by Bob Madgic
By the time they eclipsed Vernal Fall, a few cumulus clouds had formed in the sky to the east.
Meanwhile, Buchner and Ellner were a good thirty minutes behind the others when they reached the trailhead after their quick tour of the Valley’s sights. At the bridge, Buchner chose the John Muir Trail along the canyon’s side. It was a longer but more scenic route, and not as steep as the Mist Trail, an important consideration for Ellner, who had become increasingly dubious about this undertaking.
Rice, Esteban, Pippey, and the Jordan twins arrived at Nevada Fall around twelve thirty. Frith and Weiner, struggling with the altitude and arduous ascent, showed up several minutes later. Rice greeted them at the top of the trail; he was standing on the rock right at the lip of Nevada Fall, his toes inches from the river before it careened over the edge in a torrent of whitewater. Weiner and Frith couldn’t believe what their eyes were telling them.
Frith and Weiner joined the others on a sandy beach alongside the river. Rice and Pippey then stripped off all their clothes, dove into the chill water upriver from Nevada Fall, and swam out to a large flat rock. So did Brian and Bruce Jordan, and then Weiner, who thought, This skinny-dipping is cool! On the rock, the swimmers hooted, shouted, and yelled obscenities while tussling like schoolboys to push each other off. They returned to shore and, still nude, lounged about while eating lunch and drinking beer.
Several cumulus clouds in the eastern skies now had combined and were massing over and around Clouds Rest.
BRIAN CAGE, CLU AND Zip Cotter, and Steve White left work in the Bay Area on Friday and drove east until they reached a popular campground off Highway 120 outside Yosemite National Park. The plan was to rendezvous the next day at Glacier Point with Paul Kolbenschlag and Monroe Bridges, who would depart from San Jose at 4 a.m. on Saturday and drive straight through. Cage had persuaded the group to take the Glacier Point route to Half Dome, explaining that because the trail starts at about seven thousand feet, there is less elevation gain. In fact, the 4.6-mile hike from Glacier Point (at 7,214 feet) to Nevada Fall (at 5,900 feet) isn’t all downhill. The Panorama Trail does descend to Illilouette Fall at 5,850 feet, but then it winds back up to 6,600 feet before dropping down again to Nevada Fall. The distance from Glacier Point to Half Dome is just under nine miles, or more than half a mile longer than the Mist and John Muir trails.
In the summer of 1983, while hiking along the Little Sur River south of Carmel on the Pacific Coast, Cage had slipped, fallen into the river, and fractured his right patella. He was evacuated by helicopter. After that debacle, his knee always ached on long hikes.
How dangerous is hiking in Yosemite? It’s quite safe on the trails. Nonetheless, falls—while hiking or climbing boulders and rocks—account for most of the park’s accidental deaths. Some hikers are killed by rocks cascading from above. Others die when they leave the trail to command a better view. Many trails in Yosemite traverse steep terrain littered with loose rock, such that one misstep may lead to a slide and fatal plunge. Ironically, there haven’t been any recorded deaths on Half Dome’s heavily traveled trail, despite the hazards. For those who might lose their grip on the cables, the sloping granite apparently allows sufficient footage and time to recoup.
Cage’s party assembled in the Glacier Point parking lot shortly before noon on Saturday. After they donned hiking boots and organized their gear, everyone gathered for a group photo, with a side view of Half Dome in the background. Five of the men wore shorts, one wore jeans, and they all sported ratty T-shirts. Steve White wore his signature bandanna on his head. To the east beyond Half Dome a mass of cumulus clouds blanketed the mountain ridges. Before they departed Glacier Point, Clu Cotter bought a postcard showing a lightning bolt striking Half Dome.
Within the first half mile on the trail, the six men spotted two five-foot rattlesnakes about ten feet off the path, writhing together in mating behavior.* Few things get the adrenaline flowing on a hike like seeing one of these creatures, which do their best to avoid humans and keep the peace. These reptiles were exceptionally huge. Much to the dismay of his companions, Kolbenschlag waded into the bushes to get a photo of these specimens, but he kept a safe distance.
And then the six hikers resumed their march toward Half Dome.
HOOG’S GROUP PAID LITTLE attention when Rice and his buddies arrived at Nevada Fall. However, when Rice, Pippey, and others shed their clothes and began shouting vulgarisms, Linda Crozier and Jennie Hayes were stunned and offended, especially with families, young teens, and other females gathered at this popular hiking destination—the standard terminus for most Mist Trail day-trippers.
Let’s get out of here—we don’t need this, Crozier told her friends.
So they hoisted their backpacks and left. It was 1:30 P.M.
By that time, a thick, dark cloudmass hovered above Clouds Rest. The first rumbles of thunder could be heard off in the distance.
The threatening weather prompted Rice and his companions to pack up. Rice and Esteban assured the others that once they were on the summit, they would be safe and dry in the cave if a thunderstorm hit. That’s where we’re heading, Esteban said as his fellow hikers prepared to move out.
It would be a race to the top of Half Dome: Who could get there first? Pippey and Bruce Jordan didn’t wait for the others; they hefted their packs and pounded up the trail, with Esteban, Rice, and Brian Jordan not far behind. Frith and Weiner brought up the rear again.
After the surprise encounter with rattlesnakes, Cage’s party had proceeded down Panorama Trail to Illilouette Fall, then gutted out the uphill leg, which slowed their progress. Beyond that point, they set a good pace en route to Nevada Fall and a much-anticipated break. The six arrived at the falls shortly after Rice’s crew had left. Everyone stripped down to their shorts and swam out to the same big slab in the river, where they performed their own distinctive ritual: an air-guitar rendition of the Jimi Hendrix classic “Purple Haze.”
Refreshed, they returned to shore, got dressed, packed up, and headed out through Little Yosemite Valley as the thunderstorm brewed.
Buchner and Ellner didn’t arrive at Nevada Fall until nearly two o’clock, and stopped only briefly amid the steady rumble of thunder. Ahead lay darkening skies. Buchner desperately wanted to make up for lost time. Ellner followed his friend up the trail but wondered if it was wise to keep going. In fact he didn’t like anything about how the day was shaping up.
The phalanx of menacing clouds forged downTenaya Canyon, taking direct aim at Half Dome.
FOOTNOTES
*Interestingly, the film’s title refers to a type of lightning discharge. When the buildup of opposite charges is insufficient for lightning to form, a coronal discharge, a circular bluish glow, or even a mass of sparks may appear over a high, sometimes pointed object. The phenomenon, first noted at the top of ships’ masts, is called St. Elmo’s fire, for the patron saint of sailors. The movie’s title connotes the turbulent energy of the characters as they approach adulthood.
*The firefall was ended by an Assistant Secretary of the Interior in 1913 and reinstated by the Secretary in 1917.
**This era produced the Federal Wilderness Act (1964), the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968), the Federal Clean Air Act (1970), the Federal Clean Water Act (1972), and the Federal Endangered Species Act (1973).
*Hulda Crooks is evidence that such an accomplishment requires more will than muscle. In 1962, at age sixty-six, after her doctor recommended that she begin exercising in the mountains to combat breathing problems caused by pneumonia, Crooks successfully hiked up Mount Whitney. She made the trek almost annually for the next twenty years, twenty-three times in all, climbing it one last time in 1987 when she was ninety-one. That same year she also scaled Mount Fuji in Japan. Crooks’s feats earned her the nickname Grandma Whitney. One of Mount Whitney’s needles is named Crooks Peak. She died in 1997 at the age of 101.
*In earlier years, hikers could drive to and park at Happy Isles at the far eastern end of the
valley. The General Management Plan of 1974 established a shuttle-bus system to replace cars and reduce congestion in that area. The trade-off, however, was diesel fumes spewed by the buses.
*The author experienced the first of his many rattlesnake sightings in California very near Glacier Point over forty years ago. Contrary to popular belief, rattlesnakes inhabit elevations of up to ten thousand feet—even higher in warm climates. That’s probably their uppermost range in the Sierra Nevada around Yosemite. According to the Yosemite Medical Clinic, about two persons suffer a rattlesnake bite in the park each year; there has been one known snakebite death in Yosemite, in 1931.
4
THE CLIMBERS
Go climb a rock!—Yosemite Mountaineering School
ON LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON, July 26, 1985, while scaling the northwest face of Half Dome, rock climbers Ken Bokelund and Rob Foster were halfway to the summit. Bokelund was nineteen years old, Foster eighteen. The previous summer, both had completed their first Yosemite climb, the south face of Washington Column. Throughout that modest, one-day ascent, the face of Half Dome had stared at them from directly across the Valley, never leaving their sight. Its peerless image seared their minds and beckoned their souls. When they left Yosemite the next day, they were already planning their next climb—of Half Dome’s face, one of the most famous big-wall climbs in the world.
And now, a year later, here they were.
In the preceding days, the weather had been unstable, with clouds building up and thunderheads forming. As Bokelund and Foster scaled Half Dome on Friday, a fierce thunderstorm broke out in late afternoon. This storm was particularly intense; frenzied rain pounded them. The two climbers wore rain pants and jackets, and hard yellow helmets to protect their heads from fatal head trauma in the event of a slip or fall. To escape the sprays and sheets of water blasting down off the rock, making it almost impossible to see, Bokelund and Foster sought refuge at a rock structure called the Chimney. They wedged themselves into the flue between this spire and the mountain’s face, their feet butted against the spire and backs against the face. Runoff funneling down through the surrounding crevices drenched them while the thunderstorm roared overhead. Lightning flashes and thunder cracks soon became almost simultaneous.
Bokelund and Foster were, in their own words, “scared shitless.”
They heard the air around them crackle and then, almost immediately, a bright flash from above momentarily blinded them. A lightning bolt had just thrashed the summit. Its electrical current streaked down the water on the granite surface and shocked the two climbers leaning against it. Within minutes, another strike hit the mountain, delivering another jolt to their bodies. Foster felt as if the electrical charge were driving his tongue out of his mouth. For the next several minutes, the two men bore repeated electric shocks. Fortunately, the voltage was not high enough to injure them seriously.
Foster screamed, We’ve got to get off this mountain!
THE SPORT OF ROCK CLIMBING first became fashionable in the French Alps and the Italian Dolomites. Its popularity had skyrocketed over the years, especially in Yosemite, where granite monoliths challenged the world’s best climbers like no others. For starters, some of the most continuous vertical surfaces anywhere on the planet were found there. Climbing them required supreme skill, strength, and endurance. Unlike European granite, Yosemite’s rock was extremely smooth, as a result of glacial polishing and the processes of exfoliation (sheeting) and erosion, all of which shaved off corners and angles and left the rock slick and curved. Jamming hands and toes into vertical cracks—natural avenues to the top— was the standard mode of ascent. Some of the climbing was friction climbing that entailed the smallest of fingerholds. Clinging to these holds often had less to do with technique than faith.
As sports go, rock climbing is a world unto itself, a vertical wilderness of sheer rock. A climber packs not only everything a backpacker carries—food, cooking gear, sleeping bags, and all the rest— but also huge coils of rope, carabiners, hammers, pitons, wedges, blocks or camming devices, headlamps, webbing, and a bag of chalk to keep fingers dry and gritty. And water—lots of it. The standard rule is two liters per day per climber; three if the weather is hot. Each liter weighs 2.2 pounds. So a four-day climb means each climber must lug a minimum of nearly eighteen pounds of water.
Overnight climbers prefer to sleep on ledges and always tie themselves in. When there’s no ledge, they snooze on the face in a hammock-like sling, or portaledge, that is anchored at the belay or tied in.* Mice, rats, and squirrels live in the cracks on Yosemite’s walls. These rodents, as well as ravens or crows, may raid precious food supplies or ravage gear such as sleeping bags; the helpless climbers can do little else but watch such thievery. There are unique procedures for relieving oneself on a mountain face and packing out excrement so it doesn’t contaminate the environment.
The climber’s main companions are vertical rock, empty space, and vertigo-inducing depths.
AMONG THE PANTHEON of granite megaliths, Half Dome has long been seen as special. Early on, would-be climbers viewed this unique structure as the most difficult climbing challenge in Yosemite, if not the world. George Anderson was the first to hoist himself to the top with rope and spikes, in 1875. He subsequently established a trail for others that was more of a hike than a technical climb. Almost sixty years passed before anyone climbed Half Dome via another route.
John Salathe, a Swiss blacksmith in Yosemite, accomplished that feat in 1946 when he and a companion scaled the southwest face. Much like Anderson, Salathe applied his occupational skills to forge a climbing breakthrough. He had climbed on many of the best routes up Yosemite’s rock walls but found that the soft metal pitons available at that time were inadequate; they bent and mushroomed when driven into granite cracks.* By cannibalizing the axle of a Model T Ford, Salathe fashioned pitons out of hard steel, which he and his partner Anton “Ax” Nelson used to ascend the Dome’s southwest face. His innovation became the standard for Yosemite climbers who followed, and for climbers across the globe.
Salathe proved there was more than one way to ascend Half Dome, but the southwest face wasn’t anywhere near as challenging as the northwest face, the nearly vertical wall staring down at visitors on the Valley floor. Up to then, few believed it was possible to scale the eighty-degree slant that characterized much of the cliff’s twenty-two hundred feet. A few of the world’s best climbers in the mid-1900s thought otherwise.
In 1954, three climbers attempted the ascent but were thwarted just two hundred feet up. The following year Royal Rob-bins, Jerry Gallwas, Warren Harding, and Don Wilson also tried but made it up just 450 feet. Nonetheless, they surveyed a possible route to the top. Two major obstacles were a smooth section more than a hundred feet high and about halfway up, and the overhang at the summit known as the Visor.
More than a year after the Robbins team’s failed attempt, Robbins, Gallwas, and Mike Sherrick laid new plans to conquer the northwest face. In this increasingly competitive arena and hoping to scoop any other would-be climbers, they launched their try up the face in early summer 1957. Inch by inch, they lifted up their hundred pounds of gear in a haul bag suspended below them by ropes. The climbers used a flashlight to signal their progress every night to companions on the ground—but, to avoid publicity, only during the firefall spectacle, when the attention of everyone in the Valley was riveted on Glacier Point. A fourth companion had hiked to the top and posted a sign warning people not to throw rocks over the edge—a popular and innocent activity among Half Dome summiteers, who were completely unaware there might be climbers below.
On day two, the three men confronted the 125-foot-high smooth section. To continue, they had to reach a series of chimneys and flakes three hundred feet off to the side. Robbins managed to climb fifty feet up the smooth granite. There he placed three pitons. He fixed his 150-foot climbing rope to these anchors and lowered himself back down. Then, in a display of daring and skill, he gripped the rope and launched into
an explosive horizontal charge across the seemingly unassailable barrier, swung back, and charged again. At the outermost reach of his fourth pendulum swing, he grasped a narrow ledge with his fingertips and secured a hold. He now had a route to continue up. His two companions executed the same maneuver. (This part of the climb—a signature move that Robbins pioneered on several other climbing routes in Yosemite—has since been named the Robbins Traverse.)
The three climbers continued up until they were three hundred feet from the top, directly below the Visor. Securing meager foot- and handholds, they inched their way up another hundred feet, only to encounter another slick, insurmountable section. But to their surprise, they came upon a walkable ledge—virtually a climber’s highway—that circumvented the barrier. At the end of what has since been dubbed Thank God Ledge, the climbers found more foot- and handholds.
The trio completed their feat by executing a series of mantle maneuvers, pulling their bodies up to a point where they could then push down with their palms, jack themselves up, and gain a foothold. After five days on the wall, Robbins, Gallwas, and Sher-rick had surmounted the “unclimbable” northwest face of Half Dome. They completed the climb in twenty-three pitches. A pitch is the distance between one belay stance and the next, usually 100 to 150 feet, with the maximum distance being the length of the rope, or about 165 feet. Thus, the vertical length of their route was about twenty-two hundred feet.
The next successful ascent of the northwest face didn’t take place until three years later, and it entailed only two nights in bivouac. A one-night ascent quickly followed. Then, in May 1966, Jeff Foote and Steve Roper completed the climb in a single, long day.