Ethan Morf, the Youngest Person to Free El Cap in a Day, Is Just Getting Started
Ethan Morf had been climbing for fourteen hours straight before he took his first fall of the day. He slipped off the Roundtable Traverse (5.12a/b), 23 pitches up El Capitan’s Free Rider (VI 5.13a; 29 pitches) with all of the route’s cruxes under his belt. It was (kind of) in the bag if he could get through this last bit of 5.12. He ticked some footholds, rehearsed his sequence one more time in his head, and lowered to the hanging belay. His friend, Xavier Larivière, was waiting for him. “He couldn’t really hold on anymore,” Larivière said. Morf wasn’t sure if he could pull it off either. Up until this point it had been Larivière’s job to go fast and keep the pace, but now he reminded the 20-year-old Morf to slow down. “We hadn’t really rested since we started, so I encouraged him to just sit in his harness, drink some water, and relax for a bit.” Morf, exhausted, laid across Larivière’s lap, and fell asleep at the hanging belay. He woke up 15 minutes later and fired the pitch. Morf called Free Rider’s five remaining pitches “the fight of my fucking life.”
***
Four years ago, Morf was a junior in high school in Summerland, British Columbia. On the weekends, he and his friends would get a ride from parents (and then later drive themselves) to the nearby Skaha Bluffs, a world-class collection of technical gneiss. Armed with a set of quickdraws, a rope, an ATC, YouTube, and high-speed data, they would learn how to rock climb. “I remember vividly doing my first lead, getting to the anchor, going in direct—being turbo-gripped—and watching a YouTube video on my phone explaining how to clean a sport route,” Morf explained, laughing heartily over the phone. Arlo Kast went to high school with Morf, though they didn’t become friends until they ran into each other at the climbing gym, and then went to Skaha together with YouTube as their guide. “Ethan would YouTube ‘how to sport climb’ and then the next day he’d teach me what he learned,” Kast confirmed, shaking his head. They climbed as many of the best 5.10s in the park they could. Morf even did his first project, a 5.11c sport route called Rock Soft. “It really changed my perspective on things,” Morf recalled, “Like, ’Oh, you can just do hard things if you keep trying them.’”
Morf was in love with climbing, but he had still had one more year of high school. “It was sort of classic,” Morf remembered, “Like, this little boy found climbing and climbing became his whole personality.” He spent his senior year Moonboarding and watching climbing films, steeping himself in the classics: Dodo’s Delight, Rampage, First Ascent. For most Canadian climbers, all roads eventually lead to Squamish. Morf was no exception. He saw Didier Berthod trying the Cobra Crack (5.14b) in First Ascent and he knew where he was going to spend the summer. Right after graduation, Morf beelined to Squamish in a black Ford Econoline he built out with his dad. He was 17.
Amidst thick cedars and Douglas firs, there’s a campground at the southern toe of the Stawamus Chief. Because paying campers need somewhere to park their car before pitching their tent underneath the idyllic coastal rainforest, there’s a less-idyllic gravel parking lot. And because climbers are, well, climbers, they inhabit that gravel parking lot for months on end, occasionally paying their campground fee to try to keep the heat off. Lucky climbers get an actual campsite for a bit, but eventually the rangers will evict you after a few weeks. If all climbing roads in Canada lead to Squamish, a lot of them spit you out in the gravel lot. It’s awesome. It’s dusty. Vans are packed in like sardines. Friends, summer flings, exes, pros; they are all in the gravel lot. That’s where I was living when Morf rocked up in the black van he built out with his dad.
The gravel lot is a carousel of characters, and that summer was no different. One of those characters was “Rooftop Will” Larivière (no relation to Xavier) who was working as a park operator and living out of a black Honda CRV with a caged roof he liked to cook from. “He was this little kid with pimples, psyched on everything and everyone,” Will recalled. “He came in as this super-new-to-the-sport person wanting to know where all the best 5.9s and 5.10as were.” Morf was in Squamish for a month on that first trip. “Everyone took me under their wing. It was so cool,” Morf said. By all accounts it sounded like a classic, formative summer. Morf learned how to trad climb (mostly from folks in the gravel lot, and less from YouTube), promptly and harmlessly decked (but who amongst us hasn’t?), and made a lot of friends. Dreamy. At the end of it all, he went to the Bugaboos and climbed the unbelievably splitter Sunshine Crack (5.11-; 300m) which, as you might imagine, blew his mind) and then headed home to Summerland, not yet realizing many Canadian rock climbers chase conditions south like their gander compatriots.
Three years later—yes, only three years, that first summer was way back in 2022—Morf is a staple in the Squamish climbing community. The last few summers he worked as a park operator, recruited in the gravel lot by Will and their boss Connor Runge, another climber who climbed, if you will, the corporate ladder of the campground. In turn, Morf recruited Kast, his old friend from Summerland. “Ethan was perfect for working at the campground,” Will beamed. “Everyone loved him. It was cool to show him the ways—the ways of how to do as little as possible. He picked up on it quite fast, he was really good at fucking around.” Indeed, when they weren’t tending to the park’s bathrooms and garbages, and they’d finished up treating the work golf cart like a rally car, and they’d brushed all their friend’s bouldering projects and gotten their lap of Rocket Pig in, they were hanging out. Morf may have been a listless employee, but he is a very intentional human. I remember feeling like he was genuinely invested in whatever I was doing each time I’d catch up with him in the gravel lot. Multiple people I spoke with for this profile expressed a similar feeling—that Morf has such a strong community around him not out of chance, but because he got out what he put in. Will echoed: “He’s super engaged when he’s with people and it shows in how people respect him. It was cool to work with him and see him grow, and see it through his climbing.”
Indeed, his climbing has evolved. Working at the campground in the summers allowed Morf to travel in the winter. He did hit a bump, tearing his labrum on Yosemite’s Separate Reality in autumn of 2023. Morf spent the winter again in Summerland, healing and diligently rehabbing, ensuring he was ready for spring. Since then, he’s been on nothing short of a rampage, climbing his first 5.13c, 5.13d, and 5.14a, all single-pitch sport climbs, and has climbed a number of impressive trad climbs including Indian Creek’s Air Swedin (5.13 R). Up high, in no particular order, he’s climbed The Free Grand (5.13a; 300m) in Squamish, the third ascent of Manchu Wok (5.12d; 485m) on the remote Chinese Puzzle Wall, Zion’s iconic Moonlight Buttress (5.12+; 360m), El Gavilan (5.13a; 270m) and Los Naguales (5.13b; 270m), both on La Popa, a steep limestone wall in Northern Mexico. In the fall of 2024, Morf freeclimbed Free Rider over several days, ground up, with Kast. Morf brought a camera along for most of these ascents and publishes his videos on YouTube. There’s one shot where the boys are sitting on top of El Capitan after their ascent. Kast says, “If I could do it again, I’d do it again with Ethan, he’s the best partner.” Morf smiles at this, looks at the camera, and says “Arlo is the best fucking partner ever.” The shot changes to a sunset. They look like the climbing videos he watched with his dad back in Summerland. After Morf shot photo and video of Victoria Kohner-Flanagan on Squamish’s Tainted Love (5.13d R), she said: “For as long as I’ve known Ethan, he’s intentionally taken steps to do the things he wants to do. I think a lot of people want to do those things, but very few actually make decisions to do them. With the videos and photos, I think he’s been inspired by the last generation, and I think now he wants to add to the climbing literature of psych and inspire people in his own way.”
***
Morf’s in-a-day ascent of Free Rider sounded just as wholesome as him and Kast hugging in the sunset, but maybe a little more heinous. Things had gone according to plan up until that twenty-third pitch: no falls, thanks to the meticulous preparation Morf had undertaken the last few weeks. He did the crux karate-kick first try. Big-wall legend Mark Hudon reportedly called him a stud as he raged up the Enduro Corners (5.12+). But now, he was exhausted. After his nap in Xavier’s lap and subsequent firing of The Roundtable Traverse, their progress slowed to a crawl. Morf split up the Scotty Burke offwidth into two pitches, belaying at a bolt and a stance. Sheer will got him through the pitch; his exhausted body refused to comply with the beta he’d chosen to avoid offwidthing the pitch, so he squeezed in there and wiggled like a young man possessed with a dream. Still, though, it wasn’t over. The second last pitch, a 5.10d roof, took him multiple tries. But he did it. He topped out, all free, in a day. The fight of his life, as he put it.
“It was the most inspiring thing in climbing I’ve ever seen,” Xavier said. Morf is the youngest person to free climb El Cap in a day, upping the ante from his friend Sam Stroh by a few months. “I’m so proud of him. I think it was the first time where Ethan got to tap into some Yosemite spirit climbing,” Stroh told me, which I can only assume describes the sensation of trying to offwidth while your whole body is cramping and you are trying to stay awake. Morf’s thoughts on being the youngest? “That’s only because Connor Herson was too busy freeing the Nose to do it. It’s this cool bonus, and a cool fact, and I feel incredibly privileged, but someone else [younger] will come along.”
When I originally set out to write this story, I thought it would be about this next-generation talent and his rapid rise to rock climbing stardom—how did he do it, and how did he do it so fast? To the podcasters out there, I apologize, as I don’t think Morf’s story has a get-strong-quick scheme. One adage, perhaps, is that multiple people close to him told me that he is “the most focused person” they’ve ever met. Sometimes, with that amount of focus comes some element of coldness—jettisoning relationships in the name of a craft, especially for someone in their early twenties. With Morf, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Morf’s warmth and excitement for the people around him preceded his climbing ability and seems to be an enduring part of his life. There isn’t a recipe to recreate here other than that intention, commitment, and privilege go a long way, and that things are easier—and better—with your friends. You can YouTube a lot of things, and then at some point you just have to go do it. Ethan Morf is doing it, and, as Morf and the other Gen Z kids say, it is coo-coo bananas.
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