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So long, Half Dome, see you in 2025

Half Dome is hard to miss. There it is, in nearly every photo of Yosemite Valley, the jagged crown jewel of the landscape, appearing to rise above all the other area peaks. It's interesting to look at. It's a mountain of granite that was cut nearly in half by a glacier. It provides a cool focal point in the middle of an awesome view. I've even seen it from an airplane while flying east from the Bay Area. Maybe that's why hiking to the top is such a popular thing to do.

Or maybe it's because armchair mountaineers like me get to scale a very slick granite dome with the help of fixed cables and feel like we've done some actual climbing. (That is, until we get to the top and see real climbers coming up off the sheer face.) We might try to forget the fact that 500 other schlubs in golf shirts and Keds have done the same hike on the same day.

I actually had nothing to prove in getting to the summit of this difficult hike, as I had done it before. My final week of high school, all the girls in my class took a weeklong trip that culminated in scaling Half Dome after weeks of training hikes. But for many years I've been wanting to do it again with Dave. I vaguely remember it being a hard hike. I recall vividly that I wore a cotton t-shirt (shudder) and a wool sweater. But I forgot how very difficult it was, especially the second half of the hike.

Dave and I made it a little harder on ourselves with two big handicaps: 1) We didn't really train. 2) We went from sea level to the trailhead at 4,000' in 12 hours. Not a huge deal, but at least when I did this hike as a 17-year-old I had done some training hikes and spent a couple of nights in the valley first. Wait, make that three handicaps, because Dave crashed his bike one week before our hike (after our reservations were non-refundable) and tore up his knee, requiring seven stitches and a lot of gauze and ointment.

We drove up on a Thursday evening, arriving in Yosemite Valley around 10pm. Before we got to our camp site, I pulled off the road and made Dave get out of the car with me to inhale the scent of the warm meadows, gaze at the Milky Way -- yes! it was visible -- and gawk at the granite walls rising around us in the faint moonlight. I could have spent a week just in that spot.

We woke up seven hours later to start the long hike. The hike would be 15.5 miles round-trip from the trailhead, but we added another 1.7 miles by starting from our campground instead of driving to the trail. We started walking at 6:30am, just before the sun came up. As we reached the Happy Isles trailhead at 7am, we started to see other groups of hikers heading up the trail. We had about 12 hours of daylight and we thought we'd probably use all of it.

By 8:30am we had done the 2.6 miles of stairs up the Mist Trail to the top of Nevada Fall. We saw the sun for the first time here. The valley walls are so steep and high that they block the sun for several hours on its way up and down. We took a quick break to apply sunblock and then continued on to the only flat stretch of the hike through Little Yosemite Valley.

After that flat mile the trail gradually increases in difficulty. First it goes through endless long switchbacks through the woods, maybe two miles of that. I really started to feel the altitude here as I slogged up the rough trails, but at least I was passing people who were moving more slowly. Dave was way ahead of me at this point, climbing like the mountain goat that he is, despite his knee injury.

Then I reached the end of the trees and got to the shoulder of the dome. This is where you get the first taste of the really spectacular views to come. You can see the valley below and the ring of craggy mountain peaks to the south and east. This is also where you first look up at the east side of the dome and wonder how you're going to haul yourself up there. You can see people making their way slowly up the sub-dome that comes before the main dome, but there is no visible trail. Just little humans who appear to be standing on the rock in random places. A few wizened trees and shrubs. And a huge mass of rock.

In the sixteen years since I first did the hike, I had completely forgotten about this part. Everyone talks about The Cables, how crazy hard the cable part is, how scary, etc. People have died on the cables. (Mostly as the result of doing stupid things, like letting go.) But the part that comes right before the cables is almost as insane, minus the hardware to keep you from falling off.

It's several hundred feet of steep, steep, steep, switchbacky granite stairs. The stairs eventually peter out and you're left to scramble up the steep rock face wherever you see fit. From the bottom of this section, it really looks like there is no trail.

Then once you get up that, you see the cables.

Getting up the cables is 100% upper-body effort. And yeah, the view is both terrifying and exhilarating for non-climbers who aren't used to seeing the ground at their feet drop off several thousand feet.

We got to the top around 11:30am. I, of course, immediately tweeted. Dave was ready to go back down immediately. I convinced him to stay and eat some more and let me take a few more pictures. I wish I had taken more than I did. I'll just have to go back.

Then we headed back down the cables, the crazy steep switchbacks, and the rocky trail on our already-tired feet. Dave's knee had started to swell like a water balloon. And while we were both fit enough to get to the top pretty quickly, there is no substitute for training miles when you're doing a 17-mile hike. We just weren't prepared for the distance. This was not a surprise to us, but it was pretty painful.

By the time we got back to Nevada Fall we were both pretty spent. From there we opted to take the longer, but less steep, John Muir Trail back to the trailhead. It would add over a mile of distance, but spare us having to go down all those giant granite stairs on the Mist Trail. By now Dave was limping pathetically.

Those last few downhill miles seemed to take forever, both of us with aching feet, knees and legs, and with poor Dave dragging his leg along stiffly. I joked that next time I'd pack a wheelchair for the trip down, or maybe an all-terrain skateboard to make the miles go by faster. (Both of these suggestions were completely absurd, of course, because while this is no doubt one of the most heavily used wilderness trails in the country, it is also extremely rugged, with rocks, roots, stairs and the occasional broken chunk of long-neglected pavement in the lower sections.)

Finally we made it back to the Happy Isles trailhead at 4:45pm, with plenty of daylight to spare. Just as we reached the road we saw the Yosemite shuttle bus pull into the nearest stop. What a relief! No more walking. We took bus back to our camp site and enjoyed nice hot showers.

There are a zillion other spectacular hikes I'd like to do in Yosemite, not to mention the rest of the Sierras. Hikes that are not nearly as crowded or over-romanticized. But the draw of that climb up the cables to the top of the dome is pretty strong. I'd enjoy doing it again, that's for sure. Maybe in another 16 years when I'm 50. But next time I think I might train a little more.

October 6, 2009 10:26 PM