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82
MAY 2012
•
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
Here’s the thing about climbing
Half Dome as an amateur: You
leave your campsite on the val-
ley floor before dawn, queasily
preoccupied with images of
those steep rock faces lined
with cables. Will you be able to
do it?Will it be dangerous? But
what you don’t consider is how
long it will take to actually
get
to those cables.
And that figure, at least for
our group, was six hours—
climbing rock staircase after
rock staircase, over and over,
hour a er hour.
Essentially, there are two
ways to get to the top of Half
Dome, the majestic granite
centerpiece of California’s
YosemiteNational Park. Option
one, to simply go straight up its
4,800-foot face, is available only
toworld-class climbers. Option
two involves an incredibly
strenuous 8.2-mile uphill hike,
culminating with a steep 400-
foot ascentup the roundedeast
side of the dome, with two steel
cables to hold on to and deadly
slides looming on either side.
Taking the cables route
remains one of the grandest
backcountry treks available
to the average hiker. While
the dangers are very real ,
Half Dome sits in that middle
groundbetweentheadventures
WORDSFROMTHEWILD
“PENNSYLVANIA HAS TAUGHT ME PERSEVERANCE. IT’S IN THE DEADMIDDLE OF THE APPALACHIAN
TRAIL. TO ADD TO THAT, IT’S LIKE ALL THE OTHER STATES TOOK THEIR ROCKS AND DUMPED THEM
THERE. NOT ONLY DO YOUR FEET HURT FROM THOSE JAGGED EDGES, YOUR NECK HURTS FROM
HAVING TO LOOK STRAIGHT DOWN ALL DAY. BUT IT’S ALSO TAUGHT ME TO LOOK FOR BEAUTY IN
UNLIKELY PLACES: A COLORFUL LIZARD, A SMALL SPRING OR AN INTERESTING ROCK FORMATION.
YOU’RE NOT GOING TO HAVE GREAT VIEWS, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO HAVE SCENICWATERFALLS—
BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN IT’S NOT BEAUTIFUL.”
—
JENNIFERPHARRDAVIS,
author of
BecomingOdyssa
and record holder for fastest Appalachian Trail completion
ONWARDAND
UPWARD
Yosemite’s Half Dome offers the perfect
challenge for a less seasoned adventurer
one can buy and those earned
with years of experience.
Comfortably ensconced in
marriage, fatherhood and job,
I had been having nightmares
about the cables. Most acci-
dents, I’d learned, came from
gambling with bad weather or
walking on the outside of the
cables to avoid congestion (the
park servicenowissues just 400
dailypermits to curb that prob-
lem). Once we arrived at the
cable section, the hikers drag-
ging themselves up the slope
ahead of us were reminiscent
of vintage Batman and Robin
crawling up the side of a build-
ing, only with more grimacing.
I swallowed hard, tugged
on a pair of gardening
gloves that a previous
hiker had discarded in
a pile at the base, and
grabbed hold of the cable.
I went slowly, pausing
at some of the wooden
footholds to catch my
breath, settle my nerves
and, of course, take a
look around. The views
behind and to the side,
while terrifying, were out
of this world but nothing
like what we experienced
at the apex, from where
we stared, overwhelmed
by the embarrassment of
marvelous nature below
us. No car could have
carried us there; no gift
shop–bound tram either.
Enhancing the view was
the feeling of achieve-
ment: It required the kind
of sweat and danger that
rarely makes an appearance in
my adult life.
We spent an hour there, in
a large, flat, open area where
a hundred or so people were
spread out, many of them
sitting alone in silence. All
had earned the moment. This
was the land of Ansel Adams,
the land of adventure, of epic
tales on epic peaks in the great
Sierras. But for me, it was
something else: the answer
to the question of whether I
still had a big one in me. Half
Dome had posed that ques-
tion in stark black and white.
It felt good to have an answer.
—Billy Baker
TAKINGAPOWDER
Gypsy ski-touring in
the Carpathians
We reached the chalet at Bâlea
Lac, Romania, in a blizzard by
way of Communist-era cable
car. The summer road, built in
the ’70s to provide escape over
the Fagaras Mountains in case
of Soviet invasion, was buried.
Near the top, the operator had
leaped out to help dig passage
to the wheelhouse. Inside
we played hearts and drank
beer served by women in
Jägermeister uniforms. There
were pelts on the walls, an old
photo of the place after it had
been crushed by an avalanche,
a soccer game on satellite TV.
In the morning, we awoke to
an ice-blue sky and our own
private alpine cirque to carve
up as we pleased.
—DAVID PAGE