After the Yosemite in Art exhibit Becky and I went to last week, I decided — in “not getting any younger” mode — that I needed to make plans to climb Half Dome sometime soon. I picked up a guidebook
Aside from the altitude — which difference can be mitigated somewhat by acclimating oneself for a day or two — the climb from the Valley floor resembles in its essentials the hike from the Mitchell Canyon Trailhead to Mount Diablo’s summit. I’ve certainly racked up more elevation gain in a day of hiking on Diablo than I would taking the John Muir Trail route from Happy Isles to Half Dome’s summit. I spent a solid hour thinking about when to go.
And then I found this photo.
Never mind.
That photo is of the famous Half Dome cables, the aids that make the last 900 feet of climb possible for 99 percent of the people that stand on the summit. It’s possible to make a non-technical ascent of the route without the cables: legendary climber Royal Robbins walked down the route at least once, not using his hands, relying on skill and sticky rubber climbing shoes alone. With the cables in place hundreds of people, sometimes thousands, make that ascent on a busy day in season.
Without the crowds, a person in reasonable condition can climb and descend the cables in about half an hour round trip, not counting gawking time atop the Dome. With crowds there’s sometimes a 45-minute wait at the bottom just to get your hands on the cables. With crowds the ascent and descent may take a very long time, as one person paralyzed by fear, or even just taking a quick breather, brings the entire train of climbers to a halt. The cables were installed on the assumption that one cable would be used for climbing, the other for descent, but this is apparently a rule rarely obeyed. People cling to both cables in both directions, making the passing of Up- and Down-Going Zaxen much more unwieldy. That 15-minute one-way cable trip often, it seems, turns into an eternity of holding oneself up by upper body strength alone on a slick, 45-degree quartz and feldspar surface.
As the San Francisco Chronicle says today in a front-page story, a number of Half-Dome hikers are charging that the crowding played a role in the death of 37-year-old Hirofumi Nohara three weeks ago. Nohara was 3/4s of the way through his ascent when his feet went out from under him for some reason, and he slid past horrified climbers to fall several hundred feet to his death on the back side of the Dome.
So no thanks, I’m thinking. If I happen to be camped one early weekday morning at Little Yosemite, itself an unlikely prospect given Matthew’s apt description of the place as a “backpackers’ slum,” and I have a shot at getting up there by 8 am or so and down before the Valley dayhikers make it past Vernal Falls, then maybe. And maybe not. Even without the safety issue, even without the prospect of my own fear-driven safety measures being made moot as some flip-flop-wearing tourist from DeKalb slides into my ankles at twenty miles an hour, that is just too damn many people for me. If I wanted gigantic noisy crowds in the backcountry I’d go to Burning Man, and I plan to live out my life without going to Burning Man. Is that elitism? Sure, partly: I like to choose carefully the people I spend time with in the backcountry. There are hundreds of stark high places one can stand on in Yosemite, some of them every bit as grandiose sublime as the summit of Half Dome. And populated only by those you bring with you.
What propels people to make the Half Dome climb in such numbers? As a hiker who fell prey to the notion for a short time, you’d think I’d have an answer to that. I don’t. Half Dome is iconic, sure, and yet few people make the climb to the top of equally iconic El Capitan. The trail from the base of Yosemite Falls to its brink, and then on to the stupendous view at Yosemite Point, is significantly less crowded than the Half Dome trail, despite being shorter (about 8 miles round trip) and perhaps even better advertised.
And yet Half Dome is the iconic summit hike. My guess is that it’s iconic for being iconic. People go there partly because they can, but mainly because it is the thing you do when you go to Yosemite, a merit-badge-winning accomplishment with cachet not offered those who, say, summit the nearby Cloud’s Rest, despite the fact that you get a much better view of the iconic Half Dome from Cloud’s Rest than you do standing on Half Dome. It’s a National Parks scenic viewpoint with a meritocracy attached, requiring a bit more stamina than making it to the benches around Old Faithful or the fence at Mather Point or even to the base of Delicate Arch, but still a semi-obligatory stopover on the Western National Parks Circuit.
There’s something I wonder about with the majority of Yosemite tourists, the Half Dome climbers emphatically among them. I wondered the same thing this week about the idiot fasting hiker just expensively plucked out of the Los Padres National Forest when his marketing-degree-related vision quest went badly and predictably wrong. I wonder whether the Los Padres rescue, and the majority or people shuffling up Half Dome in their cotton shorts and tennis shoes, could identify, to the species level, a single living thing they walked past on their way. I’m not even talking Linnaean binomials here. Common names. “Redwood.” Steller’s jay.” “Interior live oak.” In dark moments I wonder what percentage of Half Dome hikers could identify the type of rock on which they clamber, and that’s even giving partial credit for the incorrect answer “granite.”
This is, of course, unfair of me. Any desire to get into the wilderness can be framed reductively as an attempt to extract value from that wilderness for the hiker’s private benefit. You don’t need to be a uranium prospector for this to be true. Gerald Horne went to Sykes Hot Springs in Los Padres to extract wisdom about whether to finish up his MBA. I briefly wanted to climb Half Dome, and thousands of people a year carry out that desire, to extract what? A memory of a view and the ability to tell people we’ve done so.
I am superior to no one. I go into the wilderness for a lot of reasons, some of them not too different from either the Half Dome hikers’ or Horne’s reasons. Experience, exercise, solitude, meditation, diversion, a connection with the real: All these I have extracted from the land, one hopes more or less sustainably. But the best and truest thing I so extract, at its root still no less selfish than any of the other ores, is knowledge of the land, familiarity with it, a dawning comprehension of its nature and the nature of the living things thereon, therein, thereabove.
There were once seven trees atop Half Dome, anchor-rooted improbably in the granodiorite, surviving centuries of scouring wind and freezing, sending out bud after spring bud to build contorted, picturesque bodies. One of them survives. The others were killed bit by bit by hikers seeking fires to warm themselves, who saw the trees in residence as somehow peripheral to the summit they had gained. There are calls for regulation now, for quotas or permits to limit the number of Half Dome climbers. My suggestion: an entrance exam. No one climbs Half Dome unless they can identify five living things they’ll see on the way there. Turn Half Dome from a jungle gym to habitat, and the hike becomes ten times the experience, even if you decide not to pull yourself all the way up the cables.
great post. half dome is astonishing. it’s a place i’ll never climb—even without the unspeakable crowds, i can’t do places so high and steep. maybe my deep respect [ahem] for gravity is a positive attribute, or maybe i’m just wimpy. i don’t have to conquer something to admire it, anyway.
i hadn’t seen the monterey story. since the guy says he “accomplished” what he set out to do, i hope he gets billed for the cost of his rescue. jerk. that is some kind of spin on, “i’m an idiot who had to pack a hotel room for the wilderness, dehydrate and starve myself nearly to oblivion *On Purpose*, inconvenience the kind souls who cared for me and hiked out to get help, be airlifted out of the wilderness, and end up in the hospital. oh, yeah, i also took my dog along for the fun. so now i know my true calling is marketing—will you hire me?” heh.
my husband and his backpacking buddy are somewhere near tahoe now, taking a 4 day wilderness break. they’d pass your entrance exam—hubby does trees and rocks and wildlife [not so much birds]. one of the features of their yearly jaunts is seeing how gourmet they can go with the lightweight foodstuffs. adding precious ounces to the outgoing backpacks were french roast coffee, real maple syrup, select spices, and the heavyweight—fresh broccoli for the first night.
My first reaction was to remember the forlorn queue of would-be Klondike miners ascending snowy Chilkoot Pass.
At least these folks at HD get a “payoff” for their trudging.
But this seems like an obvious opportunity for the rangers.
I propose, except for a limited free early hour, dome climbers must buy a ticket, be properly clothed and shod, and wear and use a safety line. The revenue will pay to upgrade the cables so that using a safety line is more practical and up/down traffic can coexist better.
And a more restrictive experience will cut down the appeal for some of these “daredevil” types.
This is something like what they do at caves where they must control visitor loads and provide safety furniture (ramps, rails, steps).
And also, how about, for $50,000, you can rappel straight down the flat slide of Half Dome?
Whoopee, Yosemite budget crisis solved with no raise in gate fees.
Shorter Jeff: “Don’t make value judgments! They’re wrong!”
“There are calls for regulation now, for quotas or permits to limit the number of Half Dome climbers.”
My family visited Yosemite when I was just a sprout in the early sixties. I vividly recall both the Firefall (in which a mound of burning red fir bark was bulldozed off the precipice of Glacier Point), and the nightly spectacle of black bears rooting through garbage cans (an event for which bleachers were graciously provided by the Park Service).
Talk about your cachet.
Slowly, slowly, we learn the lessons that Earth teaches.
As you know, Chris, they are lessons only understood by direct experience. Making nature “accessible” dilutes that experience, and distorts our understanding of it.
We have considerable makeup yet to complete before the looming end of term, and little aversion to the duncecap.
Years ago my legally conjoined significant other and I walked up / climbed Uluru in Australia. There were cables there, too, and the scene at the bottom was not unlike the picture above. There were a lot fewer people, but the concept was the same. Up we went anyway, and once on top we thought, “Cool view. Why are we here, again?” On the way down we noted the plaques we didn’t see on the way up—plaques noting the deaths of several people who (I’m guessing) had their hands slip off the cables, or something.
Then we walked around the formation, with some limited information about the sacredness of the site, and that was far more interesting.
Later we learned that Aboriginal people really don’t appreciate those who walk up Uluru. We were told that they have a word for people who go up. The word is, “Ants.”
Have they built the monorail on Everest yet?
Q: Is there a chance the track could bend?
A: Not on your life, my Hindu friend!
Charles, while you were in the Uluru vicinity, did you get a chance to visit Kata Tjuta? I think the formations there are at least the equal of Uluru in their striking, almost alien beauty… but they attract far fewer “ants”—or at least they did 21 years ago when I was there. The tallest of the spires is higher than the summit of Uluru.
Sherwood, we did, and you are right. What I most vividly remember about our hike through there were the flocks of beautiful parrots. (Sorry, Chris, I would have failed your test of being able to identify their species.)
And at the opposite end of the park…we saw two other human beings as we descended Dana last monday, but they were too far across the talus slope to hail. They were just isolated smears of brightly colored polymer bobbing across an ocean of shattered metamorphic blocks.
The marmot couple at the summit were certainly no strangers to humans though, begging shamelessly for trail mix handouts.
Ahh, good old Half Dome.
When I was 12-15 years old, my dad and I, and a few others, would take a backpack trip each year. One year our route ended in Yosemite Valley, so we spent the last 2 nights at a little campsite near the trail spur for Half Dome and took a day off of actually progressing down the trail to climb it. It still gives me a little thrill to remember it. It was exciting and breathtaking. Yes, there were a bunch of people there, but nothing like in the picture in this post. Maybe 10% of that crowd.
Well, let’s see if I can pass Chris’ test. Hmm, this was about 25 years ago now, and while I’ve heard proper names for pine trees, I can’t recall them all now. OK, trout (rainbow, brown or brook, depending upon where), umm pine trees and probably a few redwoods (I get mixed up on which trip we actually came across redwoods), grass (same problem as the pine trees), little red squirrels, marmots, deer, several flowers which I knew the names of then, but can’t recall without at least seeing the old pictures (which are at my parents’ place 2700 miles away), ants, probably a few stink bugs, and most memorably, a black bear marching right into our campsite one afternoon and my dad picking up a big rock and launching it near (not at) the bear and yelling “Hey, Hey! Get away from here, Bear!!! Hey, Hey!” Or something to that effect. It worked. The bear went, “sheesh! what a snub! these hikers today have no sense of hospitality!” and ambled off in another direction. Oh, and yeah, I knew that Half Dome is basically some type of granite - our trail guide might have had a more specific description, but, like I said, that was 25 years ago… and that much of Yosemite is one huge, wonderful example of glacial erosion, oh and didn’t “we” kick out Native Americans to make a national park of it (though, I heard about that later)? So maybe I would squeak out a low pass?
If you want easy danger, we have it in New England. Mt. Washington is just a 2.5 - 3 hour drive from Boston and, in winter, with a hike of maybe another hour or two, you can go from a reasonable 30 degree day in Boston, to Arctic conditions on the mountain later that afternoon. Don’t mind the 50-70 mph wind that might just pop up. You might think, “who would go up in winter?” Well, not that many, but people still do. Perhaps they want to practice cold weather camping for a bigger trek, or ski Tuckerman’s Ravine (though that is usually later in spring), or some people get off on ice climbing. Anyway, it’s really accessible via a major highway - not like out west where you usually need to drive on a little windy road for 30 miles to get up to elevation. Here everything is low, harmless looking and easy to get to even in the depth of winter. Enjoy!
The combination of the crowd and the vertical climb would make me claustrophobic.
The photo reminds me of the time my sister and I were “forced” by my mother to ride the Mount Washington cog railway. (Mom climbed the mountain with my brother but decided it would be safer for us to meet them on the summit via the railway).
Near the treeline there’s a nearly vertical (or it seemed so at the time) 30-foot high trestle called “Jacob’s Ladder” which the train creaks across. The train was ancient and crowded with nervous tourists, and the trestle seemed rickety. (Indeed, one year the thing collapsed.) I would much rather have climbed the mountain.
Speaking of the Australian outback, I recommend these two films (if they are still obtainable)
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Peter Weir
and
Walkabout by Nicholas Roeg.
mroberts neglected to mention that “easy danger” takes a couple lives every now and then, or risks the lives of rescuers summoned by cell-phoned idiots who weren’t prepared for the conditions. I agree with take the cables down - you shouldn’t be climbing a 45 degree bare rock slope unless you know what the heck you’re doing. I’m one of those out-of-shape skill-less folk, but at least I can take one look at that picture of HD and realize immediately that I’d be an idiot for trying to climb it.
I have long thought that a prerequisite for entering designated wilderness should be a passing grade on a backcountry intelligence exam, and perhaps also a requirement to perform a certain amount of environmental public service.
Like Charles, I also thought of Uluru.
When I went there, I hadn’t intended to climb it in the first place, but even if I had, an unexpected and highly unusual rainstorm made it impossible.
instead, I walked around the monolith, surprised by all the holes and caves and grooves in it (it’s a far more complex formation than all the iconic photographs suggest), and stunned by the beauty of the water streaming off its flanks.
I find it hard to imagine that climbing up it on an ordinary day with a bunch of other random tourists would have been nearly as profound and astounding experience.
Like Charles, I also thought of Uluru.
I guess no one thinks of Stone Mountain, eh? Too easy a climb, I suppose, or maybe it’s that carving on its face.
Hi Chris! I visit your blog from time to time with the link from Hugo’s place. I just thought I’d give you some insight on hiking Half Dome. I hiked to the top the summer of 2001, when I was 14. We went in August, but the best time to go is probably June or July. I believe they take down the cables in October and put them back up in April.
It’s a tough hike, but I found that the time went by faster than expected because there is plenty of shade and scenery along the way. You get a lot of gimpses of the back of Half Dome along the trail, too. I think the hardest parts were climbing the HUGE stairs along the Falls toward the beginning of the hike and the portion right before you reach the Dome. You gotta weave through tons of jagged rocks, which were tough on my weak ankles. The actual cable part looks daughting but really wasn’t as bad as it initially looked. My aunt, however, fell down several feet—so make sure someone is near enough to catch you if you slip.
El Capitan is not as iconic for a reason. The hike, well, sucks. Half Dome’s hike is gorgeous the entire way. You’d think that reaching the top would be beautiful, but the most interesting thing up there were the old weather-beaten trees. The view’s alright, but I don’t think the hike was worth it. We only saw one other couple hiking the entire time.
Those are just my thoughts. I highly recommend Half Dome. I hope to hike it again next summer.