Half Dome
Words and pictures by Michael Sweeney
The sun sets on Half Dome, Yosemite National Park.
“I’ll send you the pro carabiner.” Jason hollers up from Big Sandy Ledge. I hear a faint scoff from Lee; he knows as well as I do that nothing on this carabiner Jason is sending me is remotely close to protection.
Jason’s tone suggests the ultimate level of sarcasm, and yet, I’m somehow emboldened and encouraged. I pull up on the second rope I’m trailing from my harness and the carabiner in question arrives. It has a red piece of webbing on it, connected to some medieval-looking piece of iron.
“Fuck. So this is a cam hook,” I mutter to myself.
I’m aid climbing the first pitch of the Zig Zags on the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome in Yosemite. The Zig Zags are three of the harder pitches on this route, and they launch into a steep section of the wall directly below The Visor - an overhung outcropping of rock that protrudes from the summit of Half Dome. These three pitches sit approximately 1700 feet from the start of the route, and another 3000 feet above the valley floor. The height and exposure is palpable.
The difference between aid climbing and free climbing is an aspect of climbing that’s often misunderstood by non-climbers. People hear “free” and conjure up images of professional climber Alex Honnold climbing this very same route on Half Dome without a rope. How he keeps his wits about him 1700 feet above the ground without a rope is beyond my comprehension. Regardless, what Alex is famous for is referred to as free soloing. Free climbing is where a climber ascends a route using their hands, fingers and feet to pull on weaknesses and cracks in the rock, and is attached to a rope to catch them should they fall.
Aid climbing is another thing entirely. It involves placing gear, such as aluminum nuts and active camming devices into cracks, and pulling on these pieces of gear to progress upwards. Aid climbing is the technique climbers use to ascend routes that are outside of our ability to free climb. Only one person in our group is capable of free climbing at the difficulty of the first pitch of the Zig Zags, and he just led 17 pitches in a single, 26-hour push the day before. Needless to say, Lee deserved a break.
A cam hook resembles a wide steel chisel that has been curved back on itself. It has a hole drilled in one side that a sling and carabiner can be clipped to. The chisel end gets placed into a crack that is too shallow for even the smallest nut or camming device. Some poor bastard, me in this case, then clips a ladder made of nylon to the sling on the cam hook, and stands up on the top rung to reach what is, hopefully, a real piece of protection.
I glance down to my left; this pitch of the Zig Zags required a pendulum. This meant that I climbed to a high point where the crack in the rock tapered down to nothing and clipped my lead rope (the rope that will catch me if I fall) to a long piece of webbing tied to a piton. I then asked my belayer, Dylan, to lower me ten feet and started running back and forth across the wall. A big enough swing allowed me to reach another crack to my right, which I then placed two more pieces of gear into to aid my upward progress. These pieces were tiny, and soon this crack tapered down into nothing.
This is where my engineering brain really fails me in my battle against fear. I start running the calculations, “Ten feet of rope out to that corner. That webbing I pendulumned off is sun-faded and that’s ten feet, plus those last two nuts I put in were shit, which is another ten feet. So I’m looking at 20 feet of rope to my last good piece of gear. Multiply by two, and add 10 feet for rope stretch. Yeah I’m looking at a 50 foot whipper into a corner.”
In reality, that piece of webbing could probably hold a compact sedan off the ground, and those last two nuts could catch at least a twenty foot fall. Regardless, the thousands of feet of air whispering at my back don’t help my inner dialog calm down. Somehow, through all the dialog and fear, my body keeps moving. I step in the top rung of my ladder, watch the cam hook flex and twist under the load as it bites into the rock, reach up and sink in a red Black Diamond Camalot into a crack above my head. By comparison, this piece of protection is a boat anchor compared to the gear below me. The fear is gone - replaced with a surge of dopamine. I’m home free to the anchors, build backups and fix the two ropes for tomorrow in an orange Yosemite valley sunset.
I rappel back down to my friends Jason, Dylan and Lee, who are hanging out on what’s been dubbed Big Sandy Ledge. It’s Sandy, sure, but not very big, and is the site of our bivouac. This ledge was the goal of our first day of climbing.
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We arrived in Yosemite valley on a Sunday morning. After gaping in awe at El Capitan in the glory of early morning light, we strolled over to Half Dome Village for a hot breakfast. The Village is as touristy a place as you’ll find in a national park, complete with a cafeteria, gear shop, liquor and grocery store - all of which we were more than happy to visit. After our breakfast we left the company of World-Cup-watching foreigners behind and headed back out to the car. I still can’t fathom how anyone could sit inside in a place like Yosemite.
We packed up the haul bag and the backpacks, both sources of great debate and frustration, and began the long slog up the Death Slabs approach. I soon came to understand the name as we slogged up steep talus and fixed ropes in the hot July sun. We ran out of water a quarter mile from the spring that flows out of the base of the climb, and I nearly vomited from the heat and the sun. That spring is truly a miracle of nature, and I spent the entire evening enjoying it’s presence.
Lee and Dylan began fixing the first few pitches of the route on Sunday night as Jason and I rested and heckled our “lead team.” We had decided to split our group of four into two teams, and I was on the haul team. The lead team was responsible for leading pitches and fixing a trailing rope for the haul team to ascend.
The haul team is responsible for lifting the haul bag, filled to the brim with water, food and gear up each pitch, while attempting to keep pace with the lead team. Jason and I employed the use of pulleys and traction devices, which only allow the rope to travel in one direction, to lift the nearly 200 pounds of supplies. My friends and I had spent the last six months practicing these rope systems in preparation for this route. I slept fitfully that night, anxious about the 17 pitches between us and our bivouac ledge.
The following day, our two teams worked to absolute perfection. Every couple of pitches I would get a glimpse of Lee, immersed in a sea of granite, at the sharp end of a bright green rope. He and Dylan flew up the first six pitches, and it was all Jason and I could do to keep up. When the wall turned vertical around pitch 8, our pace picked up with theirs, and we caught up with the lead team at the rope toss pitch. In the orange glow of the sunset, Dylan, Jason and I watched Lee try again and again to toss a knotted rope into a crack, take a massive swinging fall and eventually put up one of the most impressive leads I’ve ever seen.
What happened over the course of the next 8 hours Jason calls “fuckery.” Lee was at the top of pitch 12, the sun was going down, and the ledge we were planning to sleep on was at the top of pitch 17. All four of us had to pull our most fear-inducing rope tricks out of the bag to make it through the next five pitches, and we had to do it all by headlamp. To be honest, after midnight, I don’t remember much of anything. It was a blur of exhaustion, nausea, and uninterrupted, fearful focus.
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“Anybody have any idea what time it is?” I asked in a daze.
“Turn around,” Lee said as Dylan laughed.
The sky behind us was turning pink with the sunrise; no wonder my headlamp didn’t seem very bright. “Holy shit,” I muttered. This was the 24th consecutive hour the four of us had been climbing. Everything hurt, and I felt like I was going to puke at any moment. In a mindless fog I hooked up my pulley system and began hauling the haul bag. The haul team had to keep up. At 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning I was the last one to reach Big Sandy Ledge - 26 hours after I had been the first one to start up the first fixed rope on Monday morning.
We spent Tuesday resting, drinking whiskey and water, laughing, and eating exorbitant amounts of food. On Tuesday evening, I got the honor of leading a pitch in the sunset, and we reached the summit on Wednesday after another truly impressive display of teamwork. The only thing standing in the way of us and beer was a ten mile descent down the backside of the 2,100 foot wall we had just spent three days battling.
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Climbing is a strange activity. It’s frivolous, and it might seem the only real result of the endeavor is an elevated level of fitness and a collection of great stories for the campfire. I’m coming to learn that the most tangible output of climbing is the bond I’ve formed with my partners.
I watched three of my best and most reliable friends perform utterly superhuman feats for four days on end. As we left the valley two days later, our bellies full of beer and pizza, we stopped to gaze back at Half Dome as another sun set on the valley and turned the Regular Northwest Face red and gold.
Tears of happiness, appreciation, relief and joy welled up in my eyes. Six months of preparation got us through the biggest climb of our lives. Life is beautiful, my friends are great, and returning home to family is the greatest gift the mountains can give you.
