by Bob Madgic
On day two, after thirteen pitches, they reached the halfway point by midafternoon. They had successfully executed the Rob-bins Traverse and were on schedule. However, a storm was building. By 3 P.M., the sky had darkened. Then it unleashed a deluge. For the next hour, rain hammered the two climbers, soaking them to the bone despite their rain gear. Not wanting to get caught on the exposed rock directly above, they sought protection at the Chimney, where they could wait out the storm. When lightning zapped the summit, though, both absorbed several electrical shocks. An extremely frightened Foster wanted to rappel down and get off the face, while Bokelund urged calmness. In the back of his mind was the potential loss of their meager but cherished equipment, all two hundred dollars’ worth, if they retreated down the mountain without it.
But as savage lightning bolts flailed Yosemite’s granite, repeatedly shocking the two men, Bokelund had second thoughts. Maybe it wasn’t so wise to hunker down after all; maybe they should retreat. On the other hand, a descent would require thirteen rappels down the thirteen pitches that had taken them half a day to complete, not the least of which was Robbins Traverse. Rap-pelling down that stretch wouldn’t be quick or easy, much less safe. Indeed, rappelling under any conditions is dangerous. Most climbing fatalities occur on descents rather than ascents, when climbers don’t rappel properly or rappel off the end of their rope or slip off a steep trail while hiking down from the summit. Bokelund and Foster stayed put. They were trapped.
Patches of sky soon appeared among the rain clouds. The end of the storm was in sight. When the rain stopped and sun broke out, Bokelund and Foster committed themselves to completing the climb as the best of two bad choices. Water still poured down the mountain through chutes and crevices. To decide who should lead the climb at that point, they played the game ro-sham-bo, or rock-paper-scissors. Foster lost. Up he went, out onto wet granite and the bare section. Meanwhile the guide and female climber far ahead had boogied up the face as fast as they could to reach the summit, leaving only Bokelund and Foster on the wall by late Friday. That night it rained some more. Bokelund and Foster, hunkered down on a ledge to sleep as best they could, were wetter and colder than they had ever been.
On Saturday, July 27, with Foster still leading the way, they scrambled up the granite. Only six pitches separated them from the top. Frantic to reach the summit, they wedged their fingers and toes in crevices, and balanced on tiny ledges and whatever rock protrusions were available. Storm clouds began building again—this time, later in the afternoon. Again, the situation became risky. Although the climbers were farther up the face, they were even more vulnerable closer to the summit. Fear drove them—they were desperate to evade another lightning barrage. Bokelund and Foster willed their bodies to work harder, to overcome exhaustion. Their physical conditioning was pushed to the limit.
At 4 P.M., menacing storm clouds were moving toward the Dome. Flashes of lightning and rumbling thunder carried a very clear message. The pair traversed Thank God Ledge, pulled themselves up the remaining smooth face on ropes, and, by means of hasty mantle maneuvers, surmounted the last section of rock around 5 P.M. But there was no time for celebration. They felt terror rather than glee. Foster spotted a small rock enclosure in the Visor and wanted to take cover there until the storm passed.
It was the same enclosure awaiting Esteban and Rice, who at that moment were gunning for the summit.
Nothin’ doin’, said Bokelund. We need to get the hell off this mountain!
In a frenzy, they stuffed the gear in their packs and raced off Bokelund and Foster scurried down the granite slope so quickly, half slipping and sliding, that they burned their hands on the metal cables. At the base of Half Dome, they ran across the saddle, up to the top of Sub Dome, and then down the granite stairs. Farther along, two backpackers—Esteban and Rice—were coming up the trail.
Bokelund and Foster warned the two older hikers not to go up there, it was way too dangerous. They then scampered down the trail with one goal in mind: to put as much distance as possible between them and the ferocious storm brewing over Half Dome.
FOOTNOTES
*A belay is a means of securing the climber by using a rope and usually a belay device to prevent or minimize falls. The rope is attached to a pin or cleat anchored in the rock, to the climber, and to the belayer below. A belayer is the person on the ground or at the belay station who secures the lead climber, feeding out rope as the climber ascends or gathering up the slack as he descends.
*A piton is a metal spike with an eye on one end that climbers place in the rock to secure their rope. The rope is attached to the piton placed by the lead climber. If the leader falls from ten feet above the nearest piton below her, she would fall a total of twenty feet before drawing the rope tight, assuming the piton holds.
* This system is not to be confused with the decimal system in common use. Under the Yosemite Decimal System, the levels following 5.9 are 5.10 (not the same as 5.1), 5.11, and so on. The original Sierra Club grading systems also had a Class 6 for artificial and aid climbing, but it is no longer used. Artificial or aid climbs are graded on a separate A0 through A5 scale.
*These techniques are perhaps best illustrated by the one-finger pull-ups that climbing legend Wolfgang Gülich made famous. No mere party trick, this incredible maneuver enabled Gülich, a shy German, to complete some of the world’s most difficult climbs, a number of which have not been duplicated to this day. Actor Sylvester Stallone was so impressed by Gülich that he got him a job doing stunts in the 1993 movie Cliffhanger.
*The film documenting Erickson’s and Higbee’s feat, Free Climb, won many awards.
*On October 21, 2004, a fierce, early-season snowstorm hit Yosemite and snared two Japanese climbers who were about two-thirds of the way up El Capitan. They were unprepared for such brutal conditions and died from exposure. Another climber was rescued.
**On June 25, 2000, four climbers were struck by lightning while climbing on Yosemite’s Cathedral Peak. Three of the climbers lost consciousness and all of them suffered burns. One went into respiratory arrest. A rescue team reached the stricken party and, by ground evacuation, carried out the most seriously injured climber, who survived.
5
THE STORM
When the glorious pearl and alabaster clouds of these noonday storms are being built, I never give attention to anything else. No mountain or mountain-range, however divinely clothed with light, has a more enduring charm than those fleeting mountains of the sky. . . .—John Muir
Storms were brewing across the Sierra Nevada, threatening any sightseer or wanderer who was ignorant or dismissive of their power. Mounting thunderheads accompanied the hikers pressing on toward Half Dome, each intent on reaching the summit.
Hoog’s contingent departed Nevada Fall and hiked as a tight unit. Pippey and Jordan left shortly afterward and quickly passed them on the trail. Also skirting by them were Esteban, Rice, and Brian Jordan. Frith and Weiner lagged; the forty-five-pound pack they took turns hefting was bogging them down. Buchner and Ell-ner were nowhere in sight.
Cage’s party was farther back. Their later start and slightly longer hike from Glacier Point meant they would arrive on the summit around 6:30 P.M. if they stayed the course.
The mounting storm soon would require that the hikers respond in some fashion. However, none really knew the capacities, behaviors, and dangers of thunderstorms. On that particular day, they would base their decisions more on misinformation, happenstance, and emotion than knowledge.
THUNDERSTORMS HOLD massive quantities of energy, one of the most powerful of which is lightning—a random, chaotic, and treacherous phenomenon. Every thunderstorm demands respect. One may occupy a confined cloud mass and appear quite tame. A distant observer might see telltale gray streaks directly below the cloud, indicating rain. Perhaps a streak of lightning flashes within the cloud, followed by a peal of thunder. This confined type of storm represents, in John Muir’s words, a “Sierra mid-summer thunderstorm reduced t
o its lowest terms.” Yet it can form abruptly and then suddenly unleash a deadly lightning bolt that strikes objects directly below or several miles away where the sky is blue.
A mountain thunderstorm spanning thousands of acres can be a violent, tumultuous affair. Driving, flooding rains accompany sheets of hail and terrifying lightning bolts that lash out from anywhere at any time, savagely blasting whatever stands in the way. Explosive cracks of thunder shatter the atmosphere as though it were made of fine china, prompting sheer terror in anyone caught in the inferno. As lightning strikes here, there, and everywhere, the thunderbolts bring ear-piercing booms so intermingled with sheets of blinding light that it can be difficult to pair each flash with each roar. This is Mother Nature in one of her most overwhelming displays of power.
Watching a thunderstorm from a safe haven can be glorious beyond words. It is a symphony of mesmerizing sounds, sights, and smells.
IN CONTRAST TO weather systems that originate over the Pacific Ocean, Sierra Nevada thunderstorms develop inland. The moisture comes from the Pacific, but initially it is stored in the air rather than in clouds. The air flows across California’s Central Valley, rises, and accumulates in thermals, or ascending currents of air. As the thermals drift toward the mountains, warm air from the foothills propels them upward. At higher elevations, infusions of warmer air from canyons and valleys send the thermals spiral-ing farther aloft, where they meet colder air. This mixing destabilizes the atmosphere; countless crystals and droplets combine to form a puffy, white cumulus cloud—frequently the first harbinger of a thunderstorm.
If other cumulus clouds develop in the vicinity, they often combine into a single, large cloud or sometimes clusters of clouds. This mass may hover over one mountain peak in an otherwise clear sky but can move in any direction.
Because air surrounding the cloud is cooler, the warmer air within keeps funneling upward, creating the cloud’s vertical shape. In the troposphere (the lowest, densest part of the atmosphere), this ascending parcel encounters lower air pressure, which causes the cloud to expand and cool as its interior air mass becomes saturated with moisture. Ice ultimately forms within the cloud. When this mass becomes too heavy to keep rising, precipitation falls as rain, hail, or snow—sometimes all three. When the mass reaches the tropopause (the boundary layer between the troposphere and stratosphere above), where the temperature is constant, it stops rising and the cloud top flattens into a fearsome anvil shape. This is a cumulonimbus cloud, or thunderhead.
Cumulonimbus clouds are vast, dark, moisture-laden, and formidable. They may tower twenty to forty thousand feet into the atmosphere—even, in the case of a super thunder cell, sixty thousand feet. Ragged formations called scuds hang down menacingly from tops that push up against an invisible ceiling. Within the thunderhead, violent updrafts and downdrafts generate enormous power and energy, resulting in fierce winds and torrents of rain. Sometimes the updrafts break through the flattened cloud top and punch into the stratosphere. This so-called overshooting of the top usually portends the most severe of thunderstorms.
Often accompanying such fury is a frenzied but usually shortlived barrage of hail. Hail is formed by water droplets freezing as they climb within a cloud, dropping back down and picking up more water, then rising again. The frozen droplets may repeat this cycle hundreds of times, adding layer upon layer and increasing in size until, too heavy to remain aloft, they fall to earth. Hail can be as small as a pea or, in midwestern states, as big as a baseball or even a volleyball. Hail in the Sierra Nevada seldom exceeds half an inch in diameter.
At any given moment, nearly two thousand thunderstorms are happening somewhere on earth. More than forty thousand occur every day, sixteen million each year. They keep the planet’s heat stores in equilibrium: The vast quantities of moisture in the air that result when sunlight reaches and heats the earth, causing evaporation, are returned to the earth by thunderstorms. The moisture evaporates into the air again, and the cycle begins anew.
A thunderstorm may develop quickly, although not without advance notice. Especially in the afternoon, cumulus clouds can darken and thicken fast and then rapidly evolve into more menacing cumulonimbus clouds. The one-cloud storm, or single-cell thunderstorm, doesn’t linger for long. Larger thunderstorms have multiple cells—clusters of storms that combine and feed off each other and that widen and prolong the turbulence. This process sometimes occurs in a predictable pattern, as it does over Florida, where thunderheads form on many afternoons.
Thunderstorms have three stages: developing, mature, and dissipating.
The developing stage, amid high convection turbulence and air movement, is very dangerous, especially for people who are caught unprepared (as frequently happens) or don’t take precautions quickly. Lightning can strike ten miles ahead of the storm where skies are still blue—hence the phrase a bolt out of the blue. Because every bolt originates in a storm cloud, one can exit from a concealed cloud—a cloud behind a mountain ridge, for instance—and literally streak sideways to hit something miles away. It seemingly strikes from out of nowhere.
The heaviest precipitation, winds, and lightning take place in the mature stage, which can last from a few minutes to several hours. Surprisingly, fewer people are killed or injured during the raging chaos of this stage than during the developing phase, maybe because fewer people are outdoors and exposed.
In the dissipating stage, rain and lightning activity decreases as the storm winds down. But even as thunderheads move away from the immediate region, lightning bolts may continue to strike it. The safety rule is to wait at least thirty minutes after a storm has passed before venturing out.
During the summer in mountainous regions, thunderstorms typically develop between 2 and 6 P.M., the hottest time of day. That’s also when the descending angle of the sun’s rays prompts a temperature drop higher up in the atmosphere, which in turn creates atmospheric instability. The storm’s precipitation snuffs out the warm updrafts of air—its fuel—and the thunderstorm ends. Once again, nature has achieved the homeostatic balance it seeks.
The wise mountaineer follows this rule: Up high by noon, down low by two.
A STORM CAN GENERATE lightning, its most menacing element, only when hail and ice form in a cloud. When turbulence causes these icy particles to collide, the electrical charges within the cloud divide. Positive charges usually travel to the top and negative charges to the base, thereby creating a giant storage battery. Because the earth below a thunderhead also becomes positively charged, there is a potential for cloud-to-ground electrical transmission. It’s the attraction of these opposing charges—also within a cloud and between clouds—that produces lightning. Again, nature equalizes opposing forces and achieves stability.
Various forms of lightning play out. The flash from a discharge within a cloud or between clouds, which often resembles a bursting bomb or fireworks, is called sheet lightning. A single jagged bolt from cloud to ground is streak lightning, and a bolt with multiple branches or “leaders” is forked lightning.
Strong, horizontal winds can cause streak lightning to appear as parallel luminous or blurred bands with multiple flashes, a phenomenon known as ribbon lightning. When parts of a lightning streak are longer lit or brighter than other parts, it is bead lightning, or rocket or chain lightning. Ball lightning is just that—a sphere that seems to float in the air and then disappear in a loud explosion. Typically the size of a baseball, ball lightning can be as much as a foot in diameter. People have seen such lightning balls bounce off walls within a structure or tumble down mountainsides.
When the buildup of opposite charges is insufficient for lightning to form, a coronal discharge or circular bluish glow—or even a mass of sparks—may appear over a high, sometimes pointed object. This phenomenon, first noted at the top of ships’ masts, is called St. Elmo’s fire, for the patron saint of sailors.
About one in four lightning bolts strikes the ground. These spectacular exchanges between cloud and ground occur when trem
endous negative charges of static electricity build in the bottom of a cloud, and positive charges accumulate on the ground. Their strong attraction to each other creates an electrified or ionized atmosphere that can make the air buzz and crackle, and a person’s hair bristle. When the potential for a discharge overwhelms the insulating air’s ability to keep them apart, the negative charges shoot down toward the positive charges in an invisible, jagged, zigzag pattern called a stepped leader.
An object on the ground—usually one that is elevated, such as a tree, building, or rock—may launch a discharge, or lightning streamers, to connect with the leaders, thus triggering a lightning bolt, which neutralizes the opposing charges. This process can recur tens or even hundreds of times in a storm. An observer usually sees the discharge shooting upward—manifested by upward branching —to meet the downward-moving stepped leader.
In mountainous areas, where clouds are close to earth, the lightning bolt may be shorter than three hundred feet. In flat country with high clouds, a cloud-to-earth flash may be as long as four miles and, in some extreme instances, twenty miles long. The intensely bright lightning core is extremely narrow—as little as half an inch, according to some authorities. The core appears to be wider because it is surrounded by a glow discharge, or corona envelope, that may be ten to twenty feet wide. The speed of the lightning discharge varies between a hundred and a thousand miles per second for the downward leader track and up to eighty-seven thousand miles per second for the more powerful return stroke. More than one discharge can happen in the same lightning bolt, a process that causes lighting to flicker until the charges have dissipated.