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Learning to Turn Back in Yosemite
At about 10:00 AM Monday morning, I saw a plastic water bottle tumble 2000 feet off the side of Half Dome, the iconic granite peak in Yosemite National Park.
My sister and I sat at the base of its famous cables, eating PB&J sandwiches and trying to lower our heart rates while bathing in the sun. I had put salt on mine, betting that I could leverage some kind of Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat business. It tasted terrible, but I was hungry.
The day before, we had driven past Olmsted Point, where we pulled over to absorb our first view of Half Dome and take a photo of a group of Patagonia-clad would-be adventurers. Just hours prior, we had won the permit lottery and received permission to hoist ourselves to the top along the cables.
The iconic dome’s northern face is a sheer cliff that takes experienced climbers two days to scale, and south face rounds into a similarly steep, still less featured face. Those who explored the region even before John Muir did had declared that no person could ever reach the summit of the mountain. Some 150 years later, the National Park Service maintains a set of cables along which hikers can hoist themselves to the top along the more gradual East Face, which is likely a good deal wider than the 30 feet it feels like.
