Going Full Tilt at Half Dome

Seven of us are riding in a white Suburban. The road into Yosemite is narrow, a twisting black sliver leading us deeper into a wilderness. It is night, a few minutes after 9. We have a date with Half Dome in the morning.

We bump and roll beneath branches of Jeffrey pine and Douglas fir. Huge gray rocks stare down where the road curves. Just as we break out of the trees into a meadow, there is a voice from the back of the van:

“Oh my God, look at that.”

The driver veers onto the shoulder and we skid to a stop in the dirt. One by one we stumble out into the night and stand in the empty road. There, out across a meadow, shimmering in the light of a full moon, is the largest single exposed granite rock on Earth: El Capitan.

“Wow,” someone says. “Wow wow wow wow!”

There’s nothing else to say. Carved millions of years ago by a heaving river of ice, the monolith seems somehow alive, moving before our eyes, shape-shifting, shimmying under a black curtain of winking stars. The perception of movement does something to us. Mesmerized, we stare at the rock, which stands 3,600 feet above the west end of Yosemite Valley. Then, as our eyes adjust, we see it, a flicker of orange about one-third of the way up the rock. Our pupils narrow to pinpoints, and we see a second flicker at the same place.

“Somebody’s up there,” I say. A rock climber, bivouacked for the night, flashing on a headlamp, perhaps brewing one last cup of coffee before turning in.

Down on the road, it dawns on us: We are seeing ourselves in a few hours’ time, conquering Yosemite’s other big rock: Half Dome.

(There have been two rockslides in the park since last fall, the latest, June 13, fatal to a rock climber. Rock climbing is a much more difficult and potentially more hazardous sport than hiking trails in Yosemite, such as the one that goes up the back--not the sheer face--of Half Dome.)

With its sheared western face and smooth, bald brow, Half Dome is one of the most recognized natural formations in the Americas, thanks to Ansel Adams and his 1927 masterpiece of photography, “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome.”

Adams made the image in daylight, intending to capture not what the rock looked like but the sensations it aroused in him. To obtain that, he manipulated the photographic process.

In her biography of Adams, Mary Street Alinder summarized the result of that innovative moment:

“[Adams] stepped beyond the traditional photographic boundaries of his day. The sky was no longer light and bright; instead it became a black-velvet background for the smooth outline of the shattered, flat-planed face of Half Dome, rising majestically above its snowy shoulders. Looking at this image, we see Half Dome not with our own eyes but through Ansel Adams’ soul.”

On a cold, dark morning more than 70 years later, 10 of us lace up our hiking boots in search of our own visions of Half Dome.

As a group we range in age from mid-20s to late 50s. We are not experienced mountaineers but a collection of active working people, six men and four women, friends and acquaintances from the Sacramento area.

We intend to hike Half Dome in a single day just for the challenge: 17 miles round trip, half of that the ascent to the 4,733-foot summit up an almost perpendicular grade.

Having spent the night in tent cabins in Curry Village, we start the hike just before sunrise. We reach the first section of heart-pumping climbing about two hours and not quite two miles later, when we reach the stairway that curves around the right side of Vernal Fall: 300 granite blocks rising through a spray-drenched garden of ferns and wildflowers. The climb is grueling work, using nothing but the quadriceps, the big front thigh muscle. The leverage created by a hiking staff doesn’t seem much help.

Eventually we struggle up the last set of stairs and peer out over the brink of Vernal Fall. It is October, months after the spring thaw, yet a liquid avalanche roars over the top for the 317-foot plunge to the valley floor.

I ask fellow hiker Dave, who has been up Half Dome before, if the stairs we’ve just climbed are as bad as the ones at the base of the summit. He looks at me, then at the ground. No words are necessary.

I knew what I was getting into. I read up on this hike--and it is a hike, not a climb, in mountaineering terms--and I talked to people who had made the trip. And I tried to get in shape.

Smart hikers spend weeks getting ready for Half Dome. Besides aerobic exercise and long hikes in the wild, one of he best ways to condition the legs is by climbing stairs. As you build strength, you can simulate the hiking conditions by adding a backpack filled with bottles of water.

You will need at least four liters of water on the Half Dome hike, but you don’t have to carry that much in. Many experienced climbers carry canteens or empty water bottles and refill on the trail. If you choose this option, bring iodine tablets or a water purifier.

There is another safety consideration unique to Half Dome: The steel cables that form sort of a stairway to the summit also act as one big lightning rod. Mike Maciasek, director of Southern Yosemite Mountain Guides, has this rule of thumb: “If there are clouds in the sky, you shouldn’t be on Half Dome.”

An hour’s hike beyond Vernal Fall, I find myself sitting on a rock ledge, looking across Tenaya Canyon through binoculars. I pan east to Cathedral Peak, then west, where a massive, bald block of granite juts up into a baby-blue sky. As I fiddle with the zoom lever, movement at the top of the rock catches my eye. I focus, and the words come more out of fear than awe:

“Oh my God, those are people up there.”

I haven’t realized it till now: I am looking at Half Dome, a mountain I’ve dreamed most of my life of hiking. I’m perched on one of its eastern shoulders, about an hour away from my goal. But sitting there out of shape, my thigh muscles on fire, my lower back begging me to stop, I’m forced to confront the fact that I just might be in over my head. I might not have what it takes to make it to the top.

I’m not the only one.

One of our group, Rhonda, decided early on that if everyone else got to the top before she did, that was OK. She would get there at her own pace. But partway up the granite switchback at the base of Half Dome, where loose gravel slows us, Rhonda hits a wall. Her legs just don’t want to work anymore. But an inner voice taunts, goadsher, makes her mad. So she keeps climbing.

Long before this point, it’s easy to get caught in summit fever, to put your head down and one foot ahead of another, to think of nothing but getting to the top. Instead, heed the great naturalist John Muir’s advice:

Bask in the color of wildflowers. Stop to watch the deer feeding under the trees. Then you can stand on the summit and feel what Muir meant when he said that most people are on the world, not in it. One by one, with Rhonda in the rear guard, we lurch up the last of the stairs and step aside to take a count of our hurts--a tender ankle, a swollen knee, burning muscles all around. Talking quietly, we watch others ahead of us inch up the cables toward the summit. (The cables are bolted to the rock; the stanchions that hold the cables are removed for the winter and usually replaced by Memorial Day. World-class rock climbers excepted, it is not safe to climb Half Dome when the cables are down.)

Karen, easily in the best shape of anyone in our group, doesn’t join the small talk. She sits on a rock and silently scrolls her eyes from the base of the cables to the top of the mountain. She cocks her head as if listening to something. Her husband, John, taps her on the leg and heads for the cables. But Karen has taken the measure of the mountain and has decided to stop.

“It’s not going up that bothers me,” Karen says. “And it’s not so much being up on top that I don’t think I’d like. It’s standing up at the top of the cables, looking down. No, I’m thrilled with where I am. You go on.”

And so we do. But by the time we reach the summit, 8,842 feet above sea level, several of us are showing telltale signs of altitude sickness. I’m one of them. I’m hungry, starving, but I don’t want to eat anything. Neither does Rhonda.

Someone hands us some ibuprofen, and we take long drinks of water. I lie on my side and wait for the painkiller to work. There’s a knot in my right thigh the size and color of a plum, and I feel as if I’m going to vomit. So I pull myself up and limp away from the group. I sit on a rock and put my hands over my face, and I cry.

For two or three minutes the tears pour from inside. A torrent of fears and old hurts rush for release. Finally I’m spent, my tank drained dry. Suddenly I’m not feeling horrible anymore.

I wipe my eyes and decide that Ansel Adams had it right. “No matter how sophisticated you may be,” he once wrote, “a large granite mountain cannot be denied. It speaks in silence to the very core of your being.”

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GUIDEBOOK

Getting a Piece of the Rock

Getting there: Yosemite National Park is about 300 miles, or 5 1/2 hours’ drive, north of Los Angeles: Interstate 5 north to California 99 north to California 41 east, through Oakhurst to the park’s south entrance. Entrance fee is $20 per vehicle.

Where to stay: The tent cabins at Curry Village, about a mile from the Half Dome trail head, run $45 a night. Reservations required; telephone (800) 436-7275. Campground sites (no hookups) are $15 a night. Telephone (559) 252-4848.

For luxury, the Tenaya Lodge at Yosemite, on Highway 41 two miles from the park, charges $189 to $259 a night, double occupancy, in summer. Tel. (800) 635-5807, Internet https://www.tenayalodge.com.

For more information: Yosemite National Park, P.O. Box 577, Yosemite, CA 95387; tel. (209) 372-0200, Internet https://www.nps.gov/yose.

Yosemite Sierra Visitors Bureau, tel. (559) 683-4636, Internet https://www.yosemite-sierra.org.