Google’s Street View gets everywhere these days, but rarely does it manage to scale sheer slabs of rock. Now, with the help of acclaimed climbers Lynn Hill, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell, you can take a trip up El Capitan from the comfort of a computer. The views are astonishing.
Perhaps understandably, Google found it pretty tough to capture the images for this addition to Street View. “Doing anything thousands of feet high on a sheer granite face is complicated,” writes Caldwell in a blog post for Google. “After some testing, we used our tried-and-true climbing gear like cams and ropes to make sure the camera wouldn’t fall to the ground in the middle of our Street View collection. Once we figured out how to keep the camera on El Cap, we created two sets of vertical Street View. First, we collected Street View of legendary Yosemite climbers… the second set… the entire vertical route of “The Nose” on El Capitan.”
You can read more about how the team managed the feat over in Google’s blog post. But most importantly you can go explore El Capitan on Street View. It’s well worth a look. [Google]
