Climber Hans Florine broke bones in a fall on Yosemite’s El Capitan and was airlifted Friday after spending a night on the crag’s top with his rescuers.

Florine, 53, of Lafayette — well-known for his speed records on El Capitan’s Nose route — announced Thursday’s accident in a smiling Instagram post as he awaited the rescue team: “Well, there is a rescue going on, on El Capitan. And it’s me. I think I broke my leg. Rescuers please be safe.”

The fall happened around 1:30 p.m. Thursday. Florine was ahead of his climbing partner, Abraham Shreve, about 2,300 feet up the Nose route of the iconic cliff that looms over Yosemite Valley. In his account later on Instagram and Facebook, Florine said he was on self-belay when a nut he had used to secure the rope to the wall — a metal wedge inserted into a crack — popped out.

He estimated he fell about 25 feet before he was caught by the rope, and near the end of the fall he hit a ledge with his heels. The impact broke his left ankle and right heel.

Shreve lowered Florine about 400 feet to a ledge where they waited for climbers from Yosemite Search & Rescue. The rescue team reached them within a few hours and took Florine to the top of El Capitan. By then it was too dark for a helicopter rescue, so the party spent the night and Florine was airlifted to Yosemite Valley on Friday.

He was taken to Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno where he underwent surgery.

In an upbeat Instagram post around midnight from his hospital bed, Florine wrote: “I’m super psyched my upper body’s going to get trained amazingly well the next 3 to 11 months.”

Shreve, of Ogden, Utah, rappelled about 1,000 feet to a ledge where he spent the rest of Thursday night, after posting a Facebook video in which he recounted the “hell of a day.”

Florine has set the speed record for the 3,000-foot Nose route eight times in more than two decades, most recently in 2012 with Alex Honnold. That record was broken in October by Brad Gobright and Jim Reynolds, 2 hours, 19 minutes, 44 seconds.

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Yosemite: Hazardous smoke, fire closure. Oh, and biting snakes. Thursday’s climb was not a record attempt — in social media posts beforehand Florine described it as “training to get the record” — but even completing the route in one day requires the climbers to move expeditiously. The pair had been climbing about seven hours when the fall occurred above the feature known as the pancake flake, on the 24th of the route’s 31 pitches.

Florine is manager of Diablo Rock climbing gym in Concord and the married father of two teenagers. He has co-written three books, most recently “On the Nose: A Lifelong Obsession with Yosemite’s Most Iconic Climb” (2016).