We’re used to using Google’s Street View tool to walk around cities all over the world, and even through locations such as airports and shopping malls, but now Google has opened a new frontier with its first vertical set, the iconic face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.
Working with a group of elite climbers who photographed their ascents of the steps, ledges, crevices and seemingly sheer faces, Google has compiled a set images and videos covering 3000 vertical feet of the mountain, allowing us stay-at-homes to go along on a climb.
Tommy Caldwell, who completed the first free climb of El Capitan’s Dawn Wall in a 19-day marathon last January was one of the lead climbers on the photo expedition; Google approached him with the project just after the climb. “Maybe it was the sheer exhaustion from being in the middle of a 19-day climb of the Dawn Wall but when the guys at Google Maps and Yosemite national park asked if I wanted to help them with their first-ever vertical Street View collection of El Capitan in Yosemite, I didn’t hesitate,” he wrote in a blogpost.
