Half Dome Chock-Full of Weekend Hikers

They came in high-tech hiking gear and flimsy sneakers, donning bikini tops and religious garb. They celebrated birthdays and commemorated deaths.

Sweating, smiling, and at times cursing and crying, they braved dehydration, afternoon thunderstorms and throbbing knees to haul themselves up steel cables that traverse Half Dome’s sloping northeast face, following a route first forged in 1919 by an awe-struck Scotsman.

Hundreds of hikers young and old made the grueling 16.4-mile round-trip pilgrimage Saturday to Half Dome’s majestic cap, in a prelude to a summer of exceptionally crowded weekends at the park’s best-known granite icon.

The Half Dome corridor is Yosemite National Park’s most crowded under normal circumstances. But long-needed trail repairs that began July 8 and continue through Sept. 19 are restricting weekday access to the dome for the first time in decades--and possibly in the park’s history. And that means even bigger weekend throngs on the dizzying cable thoroughfare.

Saturday marked the first weekend day since the partial closure took effect. Logjams on the cable ladder had some hikers panicking and others turning back in frustration. But to the majority of the white-knuckled hikers who inched like ants up the treacherous granite wall, it was a small price to pay for breathtaking park panoramas and a sense of personal accomplishment.

“It’s the typical California traffic jam, but it sure is worth it,” joked Bentley LaBaron, 25, of Oakdale, who made his third ascent up Half Dome on Saturday, this time carrying his 5-month-old daughter, Elizabeth, on his chest to the base of the cables.

In a two-hour midday stretch alone, as thunderclouds massed to the east, hundreds of hikers trudged up the final half-mile of crumbling hand-placed granite stairs to pluck gloves from a pile at the base of the cables and attempt the summit.

A few embarked from reserved campsites in Little Yosemite Valley about four miles below. But the vast majority hiked the full 8.2 miles--and more than 4,800 feet--from the valley floor to stand exhilarated on Half Dome’s tilted peak 8,836 feet above sea level.

Park spokeswoman Deb Schweizer estimated that about 2,000 people embark on the hike on a typical summer weekend, although far fewer make it to the top.

Visitors have rearranged their weekday plans to hike the dome Friday through Sunday, when the trail restrictions are lifted, Schweizer said.

The well-groomed John Muir Trail winds from the valley floor through stands of Douglas fir and gold cup oak to Vernal Falls and its 320-foot vertical plunge. There, hikers can detour through the mist trail, soaked by a fine spray, past the top of the falls.

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Parade of Hikers

The Muir trail picks up again past spectacular Nevada Falls, where the rush of water creates its own wind, then levels out through broad Little Yosemite Valley--scattered with lodgepole and Jeffrey pine--before winding up to reach the base of the stairs.

Saturday’s steady parade of humanity included boys with green hair, vacationing families with cranky children in tow and an occasional crazed athlete who ran nearly naked up the steep terrain. Hiking in their midst was an Old German Baptist Brethren church group--young women dressed in gauze bonnets, tennis shoes and long pastel dresses--in California to attend a church camp outside Modesto. The women, whose beliefs are similar to the Amish, turned heads as they gripped the cables to inch their way up the rock in antiquated religious attire.

“I would die if I had to wear all those clothes,” said an exhausted Charlene Martinez, 20, of Garden Grove, who made the climb in a bikini top with two girlfriends. “I can barely walk as it is, let alone have a dress to trip over.”

For decades now, conquering Half Dome’s face has become a ritual of personal achievement and a backdrop to commemorate life’s turning points. While only hard-core rock climbers can climb the flattened face tourists see from the Valley floor, the cable route has made the journey passable to just about anyone with stamina and guts.

In 1865 the United States Geological Survey characterized the dome as “perfectly inaccessible ... being probably the only one of all the prominent points about Yosemite which has never been, and never will be, trodden by human foot.”

Just a decade later, Scottish carpenter George Anderson made the first recorded ascent, pounding bolts into the granite and connecting them with ropes to create the first ladder. Steel cables were installed in 1919 by the Sierra Club and replaced, first in 1934, then in 1984, by thicker cables, said park historian Jim Snyder. Wooden 2x4s are fastened to the rock under the cables, serving as a resting place for weary climbers’ feet.

As hairy as the cable climb can seem, no climbing deaths have occurred here, although one drunken climber took a tumble in the 1980s, Snyder said. Far more dangerous are the lightning storms that often sweep the valley on summer afternoons. Several climbers were killed by lightning on the dome in 1985, and signs warn hikers to stay off the peak if darkened clouds are approaching.

The rock face below the cables has been worn smooth by the boots and shoes of hundreds of hikers over the years. Anniversaries and birthdays have been celebrated from Half Dome’s sweeping perch, and a determined few have chosen this as a suicide launch.

Don Hill, 35, made the trip from Atlanta to celebrate a friend’s 50th birthday Saturday. But the friend turned back just a few miles into the hike, complaining of dizziness. The others soldiered on, but the group planned to celebrate the birthday Saturday night, safely ensconced in the Curry Village bar.

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Homage to Brother

For Ken Mijares, the trek up the mineral-streaked monolith’s sloping face is a homage to his brother, Mark, who died of leukemia at age 32 four years ago. Saturday marked the fourth annual trip to commemorate that loss, and family friend Kyle Bunch, 21, tossed one of Mark’s wrestling medals off Half Dome’s lip to honor his memory.

“My brother always wanted to come up here but never got a chance to do it,” said Mijares, a Modesto butcher who knew of the weekday restrictions and planned the trip accordingly.

The repairs are being made to the half-mile stretch of steep granite steps just below where the cables begin. Some of the stairs are crumbling and unsafe, and hikers who tramp around them damage the stonecrop--tiny flowers that grow from the granite’s cracks. Trail maintenance all along the Half Dome corridor is constant, Schweizer said, although it typically does not require shutting the trail. In this case, however, park officials do not want hikers attempting to scramble around the granite stairs, which will be reconstructed using dry stone masonry techniques. That is the only stretch of trail that is being closed.

Trail crews will work throughout the summer, Mondays through Thursdays from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m. That limits passage on those days to visitors camped below or day-hikers prepared to travel in darkness--although park officials are discouraging such efforts, Schweizer said.

“The thing we don’t want to do is have a series of search-and-rescues,” she said. “The Half Dome corridor is probably the area where most of our search-and-rescues occur. It attracts a lot of people who don’t know what they’re getting into.”

Schweizer said she did not know whether the trail had ever been closed to summer hikers, and Snyder said he believes it remained open during the last repair to the stairs, in 1982. Park officials deemed this year’s closure crucial to the trail’s safe repair, but arranged to keep it open Fridays through Sundays to continue to accommodate visitors.

The first week of trail closure has gone smoothly, said Ranger Jack Hoeflich, who headed up the trail Saturday with an extra horse to rescue an injured hiker at Nevada Falls, a little less than halfway up the trail.

Still, Saturday’s bumper-to-bumper throngs on the cables were a bit too much for some hikers to handle. The crowds, and the occasional panic attack, left climbers standing immobilized, holding themselves up with shaking arms on the steep rock grade.

Krista Stangel, a 25-year-old San Francisco Web developer, met up with six girlfriends from college for a reunion on the dome. But they turned around halfway up the cables.

“There was someone who stopped and freaked out ahead of us and sat down,” said Stangel, whose friends got nervous hanging on the cables while dark clouds rolled in. “It’s kind of anticlimactic.”

Steve Jones, a 43-year-old ranch hand from Napa Valley, also took a pass on the climb after assessing the mass of sweating strangers lined up along the cables.

Since up-and-down traffic moves along the same two-cable path, those hoping for a quicker descent found themselves hanging with one hand on the outside edge.

“I’m paranoid. That’s why I’m not going up. I keep thinking somebody’s going to push me,” Jones said as he gazed up at the cables and chewed his lip. “I’m a real hiking-and-biking guy, but I don’t mess with cliffs too much. I get wigged out.”

But plenty of others said the ascent is an initiation of sorts, and well worth it, crowds and all.

“It’s something that makes you feel very small, and nature feels very overwhelming,” said 32-year-old Ryan Bottano, a tattooed and shirtless air-conditioning technician from Costa Mesa. “You see its power.”