The first ascent of the Salathe Wall came in September 1961, when Royal Robbins, Tom Frost, and Chuck Pratt set out to climb a line up El Capitan's southwest face. The wall had been climbed before - Warren Harding's 1958 ascent of the Nose was the first complete route up El Capitan - but the Salathe Wall represented a philosophical break. Where Harding had used siege tactics, fixing ropes and returning repeatedly over sixteen months, Robbins wanted to prove that El Capitan could be climbed in a single continuous push. His team compromised slightly: after climbing about a quarter of the route, they retreated to resupply, leaving four fixed ropes in place. They jumared back up and committed to the upper wall, which they completed in six days using only 15 bolts. The restraint was deliberate. Bolts were considered a last resort, and Robbins wanted to demonstrate that natural features - cracks, corners, flakes - could provide passage up even the most intimidating faces. The route was approximately 25 percent free climbing at 5.9 with the remainder being difficult aid at A4.

The Salathe Wall was not freed all at once. It was chipped away over decades, pitch by pitch, as each generation of climbers returned with better technique and asked whether sections that had required aid could be climbed with hands and feet alone. In 1975, Kevin Worral and Mike Graham traversed from the Nose route to free climb pitches 4 through 10, adding three pitches of 5.11 to the record. Shortly after, John Long and John Bachar freed pitch 3 at 5.11b, completing all ten lower pitches as free climbing. These ten pitches, known as the Freeblast and rated 5.11c, became a standalone multi-pitch route in their own right - a day climb that serves as a warm-up for the full wall. In 1979, Mark Hudon and Max Jones pushed the free-climbing frontier higher, leading all but 250 feet of the route free and adding three pitches of 5.12. The wall was yielding, section by section, to climbers who refused to accept that aid was permanent.

The first complete free ascent came in 1988, and it cost Todd Skinner and Paul Piana thirty days of preparation. They spent a month working the route - rehearsing sequences, resting between burns, memorizing the holds on pitches so difficult that a single missed grip meant a fall onto protection and a restart. When they finally committed to a continuous push, it took nine days. Each climber free-climbed roughly half the pitches, with two hanging belays for rest. They graded the route 5.13c, a difficulty that at the time placed the Salathe Wall among the hardest multi-pitch free climbs on Earth. But the free-climbing story was not finished. In 1995, Alexander Huber became the first individual to lead every pitch free, in two pushes with one hanging belay, using an easier variation to bypass one crux and rating his ascent 5.13b. A decade later, in 2005, Steph Davis made the first female free ascent at the same grade, confirming that the route's difficulty was absolute, not a matter of who happened to be climbing it.

The Salathe Wall is recognized in Fifty Classic Climbs of North America, the canonical list that Steve Roper and Allen Steck compiled in 1979 to capture the finest routes on the continent. Its inclusion alongside the Northwest Face of Half Dome and the Nose of El Capitan cemented its status as one of the great climbs in the world. But unlike a mountain summit, which is a fixed point, a climbing route is defined by the community that climbs it. The Salathe Wall of 1961 - an aid climb with 15 bolts - is not the same route as the Salathe Wall of 1988, when Skinner and Piana freed it, or the Salathe Wall of 2005, when Davis proved that free-climbing at 5.13b was not limited by gender. Each ascent rewrites the wall's biography. The granite has not changed, but the definition of what it means to climb it has shifted with every decade, pushed by athletes who look at the same cracks and see different possibilities.