Charles Winstead was scaling the 3,000-foot granite wall of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley this week when an unfamiliar flapping sound erupted overhead and startled him. BASE jumping, the sport of leaping from fixed objects like buildings or cliffs and then parachuting to the ground, was pioneered in Yosemite National Park in the 1970s. While it has been effectively verboten there since the 1980s, BASE has continued to occur in secret. Read more at the link in our bio. A small group of BASE jumpe

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The rockfall on Thursday, September 28 was substantially larger than Wednesday's series of rockfalls that occurred in the same area on El Capitan. The park geologist has measured the rockfall to have been 10,250 cubic meters in volume, or about 30,500 tons of granite. The dimensions for the source area are about 395 feet tall, 148 feet wide, and up to 26 feet thick. The September 28 rockfall ranks as the 29th largest rockfall on record in Yosemite National Park. A number of geologic processes se