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Clinging for life to a cold steel cable, high on a nearly vertical rock in the Sierra Nevada, the soles of my hiking boots couldn’t find traction.
Again and again, as my forearms trembled and my toes ached, my feet slid on the smooth granite without mercy.
A fall from that height—on the climbing cables that mark the final 400-foot ascent to the top of Yosemite’s Half Dome—could easily be fatal. So I clenched my fists tighter and headed for the top. The only relief came from irregularly spaced wooden slats drilled into the rock that provided desperately needed footholds.
I was right to be nervous. The wide stretches between some of those wooden slats, especially on the steeper parts of the final climb, are notoriously treacherous.
Last month, while descending the same stretch in a sudden rainstorm, 20-year-old Grace Rohloff slipped on slick rock and lost her grip on the cables. In a flash, she slipped from her father’s outstretched hand, and he watched helplessly as she fell hundreds of feet to her death.
Grace Rohloff, an experienced hiker, fell to her death while descending Half Dome during a rainstorm. He lost his grip on the cable system covering the last 400 feet to the top.
(Jonathan Rohloff)
It wasn’t the first: At least 10 others they have suffered fatal falls from the cables, usually when the rock is wet.
In a phone interview last week from his home in Phoenix, Jonathan Rohloff said he kept asking himself during his perilous descent, “Why is this wood so far away?” He guessed it would cost a few thousand dollars to double the number of steps. It’s a sum he thought could easily be raised by the 50,000 people who pay $10 permits to climb Half Dome each year.
That leaves him wondering why nothing has been done to address the obvious risk.
“My daughter’s life was worth a lot more than a few thousand dollars,” he said.
The need to improve safety was also at the top for more than a dozen climbers interviewed at the cables last week. Everyone had followed the tragic news of Rohloff’s daughter.
They were men and women from all over the country, ranging in age from 18 to 54. Among them were experienced climbers accustomed to steep terrain where any fall could be fatal, and casual hikers who had never before attempted to climb anything like and hair-raising. Everyone agrees on one thing: more secure apps would be welcome.
“I definitely appreciate more wooden boats,” said Ruthie Smith, 25, of Cincinnati, as she celebrated with her friends on the summit and tried not to think too much about the impending descent.
On the way, someone had passed Smith and slipped the cable into one of the wide strips between the wooden slats. “My grip was the only thing holding me up,” he said. “It would have been so easy to slip.”
Hudson Sauder, of Livermore, had a similar experience.
An August 2015 view of hikers resting before attempting the metal cables that mark the steep final climb to the top of Half Dome.
(Marc Martin/Los Angeles Times)
“I consider myself a strong 19-year-old guy,” he said, “I thought it would be a breeze to scamper up.” That was until her feet began to slip despite the sticky-soled running shoes she had bought specifically for the climb. “I was afraid my grip strength would go,” he said. “It would have been a nightmare.”
Juan Santiago, 39, of Dallas, still catching his breath at the top of the cables, said the upper-body strength required just to hang on to them had been a shock — and joked that it left him “question a lot of my life. decisions.” Doubling the number of wooden slats, he added, would be a great idea.
Yosemite National Park administrators declined to answer questions from The Times about the possibility of adding more safeguards and what it might cost.
Rohloff said she told park rangers who interviewed her after her daughter’s death that “Grace died because the cables are unnecessarily dangerous.” But he hasn’t heard anything from park officials about any planned improvements.
“The silence has been deafening,” he said.
Danger and drama on the cables of Half Dome are nothing new. They have been around for over a century, and are almost as iconic as the unmistakable silhouette of the top.
Braving them is a rite of passage among California outdoor enthusiasts – something that people tend to do once and remember for the rest of their lives.
The cables arrived at the end of the 1800s, after a celebrated geologist Josiah Whitney he proclaimed Half Dome’s 8,800-foot summit “perfectly inaccessible” and declared that it “will never be trodden by human foot.”
A Yosemite guide named George Anderson decided to prove him wrong.
Mountaineering was in its infancy at the time, and the methods were crude. Anderson attacked the problem by punching huge holes in the rock and filling them with heavy steel anchors—a practice that is the polar opposite of the “leave no trace” philosophy popular today.
Ascending Half Dome is a rite of passage among California outdoor enthusiasts – something that people tend to do once and remember for the rest of their lives.
(Marc Martin/Los Angeles Times)
Anderson reached the top for the first time in October 1875, according to the Mariposa County Tourism Board. The cable system, which consists of two intertwined steel wires supported by vertical steel posts, was installed in 1919. It has been modified since then, but not much.
Cables are ugly, raw and dangerous, but they have fascinated adventurous souls since day 1.
Maybe it’s because most of us will never climb the sheer rock walls that make Yosemite the holy ground for hard rock climbers.
Conquering El Capitan, the 3,000-foot vertical face on the other side of Yosemite Valley, is undoubtedly the crowning achievement in any technical climber’s career. Even Half Dome’s nearly vertical north face is out of the question for all but the most experienced climbers.
But thanks to the cables, any fit flatlander with a firm grip and nerves of steel has a decent chance of making the backside of Half Dome—if the weather cooperates. In the process, they get just a taste of the heart-pounding drama experienced by elite adventure athletes.
Over the years, the question of what, if anything, should be done to make the system more secure has been the topic of lively debate. An argument against improving the cables is that it could make them too easy, attracting people who are not fit enough to try it safely.
But just getting to the base of the cables requires a substantial level preparation and fitness.
First, you must join the park’s online lottery system that opens months before the summer climbing season and hope to win a permit. The park limits the number of people who can climb Half Dome to 300 per day, a cap intended, in part, to reduce gridlock in the cables. If you go without a permit, and you get caught, there is a fine of $280.
Then there is the grueling walk itself. My round trip from the closest park to the trailhead in Yosemite Valley covered more than 18 miles and climbed more than 5,000 vertical feet, according to the Alltrails fitness app. It’s a long day no matter who you are; it would be practically impossible for someone who was in poor shape.
Another serious obstacle is the weather. The last place you want to be when it’s raining, or during a lightning storm, is hanging on to a steel cable on slippery granite above the tree. The injuries occurred in bad weather when the climbers simply froze in place with terror and others resorted to risky maneuvers to try to get around them.
When it comes to equipment, the most important thing to have is a good pair of gloves. The best ones are those worn by electricians: thin with sticky rubber palms that form a strong bond with the steel cables. There is often a pile of them donated by other climbers at the base of the cables, but park officials discourage the practice, saying it is a chore to remove hundreds of kilos of rotting gloves left behind each year.
Some people take the extra step of wearing a climbing harness with lines that can attach to the cables. This will slow you down, because you are regularly unclipping and clipping back in to pass vertical posts. That can be irritating for more confident climbers who have been caught waiting behind you, but it provides another potentially life-saving layer of protection should you lose your grip.
Such a tool, properly used, probably would have saved Grace Rohloff.
Visitors can see Half Dome at sunset.
(Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)
Even with all the proper preparation and equipment, some people reach the base of the cables, crane their necks to follow the path of the cables almost straight to the sheer rock face, and decide that there is no way.
“I was just like, it’s a hard no,” said Grace Luttrell, 33, of Oakland, who decided to wait at the base and nibble on a sandwich while her friends went to the top.
“You see all kinds of people growing up: fitness levels, ages, whatever. And I feel like there’s a lot of pressure to push yourself to try,” Luttrell said. “But I have no regrets.”
Another athletic looking woman who had all the appropriate gear went about a quarter of the way up the cables, before abruptly turning back. “This is scary. This is so scary,” he muttered as he walked past me, slashing furiously and snapping as he went down. “That’s not my thing.”
Another argument against the drilling of more wooden steps in the rock is rooted in the aversion of the XXI century to add something fashionable from man to the natural environment. But since the cables are already there, none of the climbers interviewed thought that the improvement would take them out of the landscape.
“This isn’t really a desert anymore,” said Erick Ulferts, 54, of Portland, Ore., as he took a few deep breaths and a long look back at the cables after the healthy descent. Adding more points won’t “change things dramatically.”
He was wearing a climbing harness, but that didn’t stop his feet from slipping out from under him on the smooth granite. At one point, he slipped and almost fell where one of the steel poles would have gone straight between his legs.
“None of this is particularly safe,” he said with a wry smile. “That’s kind of the beauty of it.”
For Rohloff, an elementary school principal who is still reeling from the horror of watching the oldest of his three children slide to his death, the goal is to get park officials to commit to Half Dome safer.
“To me, there’s one common sense thing that could have been done and wasn’t done,” Rohloff said of adding some steps. “It’s hard for me to believe that I’m the first person to feel this way.”