This is a long post. If you want to skip to the pictures, scroll down.

This was a trip that was overshadowed by a series of mishaps--yeah, one of those! It took us (me, MJ, Steve, Deanna, Joe and Jean) close to three hours just to leave the Los Angeles area. We had met later than planned, packed later than planned, picked up everyone later than planned, there was more traffic than we had planned and we got to Yosemite, you guessed it, a lot later than planned--at 1am to be precise! It's normally not a big deal. But not so when you have to get up at 4am to do an 8- mile hike followed by a multi-pitch climb followed by another 8-mile hike back to the car. And there is only so much daylight...

Needless to say, we were getting a late start on the hike. The hike starts out with a bang. We're in a big group of tourist day hikers probably heading for Bridal Falls. Since the going is relentlessly steep people drop like flies around us. Unfortunately, MJ is among them. (I didn't drop like a fly, Frank! I just took a breather. -MJ) I take over the rope and she recovers quickly. Following Joe's assurance that we would all climb together, I leave my pro in the car. Guess what else got left behind?

Our. Lunch.

After negotiating granite slabs and talus fields we get to the base of Snake Dike, only to see about four other teams waiting in line before us. Joe and Jean decide to take off doing a variation without saying a word. By the way: do you have a topo? What about gear? Oh yeah, it's in the car that's right...

When we finally started to climb, about an hour and half later, we only make it halfway between first and second pitch. All the belay stations were jammed so we ended up waiting another hour and a half. Since our friends pulled their friendly maneuver people give us the evil eye. Jean basically cut in front of other climbers and hogged belay stations before the guys he overtook could get there. They just took off.

MJ and Deanna get bored and start to snack. I'm thinking about being on a multi-pitch climb and the importance of not dropping things when I see the ziploc with the food lazily tumbling and bouncing down the granite like some flat soccer ball.

None of us had a lot of multi-pitch experience and the people in front of us obviously even less. So we are crawling up the mountain, and daylight and stamina is fading fast. Steve went first (he left some gear for me to clip, thanks Steve) followed by Deanna. I used the gear he left behind and MJ cleaned as she followed. We do the last big slabs in darkness and top out at 9pm just to be confronted with a new problem: Where are the cables to go down? Luckily there were two people crashing up there and they pointed us to the right side.

Once down we had to find the trail to hike back out--a different trail. In moonlit darkness, tired, depleted, sick of it all we started hiking eight miles out. It felt surreal, like watching a movie, not really being part of it. MJ kept bumping into me because she would fall asleep every once in a while. We finally made it back to the car by 3am. Me and MJ were last after missing a turn to the car. Twenty hours later we are back at the campsite. Twenty hours and one minute later we're all passed out in our sleeping bags.

What a day.

› Half Dome slideshow 1 Photos by MJ

› Half Dome slideshow 2 Photos by Jean and Joe