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.
