general state, like, was getting worse and worse,” he says.

“It was really hard to get the psych and keep the mood high. I was like, ‘Oh no, maybe I’m going to be the one who sends the crux pitches on the route and then just goes down. I could have gone back, but I’m not sure I would have had the mental ability to try again this season.” Here, with the storm forecast in two days, Berthe made a compromise by splitting the Loop Pitch, 5.14a, into two. Midway through it, he said, there’s a big ledge so you could comfortably take your shoes off and spend half an hour sitting on it.

In his document, he wrote, “Today is the big day—it’s Jan. 30. I’m going for the final push to the summit. The next morning, rain is expected to arrive. I take down the camp and prepare a bag with a portaledge and a fly, just in case we get stuck in the rain for a few days.” As he climbed higher, he fell on many of the pitches and had to re-lead them, including whipping out of the end of a 5.11d offwidth. “You have this hollow flake and when you touch it, it makes a ton of noise,” he said. He succeeded by laybacking the feature. The remaining pitches required him to navigate hard to read terrain and sometimes grab grass growing out of a 5.12 dihedral.

“I reached the summit at 8 a.m., dedicating the ascent to the antifascist struggle with a sign stating ‘El Cap climbers against Fascism.'”

Interview

I saw on social media that you were hangboarding during the sailing part of the trip. How did you train your feet and toes? “I would put my toes on a step and climb up and down on one foot, trying to keep my foot horizontal. I’d stand on the tip of the step with the tip of my toe and try to climb the stairs without extra help. It’s really hard if you do it well, so I did it a lot during our training sessions.”

What sent you down in year one? “I spent about two months with Siebe Vanhee working on the route, fixing and training the pitches. Then, on March 22, I did a 23-day push that got me stuck on pitch 14.”

Did you bring any special items, like gummy bears? “I definitely had gummy bears up there. It’s funny because I don’t normally eat gummy bears. But two years ago, someone brought them, and so this year, when I packed, I was like, ‘Oh, I think I’m going to be happy with some gummy bears.’ I had a lot of stuff: a bottle of olive oil, bread, and a lot of peanuts.”

Do you have your sights on other El Cap free climbs? “I’m really excited about El Cap. There are still many routes I haven’t climbed. I’d love to go on Magic Mushroom at some point, maybe on Passage to Freedom. But for now, I just want to do Astroman or other moderate routes that I haven’t climbed for quite a while.”

Berthe said he plans to remain in Yosemite until May, so stay tuned for more.