Half Dome by Accident

The plan was never Half Dome.

The plan was San Diego. Amin and I had decided to go work remote from San Diego for the week, and then toward the end of it get in the car Friday after work, drive up to Yosemite, and camp two nights. We had a site reserved for Friday and Saturday. Drive up Friday after work, chill Saturday, pack out Sunday. Nice and simple.

Then somewhere in the middle of the week one of us said the thing you're really not supposed to say out loud. What if we tried to get a Half Dome permit last minute?

Half Dome runs on a permit system, and outside the main lottery there's a daily one that opens up two days before you hike. So on Tuesday we both put our names in, hoping to land something for Thursday. We didn't think much of it after that. Then later that afternoon, right as we were driving to grab lunch, both our phones buzzed at basically the same second. I opened mine first. Denied. Amin opened his a beat later, and his got accepted, and the permit covered two hikers. So just like that, we had it. Two permits, one dome.

Which is how a chill camping weekend quietly turned into something a lot bigger.

Wednesday we worked maybe half a day and gave up on the rest of it around 2pm to start packing. By 3 we were rolling out of La Jolla and pointing the car north. Getting through LA was its own little ordeal, traffic bumper to bumper the whole way, so we bailed off the freeway in Westwood and grabbed dinner before getting back on it. From there it was a straight shot in spirit only: north toward Fresno, up into the foothills, past the park boundary, and then the long slow crawl deeper into Yosemite until we finally pulled into the Happy Isles parking area in the valley. It was 3:45 in the morning when we killed the engine. Eleven hours and forty five minutes, door to door, La Jolla to the trailhead.

So picture it. It's almost 4am, we've been in a car for nearly twelve hours, and we're standing in a dark parking lot in Yosemite Valley loading gear into our packs. There's a big bright moon overhead but the stars are somehow still out too, and the whole valley is just dead quiet. It was honestly kind of surreal, so we didn't rush. Amin pulled out his camera and shot some astrophotography for a bit while I got my stuff sorted. Around 4am we clicked our headlamps on and started walking.

We took the Mist Trail up, and we did almost the entire thing in the dark. Vernal Falls, then Nevada Falls, all by headlamp, just these little pools of light bobbing up a staircase of wet granite. By the time we topped out over Nevada Falls the sky had started to go from black to that dark morning blue, and it was light enough that I could finally click my headlamp off.

Now, I've done the Mist Trail before, and the last time I did it, it felt like a slog. Long, endless, a real grind. This time it felt like nothing. I don't know if it was hiking it in the dark so I couldn't see how much was left, or if it was just that Half Dome was looming so large in my head that everything before it shrank down, but I got to the top of Nevada Falls and I was still completely fresh. Legs good, breathing fine, not an ounce of that usual "okay how much more of this" feeling. I was ready to go.

From there we came off the Mist Trail and onto the John Muir Trail and started working our way up through Little Yosemite Valley toward the Half Dome junction. That stretch ended up being one of my favorite parts of the entire day. It was right at the edge of dawn, the sun just starting to come up, the birds waking up and starting to chirp, the air still cool before the heat of the day set in. Little Yosemite is also mostly flat, which after two or three miles of straight uphill stone staircase felt like an absolute gift. I ended up getting separated from Amin through there, drifting a little ahead, and honestly I didn't mind it at all. It gave me a stretch of quiet to myself, just me and the morning, which was really nice. We linked back up before the junction, then hit it and started climbing up out of the valley toward the dome.

That's where the real views open up. Half Dome swings into view and you can just barely pick out the cables running up the back of it. We stopped at this one spot where the dome is basically standing right in front of you, filling the whole frame, and got our cameras out, and that was the first time I actually saw the cables for what they were.

The closer we got the rockier and steeper it turned, and every so often we'd stop and zoom the cameras all the way in on the dome and see these tiny little specks scattered up the side of it. My first reaction was there's no way those are people. It took about five seconds for it to click that yeah, those were absolutely people, inching their way up the cables, and that was a little wild to process.

Then we got to subdome. And I'll say the thing nobody seems to say enough. Subdome is the scariest part of the whole hike. Not the cables. Subdome. At least it was for me, and it wasn't close.

The thing about subdome is you don't really notice it starting. The trail just gradually turns into this rocky face, and then at some point it hits you all at once. You're on the edge of this thing, and the trail is exposed as hell. It's steep stone staircases winding around the side of a very steep dome, hundreds of feet of open air right off your shoulder. The rock is solid, but a few of the steps feel a little loose and shaky under you, and in some sections there aren't even stairs, you're just scrambling up the bare polished face of the rock. And the whole time you're aware that one bad step off the side of that staircase and you're going down the side of subdome, a thousand feet to the valley floor. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I handled it gracefully. There were parts where I just sat down for a second to gather myself. There were parts where I got down on all fours and crawled up the stairs on my hands. Zero shame about it. I genuinely don't understand why more people don't warn you that subdome is the real gut check.

I made it up to the top of subdome, found a spot to sit, and caught my breath. And I very deliberately did not let myself think about the fact that at some point I was going to have to come back down this exact same way, because sitting right there in front of me now were the cables.

Pictures really do not do the cables justice. They are unbelievably steep. And here's the part I still think about. When I actually looked up at them, I didn't panic. Normally in a moment like that I feel the adrenaline kick in, my stomach drops, my brain starts going what do I do, what do I do. This time none of that happened. I just felt weirdly, completely calm, like I was already past the fear and out the other side of it. It was this quiet, level feeling of, okay, I'm about to go do this, and yeah it's probably going to be kind of horrible, and I'm going to do it anyway. I sat there a while just talking to some of the groups coming and going, asking people how it was, whether the rock was slippery, that kind of thing. And then at some point I just decided it was time. I pulled my gloves on, cinched my shoes down tight, snugged up my backpack, and checked that everything was where it needed to be. Let's go.

What happened next is honestly kind of a blur, and not because I lost it. I went completely onto autopilot. The only two things in my entire world were keeping my grip solid on the cables and watching exactly where I put my feet, because the footing is genuinely the hardest part of the whole thing. That granite has been climbed on for almost a hundred years and it's worn glassy smooth, so slick you can't fully trust your shoes on it. So I just locked in. Before I knew it I was halfway up, and I made a point of not turning around to look down because I knew exactly what that would do to me. There was this one guy right in front of me who was pretty visibly freaking out, saying stuff like "why am I doing this, I'm scared of heights," and the two of us kind of started laughing about it together, and weirdly that did more to get me up those cables calmly than anything else could have.

And then I was at the top.

The cables round off near the top and the rock flattens out, so I climbed off the end of them and found a spot to chill and wait for Amin. When he came up he was in rough shape. He said his whole body had started cramping partway up, muscles seizing on him while he was trying to hold onto the cables for dear life, which sounds genuinely awful. So we posted up on the summit for a while and got him sorted out. Electrolytes, snacks, a minute to let his body calm back down. We cracked a beer up there, took a bunch of pictures, and just soaked it in. We ended up hanging out on top for something like an hour and a half, maybe two hours. We'd tagged the summit around 9:30 in the morning, which still gets me. Car at 4am, top of Half Dome by 9:30.

And I have to mention the weather, because it was flawless. Not one single cloud in the sky the entire time. Amin and I had actually talked about it earlier in the week, about how much we were hoping it would hold, because Half Dome lives and dies by the weather. A totally clear morning can turn into a thunderstorm on the summit by noon or 1pm, and being up on that exposed granite in a storm is exactly where you do not want to be. We got unbelievably lucky. It stayed perfect start to finish.

At one point up top I lost one of my gloves, and I just didn't panic about it. I figured it was somewhere up there, and that nobody on earth is stealing a single random glove off the top of Half Dome. So I stayed calm, we looked around, and Amin actually ended up being the one to find it for me. Then we got ourselves ready and started down.

I'd been convinced the descent was going to mess me up worse than the climb up, but to my own surprise I stayed just as calm going down. I faced in toward the mountain the whole way down the cables so I wouldn't psych myself out by staring down the slope. Amin, on the other hand, went down facing outward for most of it, GoPro running, because obviously he wanted the shots. The descent took us about half an hour, mostly because there was way more traffic on the cables by that point in the afternoon. Going up earlier that morning it had taken maybe fifteen minutes. On the way down I found myself doing the same thing other people had done for me on the way up, talking to the folks heading up, telling them yeah it's scary but you've got this, you're good.

Once we were off the cables and off subdome, we figured the worst was behind us. The way back down would be the easy part, right? We'd just done Half Dome. The rest was just Half Dome trail to the JMT to Little Yosemite to the Mist Trail, all downhill. Wrong. The hike out absolutely took it out of me, way more than I expected, and it went on way longer than the climb up had. The Mist Trail on the descent especially had me thinking holy hell as I picked my way down all those steep wet steps on tired legs. Amin overheated so badly at one point that he stripped down and jumped straight into the Merced River to cool off, which was hilarious and also looked genuinely amazing. By then it was hot, we were worn out, and we were running low on water, so we just put our heads down and pushed for the car. We rolled back into the trailhead lot right around 4pm.

Car to car, it came out to about twelve hours. Four in the morning to four in the afternoon. Then we went and found some genuinely incredible food, because we'd more than earned it.

And that was the whole thing. Our completely ad hoc, thrown together, impromptu Half Dome.