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We had planned to get up at 6 and be on the trail by 8. Again, reality intruded, and we got up at 8 and set out for Half Dome around 9:30. This was not wise. We had never hiked this trail before and didn't know how long it would take or what obstacles it would present; besides that, we'd been told that the best time to climb Half Dome is the morning, since clouds tend to come in by the afternoon. Weather changes quickly in the mountains, and you don't want to be anywhere near the summit when the clouds come in, rangers had said. The mountain is a magnet for lightning. All Half Dome hikers are explicitly told that if they see rain clouds on the horizon, they shouldn't attempt the ascent. Lightning strikes the dome at least once every month -- and at least a few careless people every year. Even the cables that run up the final 800 feet of the slope are lightning magnets.

So we wound up through the trees as fast as we could. We passed through deep-shadowed, pine-needled stretches of forest path like places in a fairy tale, and we emerged onto sun-blasted stretches of rock that offered amazing views of the surrounding peaks -- and of Half Dome towering precipitously into the sky.

We reached the base of Half Dome, after a final, extremely arduous half-hour zigzag trek up a series of massive steps cut out of the stone, at about 1 p.m. Clouds were massing to the east and to the west, but we pressed on. A motley pile of gloves left by previous climbers lay at the spot where the cable walkway began. We chose gloves we liked, grabbed hold of the cables and began to haul ourselves up.

This is when our little lark turned into a grand adventure.

In the pictures we had seen before the trip, the cable route didn't look all that daunting. Basically, they showed a gangplank-like walkway with thick steel cables running along either side that stretched up the slope of the mountain. In the pictures, hikers with day-packs strode confidently up the slope as if they were out for a Sunday stroll.

Somehow the pictures hadn't prepared me for the reality. The cables are set about four feet off the ground and are about three feet apart. As a further aid to climbers, wooden planks connected to the posts that support the cables are set across the mountain-path at an interval of about every four to five feet. This is not as comforting as it sounds.

I'd read before the trip that the path slopes up at an angle of about 60 degrees. In my mind I had pictured that angle and had mentally traced a line along the living room wall. That doesn't seem too steep, I had said to myself.

Beware estimates made in the comfort of your living room. From the plushness of my couch, with a soothing cup of steaming tea in my hand, 60 degrees hadn't seemed too steep -- but in the sheer, slippery, life-on-the-line wildness of Yosemite, it seemed real steep. I looked at the cables, and I looked at the sloping pate of the mountain -- and I thought, "This is a really stupid way to die."

Next page | None of them seemed to understand that what we were doing was inherently suicidal!