Hiking Half-Dome in Yosemite

Weekend of Sept. 27, 2009
Yosemite National Park
(These pictures will only show themselves if you are truly ready)

Our second weekend living in California, we decided to be even more awesome than we were the first weekend (if that's even possible). The seven of us spending our assignments in various parts of the state planned to converge in Yosemite to hike the illustrious Half-Dome. It was nearing the end of the season, and I think it was the last weekend that the chains were still up to scale the nearly vertical "dome" portion of the mountain all the way to the top. But first things first. We needed to partake in the greatest gift the west coast has to offer: In-N-Out Burger. As an east coaster, I really didn't want it to be as good as all my west coast friends had been blathering on about. However, it was delicious. Almost so delicious that I wasn't able to finish two double burgers, a shake, and an order of animal-style fries because I was just so stoked from all the amazing flavors my taste buds were experiencing. Almost. I'm fully on board with In-N-Out.

It tastes like cupcakes, mixed with little pieces of heaven, blended into a smoothie, and then injected directly into your eyeballs. That's a viable flavor, right? I'm going to order that one the next time I go for ice cream.

Now that I had finally experienced the objective excellence that is In-N-Out Burger, we drove into the park and luckily found an open campsite. We set tents up, but I'm pretty sure nobody slept in them. We all went to sleep under the stars, because just like in Sequoia, they were RIDICULOUS.
The next morning we went over to the Half-Dome trailhead a little before dawn (because, let's be honest: sleep is for suckers) and started hiking what I now rank in my top 5 hardest hikes. But holy crap was it worth it. The hike itself was fairly strenuous: a SHITLOAD of uphills, and I think the hike is something like 14 miles round trip. Not the most intense, but for the elevation change it's balls-sweatingly arduous.

The most difficult part of the hike was walking in the right direction, because everything around us was gorgeous and we were all "I WANT TO GO TO THERE"

There were some waterfalls that looked like they were in Lord of the Rings, and about a billion switchbacks all the way up, some of which were incredibly steep, to the point where I was like "I should probably not lean back very far..." BUT THEN: we got to the base of the dome-portion of the mountain (please, let's try to be mature here). Here, you use the chain railings to hike up the extremely steep, hazardously smooth side of the wall. Unless you don't wake up at fuck o'clock in the morning, in which case your afternoon will be spent waiting in line. No joke: when we went back down, the wait to go up was something like three hours. GOOD LUCK MAKING IT DOWN BEFORE DARK.

Yes. It is exactly THIS awesome.

There's a pile of discarded gloves at the bottom, so we grabbed some of those and trucked our way up. Oh, a 360 degree view of pure awesomeness? Hello. And at the top, holy crap. There was a part of the stone that jutted out about four feet, with NOTHING UNDERNEATH except the ground, about 2000 feet below. I'm not afraid of heights, but this was terrifying even for me. So I used that adrenaline to do something objectively stupid...

Sometimes I question how I haven't been naturally selected yet

I managed to not pee my pants, so I'm calling that a win. Then we hung around, chucked some rocks, freaked out about how beautiful everything was. You know, the usual. Heading back down was a bit of a challenge, because gravity, in all it's smugness, wanted us to just careen down the side of the mountain. Luckily, we were not among the few people who died on Half-Dome.

I wanna go again

Given a lifetime of knee injuries, I'm actually a bit confused why I decided to literally run down the entire mountain. But I did. And by the time we got down to the Lord of the Rings waterfall pool, we were hot and exhausted, and that water looked SO GOOD. So we dunked our heads in, which was great, and then finished the hike like goddamn champions.
If you're wondering what a group of gentlemen do after having just climbed the most awesome mountain in Yosemite, the answer is quite simple: drink our faces off. And eat ALL the food. Man, camping is great. Except the part where the sausage wasn't cooked all the way and me and Nick got up in the middle of the night to voms the entire contents of our stomachs out. That part isn't great. But all the other stuff is.
The next day we took it somewhat easy because all of our knees were exploding. We saw a few cool views, nothing fancy.

American Heros

So yeah, that was one of the coolest hikes of my life. And I definitely want to do it again. WHO'S WITH ME?