Six months after Babsi Zangerl made the historic first flash ascent of El Capitan, William Moss has made the second flash ascent of El Capitan, also of Freerider, 5.13a, but this time in just a single day.

According to an interview with climbing.com, Moss has had the objective in his sights for multiple years, first travelling to Yosemite two years ago to attempt to flash the route, but finding it wet, before he found himself foiled again last year by a mixture of poor weather and partners being unavailable. 

In the months that passed in between these non-starter visits to Yosemite and his recent attempt, Moss compiled and studied a vast library of footage of Freerider on his phone, ordered from the ground up. 

Returning to Yosemite this year, everything finally lined up. Starting the route at 5am, Moss topped out exactly 22 hours, 16 minutes, and 34 seconds later, to become the first person ever to flash El Capitan in a day, and only the second to flash it in its entirety. 

'I felt pretty dialed on the Boulder Problem and did basically the beta I had envisioned I would do, except for one foothold I had to change on the fly', he told climbing.com, 'It felt like I'd been up there before because I'd studied it so much... It was literally the most fun I've ever had while climbing: flashing 3,000 feet of rock'.

Moss, just 20 years old, is no stranger to hard trad. In 2023, he made the first ascent of The Best Things in Life are Free, 5.14d/9a, the hardest and most direct project on the Twilight Zone Buttress at Shawangunks (The Gunks). At 17, he made a 'first gear ascent' of En Passant, a 5.14a/8b+ route at Index, Washington, USA. You can check out footage of his ascent of En Passant below: