Liberty Cap

Route Overlay

Intro

Liberty Cap is located between Mt. Broderick and Nevada falls on the John Muir Trail. Climbing in such an iconic setting is just part of the draw to this dome. The stone is bullet hard Half Dome granodiorite. With its many splitter cracks and huge corners, Liberty Cap tends to be very cam friendly on most of the routes. 

Scarface follows a long crack system that shoots straight through a huge, white scar, the wall’s most prominent feature. The route now goes both free and clean, at 5.12. The aid version is 5.8 A3. The free route starts with a few hundred feet of dirty cracks before entering the clean white granite of the rock scar. The difficulty of this routes lies in the two 5.12 crux pitches, P5 and P8. The rest of the route is in the 5.10 to 5.11- range and climbs quite quickly.

The huge white scar that is Scarface's namesake was due to rockfall caused by an earthquake in 1872. 

Scarface was high on our trip's wish list. Late October had brought cooler morning temperatures hovering just above freezing, so we wanted sun. During my climb of Jericho Wall Free (5.12a, 8p) a couple of days earlier, just across the valley from Liberty Cap with a great view of Scarface, I observed that sun did not hit the base of Scarface until 10:30am, and the route was in full sun by 11:30am. So no alpine start for us. We left the parking lot at 8am. We could have left an hour later, since we waited at the base for an hour waiting for it to warm up. There was another party waiting as well.

With our 11:30 am start up the route and 6pm sunset, we decided to make our goal for the day to free Pitch 5, the first of two (and harder of the two) 5.12 pitch on the route. The climbing is steep and sustained, pretty much a steep powerful lieback with pasted feet for 100 feet. With no parties behind us, we each climbed it twice (Nate leading both times, me following both times). On his second lead, Nate made it to about 15 feet of the anchor before taking a single rest and continuing on. I was able to make it up the pitch and free all of the moves at least once, but had to rest about twenty times to pull that off. I was impressed with Nate's lead. We climbed in fix and follow method, which Nate leading all of the pitches

After our day climbing Pitches 1-5 on Scarface, the idea grew on us to return and climb up the rest of the scar to the top of Pitch 9, and climb the second 5.12 crux pitch (Pitch 8) in the process. So a week later we returned to do just that. We started earlier and just climbed the first few pitches in the low-30's cold. Like our previous time on Scarface, we climbed in fix and follow method, which Nate leading all of the pitches. We were impressed with the quality of the pitches, with basically all pitches above the first three pitches being good to great. The second 5.12 crux pitch was a bit easier than the first, but quite engaging climbing up a steep fingercrack in a corner, with some stemming at the thin crux. It was a splitter fall day and we enjoyed every moment of it.

The following page gives pitch-by-pitch photos for both of our days climbing on Scarface. Enjoy!

Time Stats

Pitch-by-Pitch Photos

Time Stats

Pitch-by-Pitch Photos

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