If you’re uncomfortable looking straight down 3,000 feet (900 m) or watching someone else hanging from that height by their fingertips, you may want to skip the video clip below or this view.
Yesterday, Google’s official blog declared, “Today we’re launching our first-ever vertical Street View collection, giving you the opportunity to climb 3,000 feet up the world’s most famous rock wall: Yosemite’s El Capitan. To bring you this new imagery, we partnered with legendary climbers Lynn Hill, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell.” Above, you can see this trio in action, talking about what makes El Cap a mecca for rock climbers everywhere.
To create this Street View of El Capitan, Hill, Honnold and Caldwell worked with Google engineers to figure out how to haul a camera up this sheer rock face. And what you ultimately get are some amazing 360-degree panoramic images. According to Caldwell, these “are the closest thing I’ve ever witnessed to actually being thousands of feet up a vertical rock face—better than any video or photo.”