Aspiring mountain climbers learn the ropes, as it were, along the path to the second Yosemite Falls trailhead. It's likely that they hope one day to unleash their cams and carabiners a few miles to the west at El Capitan, a fixture in the mountain climbing pantheon.

When they climb El Capitan, they'll spend two days dangling from a rope, sleep in a hammock suspended from the cliffside (sleepwalkers rarely make it to the top of El Capitan), drink warm water and gatorade in a place where you can almost hear the ice cubes clinking at the Ahwahnee Hotel's bar, and defecate in cans they carry with them all the way up and down again. Are mountain climbers batshit crazy? Who are we to judge? Though on any given summer afternoon you'll find gaggles of people in El Capitan Meadow gazing up at El Cap through binoculars and debating this very question.