Shattered Air: A True Account of Catastrophe and Courage on Yosemite's Half Dome

by Bob Madgic

  Another individual who came to Yosemite in the 1860s and who lived there on and off across fifty years was a Scotsman by the name of John Muir. Muir’s conservation legacies have shaped the very character of America. Among his many accomplishments, he was instrumental in having Yosemite preserved as a national park. He also helped found the Sierra Club in 1892 and became its first president. In fighting many battles on nature’s behalf, his sword was the written word. He wrote ten books and more than three hundred articles in some of the most eloquent and compelling language ever penned.

  Although he was one of this country’s greatest naturalists ever, John Muir incorrectly attributed Half Dome’s shape to glacial forces. He correctly deduced that glaciers carved out the canyons and valleys of the Sierra, but he erred in concluding that glaciers sculpted the domes, at least those more than four thousand feet from the Valley floor. According to various studies, Half Dome protruded five hundred to nine hundred feet above the highest glaciers.

  Exfoliation and erosion formed the rounded domes as forces, in a process also called sheeting, cast away successive thin, granite slabs called spalls over time, much like the peeling away of onion layers. Scoured by the weather—ice and frost wedging and heaving, and lightning strikes—the granite top progressively lost mass and hence weight. As the load decreased, the granite expanded outward, creating the spalls. Originally, the mountain may have been angular, but exfoliation shaved off the corners of the spalls.

  Half Dome’s sheer face extends twenty-two hundred feet from its base of jumbled rocks to the crest. It was formed by the progressive removal of thin rock sheets from a zone of nearly vertical joints. Indeed, this process shaped many of the landforms in Yosemite that glaciers didn’t sculpt. (In Yosemite’s high country, the jointing process is evident among other granite domes with partial vertical faces.) Much of a granite monolith like Half Dome consists of solid rock that is highly resistant to erosive forces. But often present in the rock are parallel cracks or fractures called joints. Weathering forces, especially ice, cause the jointed segments to break off eventually. In the case of Half Dome, the fractures are vertically aligned; that produced the mountain’s distinctive vertical face. However, one prior form still remains, at the apex of this northwest side: the Visor, a prominent protrusion that resembles the beak of a giant bird or an observation booth.

  To the surprise of many, there never was another half to Half Dome. Up to 80 percent of the famous northwest side may still be intact, despite references to the “missing half.” Indeed, the Dome’s appearance is more illusory than real. That shape prevails in views from the Valley floor, but a view of Half Dome from Glacier Point or Washburn Point reveals that only the top of the southeast side is rounded; the remainder is almost as vertical as the northwest face.

  AS IF ON A GRAND PEDESTAL, Half Dome stands at the far end of the Valley, on the divide between Tenaya Canyon and Little Yosemite Valley. At 8,892 feet in elevation, its summit juts almost one mile above Yosemite Valley. Of all the eminences in this part of Yosemite, only the lofty, two-mile-long granite ridge called Clouds Rest, with an altitude of 9,929 feet, surpasses it. Half Dome’s location and height bestow upon it a visual prominence and allure that any visitor to Yosemite Valley takes in. They also account for yet another of this monoliths features—its susceptibility to weather systems to unleash their torrents there. Storms that build over Clouds Rest inevitably move down Tenaya Canyon and take aim at Half Dome. The same holds true for ones that develop in lower Yosemite Valley.

  If there is any such thing as a “granite lightning rod,” Half Dome is it.

  EVERY MOUNTAIN BECKONS to climbers for a host of personal reasons. And contrary to Whitney’s assessment that Half Dome would never be scaled, its summit lured the adventurous early on. Several first attempts ended in failure. But on October 12, 1875, George Anderson—a former sea captain, carpenter, blacksmith, and one of Yosemite Park’s early trail builders—set his sights on the top and would not be denied. The challenge: ascending a rounded slope of polished granite with a grade of forty-five to sixty degrees. First, Anderson tried applying pine pitch to the bottoms of his bare feet as an adhesive. That didn’t work. Then, summoning his trade skills, he drilled a six-inch-deep hole into the granite slope every five to six feet and drove in an iron bolt, which he used as a foothold to drill the next hole. The Scotsman thus painstakingly proceeded up the six-hundred-foot incline over several days. When he finished, he descended on the same bolts and spliced together sections of rope to connect them. That enabled Anderson to pull himself back up to the top of Half Dome.

  What he found was a vast, mainly flat surface covering about thirteen acres (the equivalent of approximately seventeen football fields), with a higher knoll in the middle of the dome. The side overlooking the Valley had a sheer edge; the other sides had rounded slopes before they, too, became almost vertical.

  Delighted with his accomplishment, Anderson returned to the Valley. He thought about constructing a staircase to the summit.

  Within a week, six men and a woman wearing a skirt successfully made the ascent using Anderson’s rope. The woman, Sally Dutcher from San Francisco, a twenty-eight-year-old assistant to the famous photographer Carleton E. Watkins, demonstrated that mountaineering was not strictly a man’s sport. On November 10 of the same year, right after a snowstorm that would have discouraged anyone else, John Muir became the ninth person to accomplish this feat.

  Muir described his first view from the summit of Half Dome as “perfectly glorious. ... A massive cloud of pure pearl luster . . . was arched across the Valley from wall to wall. . . . My shadow, clearly outlined, about half a mile long, lay upon this glorious white surface with startling effect. I walked back and forth, waved my arms and struck all sorts of attitudes, to see every slightest movement enormously exaggerated.” The German word for this rare optical illusion, in which a vast shadow or apparition is projected on the mists of a mountain, is Brockengespenst or the “specter of the Brocken” (Brocken is the highest of the Hartz Mountains in Germany). Atop Half Dome, Muir identified plants such as spirea, cinquefoil, alpine daisy, buckwheat, goldenrod, Sierra onion, pen-stemon, and three species of “repressed and storm beaten” pine— white-bark, western hemlock, and lodgepole.

  Since Muir’s time, the rare Mount Lyell salamander, a lungless amphibian that sustains itself on a diet of spiders and other insects, has been spotted on the summit. The only mammal living there before the arrival of humans was the golden-mantled squirrel, often referred to as a “chipmunk.” It still exists there, along with other small furry creatures that undoubtedly followed the parade of humans to the top.

  Anderson’s rope trail attracted only those willing to pull themselves up a perilous slope using a system that could fail at any time. In fact, snow and ice during the winter of 1883–84 broke the rope and ripped out spikes. A new rope broke in 1895 and again in 1901. In 1908, a climber inserted new pegs. Such patchwork repairs continued until a more permanent trail could be built. Anderson, who died of pneumonia in 1884, never realized his dream of constructing a staircase.

  TO ASCEND ANDERSON’S ROPE, of course, you had to reach the base of Half Dome. The effort then and now typically begins on the renowned Mist Trail, built in the late 1850s. Consisting largely of granite steps, it starts at Happy Isles at the far end of the Valley and winds alongside the Merced River up a narrow canyon. The trail leads hikers first to Vernal Fall, where crashing water sprays off rocks, creating swirling mists—hence the trail’s name—that engulf those who pass by at the closest point. Vernal Fall drops only 317 feet, but the sheet of water is unbroken from top to bottom and as wide as 80 feet when the Merced is full, thus making it one of the most symmetrical falls in the world.

  Mist Trail continues up the steep ravine to the top of Nevada Fall, not quite three and a half miles from the trailhead. Nevada Fall, like Vernal Fall, plummets over a granite platform, one of many steps in the “Giant Staircase.” The full staircase, encompassing le
ss distinguishable platforms, reaches from the Valley floor to the base of Mount Lyell—a distance of twenty-one miles and an altitude gain of seventy-six hundred feet. Glaciation quarried away the massive vertical joints of granite formations at roughly right angles, leaving stair-like platforms in its wake. Trail builders tried to duplicate nature’s work, although on a much smaller scale, in the tight canyon below Nevada Fall. Using only manpower, they placed more than two thousand granite steps; some of the risers are nearly fifteen inches, others barely one.

  At the lip of Nevada Fall, the Merced River surges through a narrow opening in the granite and plummets 594 feet to a projecting ledge that splays the massive falls slightly outward. Nevada Fall, unlike Vernal’s even drop, begins as a constricted blast of water and then widens dramatically as it drops, resembling a giant horsetail.

  From Nevada Fall, the Mist Trail follows the river to Little Yosemite Valley, which is slightly less than four miles from Half Dome’s shoulder—a steep, six-hundred-foot hump that had to be surmounted on somewhat perilous footing before one reached the base of Half Dome’s eastern side and the start of Anderson’s rope trail. For decades, the shoulder was informally called quarter dome, a designation that conflicted with that of nearby formations formally called Quarter Domes. (Today the shoulder is referred to as Sub Dome, a name that some people find less than endearing.) In 1919, the Sierra Club funded the construction of more-permanent climbing aids up Half Dome. A train of about a dozen mules carried two coils of connected steel cable from the Valley to the base of Sub Dome. There a civil engineer named Lawrence Sovulewski took over; his crew manually hauled the coils to the top of the hump, then up the slope of Half Dome.

  The revamped pathway consists of a cable handrail on each side and wooden footholds, a design that hasn’t changed much since 1919. The cables are thirty inches apart—close enough to grip with both hands yet far enough apart that hikers can squeeze past each other—and above average shoulder height to accommodate the steep incline, which obliges climbers to lean forward as they pull themselves up. The cables are attached to steel posts set in sockets drilled into the granite every ten feet and fortified by heavy chains bolted into the rock every hundred feet. Two-by-fours secured to the steel posts provide a foothold—and frequent opportunities to rest.

  In 1934, a crew from the Civilian Conservation Corps, an outgrowth of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, replaced the cables as part of trail-building projects nationwide. The National Park Service did the same in 1984. Most of the steel posts with the exception of those along the very upper part are removed each fall and laid on the granite in order to prevent destruction from snowslides. They are then returned to their holes in early spring.

  The early trail builders also constructed a granite stairway up Sub Dome. The “Rock Stairway,” as some publications refer to it, has roughly 600 steps, most of which are manmade. Then the trail descends a short distance to the beginning of the cables.

  The trail from the Valley floor to the summit—the Half Dome Trail—has been recognized in the National Register of Historic Places since 1988. Thousands of people from around the world hike to the top every year.

  Among those who made regular pilgrimages to Half Dome’s summit were Adrian Esteban and Tom Rice. For them and a coterie of companions, the Dome took on a meaning far beyond that of other outdoor adventures.

  YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK

  Thunderheads eclipsed the lowering sun as it dipped toward the western horizon. The storm had swept down from Clouds Rest past Tenaya Canyon and was now massed over Half Dome, where arrows of lightning pierced the darkening gloom and caused the air to smell as if it were burning. While thunderous detonations rocked the heavens, rain began pounding Half Dome's granite slopes and raced downward in ever-thicker rivulets.

  Nothing in the experience of the frightened backpacker who was caught out on Half Dome's summit had prepared him for this. Lashed by sheets of rain, barely able to make out the surrounding ridges between lightning flashes, he was growing desperate when he stumbled upon a human-made rock enclosure. He scrambled inside, spread out a sleeping pad, and scrunched himself on the ground against one of the low walls. Clutching a tarp around him, he prayed he'd survive. His imagination, perhaps stoked by the thunder blasts and rushing wind, conjured the voices of vengeful demons.

  Then he thought he heard a different sound.

  Amid the reverberations ripping through the sky and rolling off Yosemite's domes and spires, he could have sworn he heard laughter.

  Human laughter.

  He raised his head and peered cautiously over the wall. In a sustained flash that lit the surrounding terrain, he saw a pale figure a few hundred yards off, toward the area atop Half Dome known as the Visor. His brain, in shocked disbelief, registered the image of a dancing man. A dancing naked man, head thrown back, arms spread wide, hooting up into the rain.

  The light died away but the shouting did not.

  The backpacker rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t hallucinated because, in fitful illumination from successive bursts of lightning, he saw the figure again, his skin chalk-white in the eerie light, spinning and bending with reckless grace on the exposed rock as if it were a dance floor. Another patch of darkness, then a new shock: Four figures now circled the naked man. They were sodden, dark, clothed shapes, slapping at each other and seemingly exchanging high fives, weaving like drunken acolytes of some mountain Bacchus, their disregard a mockery of the deadly forces playing around them.

  But in the next dark interval, they all vanished.

  The observer stared. It was as if they had dropped into the mountain. Or never been there at all. Yet he was certain that he'd seen and heard them. What mortals would dare expose themselves on the bare summit of Half Dome, which, in a fierce storm, was essentially a gigantic lightning rod?

  At the first sign that the storm was dissipating, he rose to his feet, troubled. He quickly stuffed his gear into his pack and hurried toward the cables, his lifeline to a safer refuge below. As he dropped down the granite incline, the cables burning his hands from his swift descent, the image of the dancers remained with him.

  Who were they?

  Where had they come from?

  Where had they gone?

  —AN ANONYMOUS OBSERVER ON HALF DOME, JULY 27, 1985

  1

  THE LEADERS

  A large granite mountain cannot be denied—it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.—Ansel Adams

  FOUR YEARS EARLIER

  MAY 23, 1981

  ADRIAN ESTEBAN FOLLOWED TOM RICE on a hillside path edging . a tributary feeding the Merced River, a spring-fed creek that tumbled down from high in the rugged foothills outside Yosemite National Park. Yellow oak, foothill pine, chaparral, and poison oak formed dense clusters in the ravine below. Halfa mile up the narrow trail, just before the open terrain steepened abruptly and where the distant top of the mountain was visible, Rice stopped. Through erosion, the creek had created beds of polished red stone here, their hue the result of oxidized iron deposits. The particular pool they were looking at was set within a rock grotto, one side vertical and slick. It was known as Paradise. On the hot summer days common in the Sierra foothills, local residents were fond of jumping from the surrounding rock platforms into the cold water, sliding otter-like down a natural chute into the pool, and sunbathing on the smooth stones.

  Which was fine for the locals. But Esteban knew very well that Rice had not brought him here for restful play

  There it is, Rice said. Up there.

  Shading his eyes from the morning sun, Esteban peered where Rice was pointing to a ledge high above. With a rising sense of unease, Esteban shrugged free of his army-surplus rucksack and removed the green bandanna from his head. He unbuckled the military belt that held his metal canteen—Esteban’s outdoor wardrobe was greatly influenced by Vietnam combat films—then pulled off his boots and, finally, his camouflage pants with multiple pockets. The tank top he liked to wear to show off his
sharply defined muscles stayed on, as did his shorts. Rice, meanwhile, had stripped off his pack, old low-cut sneakers, and mandala-embla-zoned T-shirt and was moving up toward the ledge.

  It was morning on their first trip together to Half Dome. Rice had already informed Esteban that he had to complete a test before they would do the Dome. It was to jump from the ledge here at Paradise into the pool. To Rice, this initiation ritual was an integral part of the Half Dome experience. It would demonstrate that a companion was able to overcome his fears—a central piece in Rice’s beliefs about how to reap life’s rewards.

  When they stood on the ledge together, Rice told Esteban it was exactly forty-four feet to the surface of the pool. He knew this because he'd previously measured the distance with a rope. The pool’s depth was fifteen feet—plenty deep for their purposes.

  As Esteban looked down, his stomach felt queasy, his legs weak. The swimming hole, which had seemed about the size of a small backyard pool when he stood near it, looked considerably smaller from up here. He felt himself recoiling inwardly at the thought of leaping from the ledge. In fact, he couldn't remember ever feeling so intimidated. He glanced sideways at Rice but found no reprieve in the other’s set features.

  He would have to do it.

  Forty-four feet is higher than a four-story building. The high-diving platform in diving competition is ten meters, or roughly thirty-eight feet, above the water. Jumps of twenty to twenty-five feet challenge most thrill-seekers. To throw yourself into a small pool forty-four feet below requires extraordinary nerve—there’s little margin for error. As soon as you jump, the gravitational force generated by accelerating thirty-two-feet-per-second-per-second sends your stomach upward, causing a sudden constriction of the chest and lungs, and a loss of breath. When your body reaches the water 1.7 seconds later, it’s traveling about fifty-three feet per second, or thirty-six miles an hour. At that speed, water becomes a hard surface, especially if you don't slice into it just right. (Increase the height to 120 feet and you hit the concrete-like plane three seconds later at sixty mph, which explains why suicidal leaps from high bridges are mostly successful.) Impacting the water at the wrong angle could snap your neck or back.