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Notes from Halfdome (June 6) (Backdated from July 18)
Half Dome from Yosemite Valley.
My high school English teacher's husband, Marl, drove us into Yosemite National Park. "You sit up here, the seat for the person who hasn't been here before," he said to Bree, indicating the front passenger seat. Judy and I sat in the back of the Subaru. Through a tunnel, the valley comes hurtling into view. Bree's out the window, eyes wide. "I didn't know that places like this existed!"
Down in the valley we said our goodbyes to Judy and Marl, put our backs down in the tent cabin, and set out exploring. Wait, did I say Tent Cabin? Oh yes. Via the wonder of the Internet we'd managed to hook up with some friendly Yosemite Park employees. "Tent number thirteen is all yours!" was the message left on my voice mail. Score! Out exploring, we bounded up the Mist Trail to Vernal Falls. The river there, swollen by record rainfall, was a mad blast of white water over boulders [photo].
"What should we do tomorrow," I asked.
"We should get up early and climb that mountain," Bree replied, gesturing towards Half Dome, which, lit in alpenglow, loomed gloriously over our camp.
I agreed, of course, but I was thinking, That's a 17 mile hike with 4500 of elevation and we just got here!
We set the alarm for 05:30 AM.
Kathy, of Steve and Kathy, who had driven us one leg of our hitchhiking journey to the park, to Groveland, and who had treated us to beers in the tavern when we arrived there, explained the Half Dome hike: "Yeah it's a long hike, but it's so beautiful you don't notice!" We would be inclined to agree. First you hike to Vernal Falls, a huge and amazing waterfall, and then up the aptly-named Mist Trail, by the end of which you're soaking wet and at another waterfall, Nevada Falls. Then you're in Little Yosemite Valley and you're encountering John Muir Trail hikers. Then up through trees to the ridge line, and then you're billygoating it up a huge granite hump.
Going up the granite hump antecedent to Half Dome itself (it must have a name, but I don't know it), I really felt the altitude. We stopped every few (vertical) meters to catch our breaths. I felt light headed, dizzy. We'd been at sea level in San Francisco two days before. Now we were a mile and a half higher, far higher than anything East of the Mississippi but not even half as high as the highest point in North America, Denali in Alaska, which is more than 20,000 feet higher than the sea. I've walked, twice, to the highest point in California, but each time we gave ourselves nearly a week to do it.
![[Tobin and Bree by Halfdome]](https://static.flickr.com/63/165028415_446ed009ec.jpg?v=0)
Halfdome from the ridge line. June 6, 2006.
The top of this granite hump is totally barren, save scattered boulders, a gnarled tree or two, and, on this day, a tiny patch of snow. There is a saddle. And then there are The Cables, two cables, one for each hand, that you may grasp as you ascend the apparently near-vertical granite slope. It is dizzying. Half Dome is, needless to say, as the icon of Yosemite National Park, a popular place. Up the cables was a continuous queue, moving as slowly as the slowest person, who may have been hysterical and in tears, having second thoughts about the ascent. Someone dropped a water bottle and we watched it skid down the slope to the saddle, then cascade down the face, flying towards the valley 4000 feet below [photo]. A sign at the base of the cables warns that lightning has struck Half Dome in every month of the year.
We ate our sandwiches.
We did not go up the cables. Later my grandmother (
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hanksmr), who has climbed the cables, chided us for it.
The Cables, and the queue up them.
It was a good hike.
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