Siebe Vanhee is a professional climber from Belgium who shares his rock-climbing adventures with his community on Instagram. A few weeks ago, Vanhee posted a video of him and his comrade setting up camp on the Dawn Wall of El Capitan, a vertical rock face in Yosemite National Park.
In the video, you get a taste of what it must be like to hang so far up as you awkwardly try to pop a portaledge and “set up camp” for the night while big-wall climbing. Two men work together to deploy the hanging tent system, and there’s a bunch of clanging as the poles bang together.
At one point, Vanhee pushes himself off the rock face and swings as he unfurls part of the portaledge. At another point, he’s sitting inside his hanging tent, looking down, wondering if he dropped something.
“Setting up camp be like . . .,” Vanhee wrote in his video’s caption, followed by a string of hashtags.
Watch climbers set up camp on El Capitan’s Dawn Wall here:
Yosemite’s El Capitan is the infamous location from the rock-climbing documentary Free Solo. In Free Solo, Alex Honnold climbs the Freerider route up El Capitan without ropes or safety equipment. The Dawn Wall documentary shows the remarkable ascent of Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson up El Cap’s Dawn Wall.
Does this look like a good night’s sleep to you? Pretty sure I wouldn’t sleep a wink.