For the first time in quite a while we were able to take the day off on Friday and take off for Yosemite first thing in the morning. I’m pretty sure it was the first time I’ve ever been able to drive there during the day. Usually we arrive around 10 or 11pm after getting lost in Tracy and rushing through a fast(ish) food dinner, get there, immediately go right to our tent in the dark and go to sleep. This time things were different.

We arrived around 2 or 3 in the afternoon and were able to take a hike before there was even the chance of it getting dark. From the trail around Mirror Lake you’re able to look up at Half Dome, a unique perspective that i don’t know that i’ve noticed the times that i’ve been out there before.

Half Dome from the ground is even more impressive than it is from the meadow a couple of miles away. Standing there amongst the boulders the sense of enormity hits you straight in the face. The beginning of the sheer cliff face is only about 100 yards away, but the top seems miles above. The ‘diving board’ (visible at the upper-left side of the peak) sticks out even more, and the sheer immensity of the hill becomes apparent.

If you want to you can climb to the diving board. From the point where i was standing the hike would be approximately 9 miles and cover more than 3000 feet of vertical elevation change.

A (maybe) little known fact: To get to the top of half-dome you have to climb the last few hundred yards clinging to cables that have been set up by the parks service every spring and taken down every fall. In the old days (1920s, 1930s) the turnbuckles that supported these cables (and the cables themselves) each weighed about 25lbs. As there was one every 10 yards or so and a couple of hundred yards of these things someone, or some group, would have to haul them up the mountain each spring and bring them down each fall. That someone, for a period of time, was none other than a young photographer named Ansel Adams.