An Interview With the Climber Behind El Cap’s Newest Route: ‘Cardiac Arrest’

On October 22, Olly (aka Oliver Tippett) and I sat next to the fire in Degnan’s Deli in Yosemite Valley to escape the rain and talk about his new El Capitan route Cardiac Arrest.

“A3, huh?” I ask him teasingly of his proposed grade. I’m very familiar with his characteristic British stoicism that prevents him from admitting that anything is truly all that hard. In the same way that Alex Honnold’s watchword is “no big deal,” Olly’s would be, “Yeah, it’s not that hard really.”

“Modern A3, yeah,” he replies with a mischievous grin. That’s all I need to hear to get an idea of what kind of adventure he has just had up on the big stone.

Olly, like many before him, has caught the El Cap addiction. Over the past few seasons, he has soloed many of its hardest aid routes. Unfailingly, he shows up in the spring and fall with blinders on for anything but big wall climbing on El Capitan. Just this spring, I joined Olly for the first one-day ascent of Sea of Dreams (VI 5.9 A4). I watched in awe as he charged up a heroic block of difficult and sometimes dangerous pitches through the night.

The only place one can find the honest personal estimations of the grades of the El Cap routes Olly has climbed is the Notes app on his phone. He downrates all of them, some egregiously so: Tempest receives a step down from A4 to A2 in his book. It’s also his favorite route on El Cap.

As one of the most accomplished and driven El Cap climbers today, Olly is likely underselling the true challenge of his new route. Yet after 20 days working on the route—with 14 days on the final push and 20 rope-stretching pitches of route-finding, crack cleaning, and countless sketchy beak placements—he seems to be as unfazed as ever. On the wall, he also endured a significant storm alone. At Tower to the People, about two-thirds of the way up El Cap, he weathered torrential downpours.

Olly was also on El Cap when the talented alpinist Balin Miller lost his life in an accident. When he heard the news, he descended to be with friends, then went back up on the wall later on. After completing the route, he named a roof between the Heart Route and the “Iron Curtain” variation “Balin’s Roof” in his honor.

Eager to hear more about his latest adventure, I teased out more of the details of Cardiac Arrest (VI 5.8 A3) with a few questions for Olly.

An interview with Oliver Tippett on his new El Cap route

Miles Fullman: How did you find the line?

Oliver “Olly” Tippett: I spent loads of time looking at high-resolution images of El Cap. I climbed Bermuda Dunes (VI 5.11c A4+) with my girlfriend Sam this spring and saw some cracks around the corner and to the right from Long Ledge that looked interesting. The reality is that there are still tons of unclimbed features on El Cap, but it’s just hard to piece them all together independently.

Fullman: When did you start the route?

Tippett: The same day I arrived this spring, I was carrying water up. I was psyched to get straight into it. I wanted to do a warmup route, but wasn’t sure I’d have the time, so I just went for it and started shuttling loads immediately. Two days after arriving on September 20, I started to lead from the ground.

Fullman: How does the route start?

Tippett: The climbing from the ground was a bit of a question mark. Initially, I climbed the first five pitches of the Heart Route. While cleaning those pitches, I noticed some interesting new terrain over to the side, so I completely bailed to the ground and then started all over again up the new terrain. There was this long corner that only took beaks and a big loose thin flake on the second pitch that I drilled to the side of.

Fullman: Give me a rundown of where the route goes.

Tippett: The route starts on Fifteen Seconds To Fame, which is a 5.9 to the right of Sacherer Cracker, and then pendulums to the right into just barely enough thin discontinuous cracks. A few bolts lead to the base of a 200-foot beak seam into a few hooks. It rejoins the Heart Route at pitch five and then follows the Heart Route up to Heart Ledges. I linked three of those pitches into one long pitch with a 70m rope. I tried to make my pitches as long as possible to drill as few anchors as possible.

Fullman: Where does the route go from Heart?

Tippett: After Heart Ledges, it follows Salathé Wall for one pitch up to Lung Ledge and then tackles these grooves on the left arête of the Heart. Then it joins Pacemaker for a bit before penduluming further into the Heart itself. There was this neat expanding flake that took upside-down beaks. I also climbed into and out of a tree in the upper left Heart, then went out the left Heart roof, sort of between Heart Route and the “Iron Curtain” variation.

The route continues up between the Heart Route and Son of Heart, overlapping in places with Verano Magico and following that route for four pitches up to Tower to the People.

From that ledge I rapped maybe 30 feet down and climbed up where Pacemaker goes down, following golden corners up to a big obvious left-facing corner from some unknown route until even with Long Ledge, where the route joins some old unknown bathook/rivet ladder up an arête to the top.

Fullman: How much of the new route covers independent terrain?

Tippett: It’s sort of hard to tell exactly how much was previously unclimbed. Every now and then, I’d come across random gear from some unreported exploration. I’d heard maybe Charles Cole had an unfinished project in the area, but never got any further information. There are all sorts of different variations and weird things up there.

I’m estimating I climbed about a thousand feet of unclimbed terrain and another thousand feet of what’s probably been climbed before, but is unnamed or unreported. Then the rest is mostly on Verano Magico (VI 5.10 A4), which is still without a topo and has gone unrepeated.

Fullman: How did it feel heading up into the unknown on El Cap?

Tippett: It felt pretty adventurous. I was fairly familiar with the features from so much staring at the wall from the meadow and pouring over high-resolution images. Having a drill kept things fairly comfortable, knowing I could always get down to the Heart if I really needed to.

I had sort of assumed El Cap was all climbed out. But when I soloed Neptune, I was shocked by just how much they were going for it before drilling a bolt. When I looked a little more intently and saw what might be a line above the Heart and thought it looked like a good adventure. Even if it had all already been climbed, I was psyched to just go up there without a topo or anything—just have an adventure and see what I could find.

Fullman: How did you process being up on El Cap during Balin’s fatal accident? Did you consider abandoning the attempt?

Tippett: I didn’t know Balin long, but we were staying in the same campsite in the days before we both went up on the wall. He was initially planning on soloing the Reticent. I told him that I thought Sea of Dreams was a better route and he ended up switching. When I got the call saying that he’d fallen, I felt so guilty that I really worked myself into a state. I knew I had to get to the ground immediately. I didn’t know if I’d go back up. So I spent a few days on the ground processing before eventually deciding to go back up to continue. I thought it would be a good way to distract myself so I wouldn’t think about it too much. He was one of those people that you instantly knew you liked. I wish I got to know him better.

Fullman: What was it like being up in the big storm that rolled through?

Tippett: I had a brand new fly for my Vision portaledge that was made by the gnarly Polish alpinist Józek Soszyński. So I wasn’t too worried, even when the runoff from the top became a waterfall onto the rainfly. I put a lot of faith in it as I unsensibly brought a down sleeping bag, but it never got wet.

Fullman: What inspired the name “Cardiac Arrest”?

Tippett: Just that it’s in the area of the Heart in the same vein as all of its other route names like Pacemaker and Heart Route. And because it makes it sound scary.

Fullman: Do you see your route seeing any repeats any time soon?

Tippett: I suppose it’s possible. I don’t think it’s very hard, but it goes through the forest section on the Heart Route, which is a bit of an odyssey. A lot of the pitches are also pretty winding, which favors a rope soloist because there’s no drag. A roped team may find it harder.

Fullman: Are there more unclimbed lines on El Cap that you have your eye on?

Tippett: Yes, but I’m not saying where, since someone else will climb it!

Miles Fullman calls Yosemite Valley home, living, working, and climbing there for the last eight years. A former member of the Search and Rescue team, he is now a Yosemite Climbing Ranger. He enjoys long days in the mountains with friends, and relaxing with a good book. Immediately after filing this story, he headed back up El Cap himself. 

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