Half Dome's northwest face was not climbed on the first try, or the second. In 1954, Dick Long, Jim Wilson, and George Mandatory made the first attempt and retreated after gaining just 175 feet - barely higher than the tree line at the base. The wall was too steep, the cracks too thin, the equipment too primitive. A year later, a stronger team tried: Gallwas, Don Wilson, Royal Robbins, and Warren Harding spent five days on the face and managed 500 feet before the same problems forced them down. The granite was clean and compact, offering few features for the pitons of the era. What changed between 1955 and 1957 was metallurgy. Gallwas fabricated new pitons from chrome-molybdenum steel, harder and thinner than anything previously available, capable of biting into the hairline cracks that had defeated earlier attempts. When Gallwas and Robbins recruited Sherrick for a third attempt in June 1957, they carried gear that had not existed two years earlier.

The three climbers left the ground on June 24, 1957, carrying enough food and water for a week. The Northwest Face is not vertical in the way El Capitan is vertical - it leans back slightly in places, offering occasional ledges and shelves - but the sustained difficulty was unlike anything American climbers had attempted. Previous big wall climbs in Yosemite had topped out at Grade V, meaning they could be completed in a long day or an overnight push. Grade VI meant multiple days on the wall with no option to retreat once committed. Robbins, Gallwas, and Sherrick encountered repeated obstacles - blank sections where cracks pinched out, traverses across polished slabs, overhangs that required direct aid. They surmounted each one. The route they established ran 23 pitches up the center of the face, following crack systems and dihedral corners with an aid climbing rating of A3, later upgraded to A4. Five days after leaving the ground, they stood on the summit.

The history of the Regular Northwest Face is a story of compression. What took five days in 1957 took two days by the 1970s. In 1976, Art Higbee and Jim Erickson free-climbed the entire 24-pitch route at 5.12c after five years of ground-up attempts, one per year, making it likely the most difficult long free climb in Yosemite at the time. Later climbers discovered easier variations that brought the free-climbing grade down to 5.12a. Then Alex Honnold arrived. In 2008, after a few rehearsals, Honnold free-soloed the route - no rope, no partner, no protection - via the 5.12a variations in two hours and fifty minutes. Four years later, in May 2012, he returned and speed-soloed it in one hour and twenty-two minutes, breaking a thirteen-year-old record set by Jim Herson and Hans Florine. The route that had once represented the absolute frontier of American climbing had become, in the hands of one extraordinary athlete, a morning workout.

Half Dome is not finished changing. Over the Fourth of July weekend in 2015, a major rockfall struck the Regular Northwest Face, severely altering pitches 10 and 11 - the middle section of the route that Robbins and his partners had climbed fifty-eight years earlier. In September 2016, Yosemite climbing rangers ascended the route to assess the damage and found that while the main line avoided the worst of the new hazard zones, much of the rock on Half Dome was alpine in nature - loose, fractured, and prone to exfoliation. There is speculation that more rock will peel away from other routes on the dome in coming years. The mountain is literally shedding its skin. For climbers, this means the Regular Northwest Face is not a fixed artifact but a living route, reshaped by gravity and weather with each passing decade. The rock Robbins climbed in 1957 is not entirely the rock you would climb today. Some of it is lying in pieces at the base of the wall.