BURST
On April 29, 2025, 22-year-old Pietro Vidi freed the 19th and final pitch on Lurking Fear (5.13c) on El Capitan, becoming the first person to send every pitch since Beth Rodden and Tommy Caldwell did in 2000.
Five days before, Vidi sent the second pitch—the crux of the route—for the first time. Then he rappelled to the ground, waited a day to avoid bad weather, and pushed from the top of pitch two to the summit, freeing every remaining pitch within a couple of tries.
“Pitch two was by far the hardest,” he tells Climbing from the inside of a high-speed train in Innsbruck, Austria. In true comp style, he solved the blank slab section by performing two dynos.
For the past four years, the Italian climber has split his time between World Cup indoor competitions, hard sport routes, and brutally steep boulders in Europe. In 2023, he climbed Last Night (9a/5.14d) in Siurana, Spain, and last year, he ticked his first V16, F the System in Fionnay, Switzerland. Then in January, he sent the trad route Tribe (9a/5.14d). With these achievements and Lurking Fear now under his belt, Vidi says that he’s leaving the competition scene behind and intends to focus exclusively on outdoor climbing.
“I Didn’t Know It Was Unrepeated.”
Originally, Vidi had intended to spend his spring season working the boulder Space Cadet Low, which is the possible 9A/V16 sit start to Space Cadet (8B+/V14) in Val Bavona, Switzerland. “That’s still a project,” he says. But after tweaking his finger and getting rained out, he decided to pivot to training for multi-pitch climbing in Yosemite instead.
“I got into trad climbing basically two years ago,” he says, “but I wasn’t really psyched for Yosemite and big walls until last fall.” That’s when Olympian and top-ranked IFSC athlete Camilla Moroni, who is dating Vidi, brought him on a trip to Yosemite. “I was super hooked,” he says. “Since that trip, I decided I wanted to free climb a route on El Cap, and I started learning the tricks.”
Vidi grew up in Arco, Italy, and he calls his own crack climbing experience “limited.” Before he left for Yosemite, he spent a month on granite cracks in Caderese, Italy to warm up for his goal: the Salathé Wall (5.13b). However, when Vidi arrived in Yosemite in mid-April, he quickly abandoned his Salathé plans after finding out that the route gets sun most of the day. He assumed Lurking Fear would be a solid 5.13c alternative, with shade until noon and crux pitches down low.
“I didn’t know it was unrepeated or that it was that hard,” he explains. “I thought it would be just as hard as the other 5.13’s on El Cap.”
With only two weeks in Yosemite, he knew he had to focus 100 percent on the route. In total, Vidi worked it for 10 days, with only a single rest day before his push. “The weather was so bad I had to use every window I had,” he says. “The route doesn’t really get you tired. It’s super beta-intensive and very, very technical.”
Leaping (Literally!) Through the Cruxes
When Vidi posted on Instagram that he’d made the second ascent of Lurking Fear, Babsi Zangerl commented, “Finally, somebody did it after the hold broke!”
From a train car in Innsbruck, Austria, Vidi admits that he did not know there was a broken hold—but thinks it was probably on the featureless slabs of pitch two. Drawing upon his competition background, Vidi chose to dyno between good crimps.
Watch Vidi explain his moves and thoughts on the broken hold:
A Possible 5.14?
Two years ago, Tommy Caldwell told Climbing that he and Rodden only graded Lurking Fear 5.13c because at the time, he’d never heard of a slab route harder than 5.13c. But he added that “in modern grades it would firmly be into 5.14.”
The Italian climber agrees: “Knowing I’m good at this style, I’m sure pitch two is 5.14. I’m not sure about pitch seven, but it’s for sure not 5.13b like the guidebook says.” He thinks pitch seven is likely 5.13c or 5.13d, but not 5.14.
Besides pitch two, pitch seven was Vidi’s main concern. “The flakes are so tiny that they just break. I knew I could send it if nothing broke off,” he says. Despite practicing the pitch in advance, during Vidi’s main push up the wall, he accidentally broke another hold on pitch seven and fell. Luckily, he was able to send the pitch on his next attempt.
After he completed pitch seven, he knew he had it. “There were two tricky 5.12s and one 5.13, but I was mostly actually scared of the 5.11d offwidth, one of the last pitches,” he says. Vidi chose to layback the offwidth, calling it “chill.”
A Farewell to Plastic
For many competition climbers and boulderers, it can be challenging to learn big wall systems, but not so for Vidi, who says he’s lucky to be the son of two mountain guides. He credits his parents for getting him into climbing at age 12. His father, who has climbed five El Cap aid routes, belayed him on Lurking Fear and taught him the necessary big wall systems.
Now that Vidi has made the decision to leave competition climbing behind, he’s eager to free more El Cap routes. This fall, he’s planning to try to free the Nose (5.14a). “I want to spend half my time bouldering and half of my time trad and multi-pitch climbing,” he says. “I didn’t really want to stop comps. I had fun and everything, but it’s really, really hard to train for both. Routes are what I like more and what I’m stronger at, so it’s an easy choice.”
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