Nobody knows the exact number, but climbing community estimates suggest on the order of tens of thousands of successful ascents of El Capitan, and likely something like 20,000–30,000 individual people have topped out via technical routes since the 1960s, rather than just a few thousand.

Why There’s No Exact Count

  • Yosemite National Park and climbing organizations do not maintain a complete, historical registry of every ascent of El Capitan.
  • Many ascents are done independently, without guides, permits specific to El Cap, or any formal reporting requirement, so they never enter an official database.
  • Early ascents from the 1960s–1980s especially are incompletely documented, making retroactive counting impossible.

Community “Best Guess” Numbers

On climbing forums, experienced climbers and data-minded posters have tried to model the totals:

  • One detailed forum analysis suggested around 25,000 people have successfully climbed El Capitan at least once , with something like 12,500–20,000 total recorded ascents in their rough model.
  • In that same discussion, climbers estimated perhaps 90,000 “failed” attempts over the decades, meaning far more people have tried than have topped out.
  • Rough season-based back-of-the-envelope math in that thread assumed roughly 100 climbing “seasons” (spring and fall) since the early 1970s, averaging about 125–250 successful ascents per year , which plausibly lands you in the tens of thousands overall.

These are informal estimates, but they align with how busy the main trade routes (like The Nose, SalathĂŠ, Zodiac, Lurking Fear, Triple Direct) have become in modern big-wall climbing.

Free, Free-Solo, and Style-Specific Ascents

When people ask “how many have climbed El Capitan,” they sometimes mean specific styles:

  • Aid or mixed aid/free (the standard big-wall way): The vast majority of ascents; this category likely accounts for most of those estimated tens of thousands of climbers.
  • Free climbing (using ropes only for protection, not pulling on gear): This is far rarer; informal community guesses put free ascents in the low hundreds to maybe a few hundred total on routes like Freerider and other free lines.
  • Free solo (no rope at all): Only one person is universally accepted as having free soloed a full major route on El Capitan: Alex Honnold , on the Freerider route in June 2017. Conflicting blog-style claims of “two or three” such climbers are not regarded as reliable by most mainstream climbing sources.

So: almost all El Cap climbers used ropes and big-wall techniques; totally unroped ascents are essentially unique.

El Cap Today: A Constant Flow of Climbers

  • Modern guide and outfitter write-ups describe El Capitan as a “mecca of big-wall climbing” , with hundreds of climbers attempting to claim its summit each year.
  • Popular trade routes like The Nose alone are often estimated to have over 10,000 ascents by now, making it one of the most repeated big-wall routes in the world.

A typical scene in peak season: haul bags dangling, portaledges on the wall, and a steady trickle of rope teams topping out. Even if nobody is counting every ascent, the wall sees enough traffic that “tens of thousands” is a realistic scale, not an exaggeration.

TL;DR: There’s no official number, but climbers’ own modeling and community experience put it at roughly 20,000–30,000 people who have climbed El Capitan , with trade routes like The Nose alone likely exceeding 10,000 ascents.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.