A 7-Year-Old Reached the Top of El Capitan
Seven-year-old Joey Danger Evermore reached the top of El Capitan on Thursday evening, May 21, capping a five-day ascent with his father Joe, his two older brothers, and a documentary crew, according to KRDO in Colorado Springs.
Joey turned seven on the wall the day before topping out, and fans in El Capitan Meadow sang him happy birthday from the valley floor. He is the third Evermore brother to reach the summit of the 3,000-foot Yosemite monolith before age nine, and the youngest.
The catch, and it has been the catch on all three Evermore ascents, is that none of the brothers climbed the rock in the way the headlines suggest. The party went up the Freerider route as a guided rope ascent, with two lead climbers fixing ropes ahead of the family and Joey and his father following on jumars.
Jugging fixed lines for five days on the side of El Cap is its own brand of exhausting, but it is a different sport from leading a route, and the conflation of the two has been a sore point with the climbing community since older brother Sam, then Sam Baker, reached the top by the same method in 2022.
That objection was sharpest from Tom Evans, the longtime El Cap chronicler who runs elcapreport.com, who told the Los Angeles Times in 2022 that the Bakers “didn’t climb a foot, so they don’t deserve any recognition,” adding that “climbing a rock is not climbing a rope.” Hans Florine, the unofficial record-keeper of El Capitan speed climbing, defended the family in the San Francisco Chronicle, noting that jugging the full 3,000 feet is “difficult in its own right.” Both points stand, and we’ll leave the hardcore climbing crowd to hash out the rest. We’re not in the business of giving a seven-year-old a hard time about reaching the top of El Cap.
The previous youngest known summit belonged to Selah Schneiter, who climbed El Cap at age ten in June 2019. The National Park Service doesn’t track youngest-ascent records, so all of these are by media consensus rather than official standing.
The Evermores live in Colorado Springs, formerly under the surname Baker, and have built a sustained media presence around the brothers’ big-wall climbs. Joe Evermore has raised more than $450,000 online to finance a feature-length documentary on the family, built around a parenting philosophy of helping boys “develop into men through hardship and affliction.” A film crew accompanied the family on Joey’s climb, as it did on Sylvan’s the year before.
Summit day brought one detail the wire stories haven’t picked up. Within a pitch of the top and with the sun setting, the Evermore party found themselves caught up in a Yosemite Search and Rescue operation roughly 2,000 feet below them, which shut the route down entirely. “This one kind of sucked,” Sylvan told KRDO. The Park Service has not released a report on the May 21 rescue, and neither the family nor NPS have identified the climber or the nature of the emergency. The Evermores eventually topped out Thursday night. Asked about reaching the summit, Joey kept it short: “So amazing. We got to the top, and we ate military food.”
