Half Dome: To the cables

[cjsmith]

The wooded, less-steep section of trail is very pretty and mostly uneventful. It's part sun and part shade, with a variety of trees and scrub. We started recognizing people we had passed before; hikers going about the same speed would leapfrog each other from time to time.

I was getting awfully tired of eating, but I wasn't falling behind on my "one food unit per hour" schedule. I forced myself.

We started to see people coming down. Most of these had come from the backpackers' camp so as to make a shorter day hike of it. (Later I saw one advantage of this approach: less crowding!)

One hiker coming down alerted us that there were two bears ahead, pacing back and forth across the trail! Yosemite has a big problem with bears becoming too habituated to humans, usually because of easy access to human food. When a bear gets too bold and too interested in human food, it can get aggressive, posing a danger to humans; bears are sometimes killed for this reason. We didn't know quite what we were dealing with: bears that were just a little too calm around people, or bears that were really a problem? Soon we saw them. My worry meter increased when I noticed it was a big one and a little one: momma and cub. Long term, the right thing to do is make sure they're scared of us. Other hikers had been using whistles to little effect. Chris and I hollered at them, waved our arms, roared, and just generally defended the trail. Nearby hikers might have helped make noise; I'm not sure. The bears loped off. I think I got one photo of momma's butt as she went over a log.

Further up the trail we saw a small creature we dubbed "The Bug from Mars". It was WEIRD. I have no idea what it's called. It was a bit bigger than a caterpillar, maybe about the length and thickness of my thumb. Its front section had tiny mothlike wings which it fluttered
constantly to no effect. The rear two-thirds were striped: rings of gray fur alternating with yellow shiny skin of some sort. It looked like it was stuck halfway through metamorphosis. We decided this was quite the trip for wildlife.

Time check photo at the sign reading "Half Dome 2.0". It was close to noon. I began to believe I would make it all the way up.

The flat section of trail ends abruptly at the base of the large granite chunk making up Half Dome. There is a saddle I had never noticed before, but I later saw that it is clearly visible even from the valley floor. By this time we were approaching from the east, and on that side, there's a second, much lower bump. Into this, stairs of large granite chunks have been set. A sign warns that if a thunderstorm is anywhere on the horizon, hikers should not proceed past this point. Lightning has struck Half Dome in every month of the year. Someone had scribbled on the sign: 494 STEPS. I didn't check.

I counted the first twenty or so steps and I remember looking at my watch. Twenty-five more sections just like that; twenty-five more sets of twenty steps. The altitude was really getting to me. I knew how hard climbing stairs ought to be, and this was a lot harder than that. Twelve fifty one, I thought, and my world has narrowed to the next twenty steps. I wasn't even thinking of the cables or the climb back down. I was just telling myself over and over, at each point, that I could do twenty more steps.

People were beginning to encourage and help each other. Everyone was very polite about passing. (If you fall off these steps, you're probably toast, so finding a place to stand while someone goes by you is kind of important.) People at the top of the steps were calling down to friends and even to other hikers they hadn't met before: You can do it! Almost there!

We got to the top of the bump and rested for quite a while. I tried to eat, I really did, but every bite was a big argument with my gag reflex and I finally gave it up. It's at this point that I began to fall seriously behind on food.

The view into Little Yosemite Valley and the upper edge of Yosemite Valley proper was stunningly beautiful.

The cables were clearly visible on the other side of the saddle and I could see people making their way slowly up and down. There was no break in the traffic; it was a neverending stream of people in both directions. I was nervous. People had told me the cables were bad, and it hadn't sunk in. It was beginning to sink in when I looked at them. I bet Chris, afraid of heights, felt worse.

Comments

Cables

[cwilson.livejournal.com]

> I bet Chris, afraid of heights, felt worse.

I can't deal with the whole length of those cables. I can only deal with little
sections. Every ten feet or so, there are poles set in the rock holding the cables
up and there is a piece of wood across the rock from the bottom of one pole
to the bottom of the next. The first time I went up to the base of Half Dome,
I decided that I wouldn't go up the cables, but since I was there, I would go
up one or two sections from wood to wood.

So I went up a couple of sections. Then I decided to try one more. Then one
more. As long as I just thought about doing them one at a time and didn't
look up or down, I just did one section, then another.

That's the way I made it up this time, too. I didn't work on trying to get up the
cables, just seeing if I could get up one section.

Re: Cables

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I was too prone to thinking about the big picture (both figuratively and literally); I would think "I could just go down now" and then I would think "but I can't reach the downward cable" and then I would think "so how am I EVER gonna get out of here?" I always wound up asking that question: how I was EVER gonna get out of there. The answers weren't good: finish climbing up all the way, go back down (worse?), or just let go.

Re: Cables

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I'm scared of heights, too, but -- if I thought I could *ever* do it -- climbing Half Dome would be worth it. Maybe blindfolded. . . . ;)

Re: Cables

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Somebody told me today that there's a pony ride leading up to the last bit. I don't know where it departs (Glacier Point, maybe?). That might be a way to decrease the strenuousness of it all. But the cables are still a toughie. The altitude doesn't help. (I've been a sea level dweller all my life, so altitude matters to me.)