The Way of Wanderlust by Don George Page B

part you step and mop your brow and swat at mosquitoes in the patches of shade and take swigs of water, careful to roll the water in your mouth as your long-ago football coach taught you, until you’re surprised by a dazzling quilt of purple flowers or a tumbling far-off torrent shining white and silver and blue in the sun, and you stop and munch slowly on granola bars and dried apples and nectarines and notice how the sunlight waterfalls through the branches of the trees.
    After four hours we reached the halfway point at Little Yosemite Valley. It’s a popular camping spot with loosely demarcated camping areas—framed by fallen tree trunks, with rock-outlined fire circles and tree stumps for tables and stools—plus a resident ranger, an outhouse, and easily accessible water in the form of the Merced River fast-flowing by. We hadn’t really prepared for the trip physically, and were already grimy and sweaty and exhausted. On top of that, we had received conflicting information about where exactly the last source of water on the trail would be, so rather than press farther up, we decided to stop there for the night. Tomorrow we would rise early and climb Half Dome.
    We had planned to get up at 6:00 and be on the trail by 8:00. Again, reality intruded, and we got up at 8:00 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 1:00 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 daypacks 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 sixty 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,