What Happened Since Graduation, pt I: The Week of Graduation

All Spring Quarter, Dan Urban (companion of previous adventures) and I had been dreaming of doing another summer night hike of Half-Dome in Yosemite, like the one we did in the summer of 2002. Except this time we wanted to get all of our friends together for an end-of-college, last hurrah sort of adventure. Accordingly, we planned a night hike of Half-Dome for the night of Saturday, June 5, 2004, and invited just about everybody we knew.

Being somewhat climbingly oriented, Dan and I wanted to do a little more than just a night hike. We wanted to climb Half Dome via a route called Snake Dike, rumoured to be one of the funnest climbs in Yosemite, with stunning views. Snake Dike is (I think) a 9-pitch climb up the side of Half-Dome (not the back, where you can hike up, or the front, with its sheer face)–around a thousand-foot climb. Certainly longer than anything I’ve done before (my longest route was a 2-pitch in Thailand. Snake Dike had a rating of 5.7R, which means a rating of 5.7 with “runout” pitches. 5.7 is just about the easiest rating–in a gym, a route with that rating is often climbable by people who are climbing for the first time. Still, things are different outdoors, and when you have a 9-pitch route, with some bolted clips and some trad protection, it becomes another story. All the same, the climbing was well within my level, and well below Dan’s.

The “R” was a little scary though–“runout” means that sometimes there is a very long way between bolts or protection points (which is where climbers put a piece of gear into a crack in the rock or into a bolt in order to provide protection in case they fall). The way lead climbing works is that, if you make a mistake and fall, if you are currently above the last piece of gear you placed, you will fall down to that gear, and then the same distance again, since you are on a rope (plus some rope stretch). Snake Dike reportedly had runouts of up to 75 feet. This meant that if a climber fell just before reaching the bolt which was 75 feet away from the last, he would fall 150 feet before the rope would go taut. Clearly, falling 150 feet is a bad idea. So: an easy route technically, but long and with no room for mistakes.

Dan and I tossed around the idea of climbing Snake Dike at night, while our friends hiked Half-Dome the normal route, and meeting them on the summit. But we threw away that notion because it was (a) too obviously dangerous, and (b) nullified our goal of hiking with our friends. Therefore, since it was absolutely necessary that our friends experience a night hike, as opposed to a day hike, Dan and I realized we would have to summit Half-Dome twice: once on Snake Dike during the day, and once with our friends at night. As we further looked at our schedules for our last week of school, we realized that we would have to accomplish all of this in a short amount of time, with relatively little rest in between endeavors.

So ultimately, the plan was this: drive to Yosemite on Friday the 4th, get an early sleep, wake up before dawn, climb Snake Dike, hike the 8 miles back down Half-Dome, eat dinner, meet our friends who would be arriving, hike back up the 8 miles of Half-Dome at night, greet the sunrise on the top, and then come back down. It seemed like a good plan, so we settled on it, and left Stanford at midday Friday as we had decided.

The drive to the Valley was successful, and we found a spot for our sleeping bags and camp stoves at Camp 4. This was illegal, since the camp was “full”, but we were planning on being out before the rangers came around the next morning, so we didn’t worry about it. Around 9:30 or 10:00 pm, we finally had eaten dinner and settled in for sleep. I slept well, but was nervous thinking about the long climb the next day.

Half-Dome in the sunset, taken while driving into Yosemite Valley

We woke up before 5am, packed up our gear, and drove to Happy Isles, which is at the base of the trail up Half-Dome. We were on the trail fairly quickly, for the hike to the base of Snake Dike. That hike follows the Half-Dome hiking trail for 3 or 4 strenuous miles, and then goes off-trail towards the dome (while the regular trail continues to circle around the dome).

A view from the way to Snake Dike. The route itself follows the shadow on the left side of the dome up to the summit.

Since there was no trail, we followed little cairns (piles) of rocks which previous climbers had used to mark the way. Sometimes these were devious guides, though, and led us in the wrong direction. But after about an hour of trucking through forests and even a swampy area, we came to the very base of the dome itself–an area of slabs.

“Slab”, in climbing terminology, just means any rock which is leaning away from you (as opposed to “overhang”, which is rock which is leaning towards you). If a wall is “slabby” enough, you can walk up it carefully without any ropes (just like you would walk up a steep hill). We saw that a series of cairns went up these slabs towards the base of Snake Dike so we followed them.

The foot of the slab approach to Snake Dike

The slabs kept getting steeper and steeper as we went up, and pretty soon I was feeling very unsecure with the shoes I had on, which were quite good trail running shoes, but lacked the sticky rubber of climbing shoes which enables one to put less foot surface area onto the rock while maintaining friction. We saw that we were getting closer, though, so I pressed on, with Dan a ways ahead (his shoes were slightly better suited to the task, having this climbing rubber). There were a few points where I had to make a sprint for a tree or some other anchor sideway across the slab, since if I moved any slower my shoes would fail and I would slide down however many hundreds of feet. Once you start sliding down a steep slab, it’s incredibly hard to stop–and if you start tumbling, it’s pretty much over.

Finally, I had made a lunge into a position which was impossible to get safely out of. The slab was too steep to press on, and the scree all around made it impossible to go down (since going down requires more friction than going up). Dan was fortunately able to get to a rock outcropping above me about 30 feet and blindly toss down a rope, after he had anchored himself around a tree. After a while I caught the rope and was able to pull myself up to Dan. From that vantage point, we could see that we had come up the wrong way–while we had followed a few cairns, the vast majority of them did not go up the slabs immediately as we had done, but made a level path on the shallower slabs until it came to a more step-like and less slabby way up towards Snake Dike.

Needless to say, I was exhausted from the thousands of feet of hiking, the hundreds of feet of crazy slab running, and hauling myself up a rope. And in fact, being trapped on slab where I could not even rest my muscles fully had scared me pretty bad. So we hiked the last hour up the pretty grueling terrain to the base of the climb with a good bit of apprehension. But we had finally finished the non-climbing part of the climb. And it was 9am.

Looking up from the base of Snake Dike

In the picture, you can see a dot a ways up. That’s a person climbing the route ahead of us. We had started at 5:30 am, and this group was at least an hour and a half ahead of us! That’s dedication. But to give you a sense of scale, the climber is not even a third of the way up the route.

Dan on a crazy runout

Here we can see Dan on one of those really long runouts I was talking about. If he had fallen there, things would not have looked good for him (or me, if he landed on me). Luckily, Dan’s climbing prowess was not overestimated, and we made it to the end of the 9th pitch without any problems, a few exhilirating hours later. The climb wasn’t over then, though. We unroped and prepared for the last leg–more slabs, but this time we had our climbing shoes on and the going was not as frightening. It was steep and difficult, however, and terribly aerobically taxing at almost 9,000 feet above sea level. Nothing was about to stop us at that point, though–we finally made it!

Dan and I on the top, Sierras in the background

After a brief rest (and a brief bask in the admiration of those hikers at the top who happened to notice we had come up the wrong side), we noticed it was about 2pm (Snake Dike takes a long time when you make 1 person lead, as I made Dan, since you have to switch gear at every belay–I wasn’t about to try any runouts!) and started the descent. We didn’t push ourselves and got down sometime in the late afternoon, probably between 4 and 5. So, at least 5 miles of uphill hiking, a thousand feet of climbing, and 8 miles of downhill hiking later, we were exhausted. We rewarded ourselves with an extra-large pizza and a pitcher of beer and joined a table of climbers who were a bit more seasoned than ourselves for some friendly conversation.

Around 7:30 we settled back in our car seats for whatever nap we could get. I woke up around 9 and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I started preparing for the night hike, rearranging gear and packs and water and so on. After 10pm or so, our friends rolled in in a disorderly caravan of vehicles–many more people than we had expected given the poor reception our invitation e-mail had received! All in all there were about 15 people ready to tackle the dark, bear-infested heights.

With so many people it took a while to get headlamps and packs in order, but we were starting up the John Muir trail not too long after 11–just 18 hours after Dan and I had started our Snake Dike adventure. I had been feeling pretty exhausted, my legs were virtually destroyed, and I was worried that 16 more miles of hiking would be out of my reach. But everyone else’s excitement, the bright moon (we had planned it for a full moon), the crisp air, and the steady pace lifted my spirits and I felt ready to push again.

A night hike of Half-Dome takes a fair bit longer than the same hike in the day, because much more care is required in order not to trip over hidden roots and stones, go off the edge into a waterfall, or slip on slick rocks. There were also a number of points where the trail itself is easy to lose, and Dan’s and my short term memory from earlier in the day proved valuable.

The group, which consisted of people at all levels of outdoors experience, went surprisingly quickly. We trekked through all the kinds of terrain there is on the beautiful hike up, and eventually made it past the “treeline” to the beautiful moon-reflecting granite near the summit. The panorama for the last hour of the hike is truly amazing in the moonlight, with all of Yosemite Valley clear, but ethereal and ghostly and quiet. And then we were at the Cables–the last, very steep push up to the top of the dome, assisted by heavy cables you use to pull yourself up.

We arrived around 4am, making for just under a 5-hour hike–not bad, especially for such a large group! I immediately began to fire up my stove and make some hot chocolate, because the sudden ceasing of movement gave me a deep chill. I had foolishly packed most of my technical hiking clothing away for moving to Florida, and was wearing layers of cotton, which, when soaked through with sweat, practically turned into ice in the 40-degree air and swift winds.

The small size of the picture doesn’t show it well, but this is a pretty sweet long-exposure shot of the stars above the sierras

From there I degenerated physically pretty quickly, since I had spent all of my energy stores, and was now freezing cold. So I huddled rather miserably under a rock and awaited the sunrise. It came pretty soon, as you’d expect at high altitude, and flooded the Valley with amazing brilliance and beauty. It’s really impossible to describe how the light goes from non-existent, to gentle, to jewel-like, to fiery, to terrible and blazing, on the slopes of the Sierras.

Our group played around on top for a while, exploring the large surface of the summit and making oatmeal on our stoves. Much of the wonder was lost on me, unfortunately–not because I’d been to the top twice before, but because I had begun to feel very ill, and had no idea what was wrong with me. I figured it would pass, and so I pretended like everything was OK until we started the descent later on in the morning. I was helping some of my friends down the cables when I realized why I was feeling ill. Without further ado I let go of the cables and practically ran down, then up the next hill until I could find a suitably private spot. Then, with the help of some friendly bushes and an uncomfortably rough rock, my body was freed of the burden it had been carried, and which had made me ill! Of course, no one else in the group needed to know about this little scouting trip.

The cables head on look very steep–it’s a fantastic optical illusion! (Credit: Dana Hornbeak)

That done, I was relieved that I wasn’t in any serious physical trouble, and was confident that I could make it down to the cars without any problems. Indeed, a number of us felt that it was better to jog down than to hike, to make use of gravity and allow our legs some more free movement. So the whole of us hiked and trotted down, not in any hurry, the 8 miles which had become so familiar to me over the past 30 hours.

The bulk of our group taking a break on the way down (Credit: Melanie Chuen)

One of the benefits of the night hike is that you meet very few other hikers on the trail, and you feel as if you have Half-Dome to yourself. On the way down, however, we met scores and scores of early-morning hikers getting a good start up Half-Dome, and it became very tedious and crowded. So for the last 2 miles or so, on the relatively easy downhill, I let loose and ran (along with a couple of other guys) for the finish, playing games like “dodge the hiker”.

And then, it was over! We had made it to the base and walked the mile back to the cars. I was more exhausted than I’d ever been, but also exhilirated that Dan and I had pulled off an amazing expedition for ourselves, and one that all our friends had enjoyed too. The pain and soreness in my legs over the next week made me feel a little foolish for running the last bit, but I had final papers to contend with, so there wasn’t much room for regret.

The downside of coming back from that wonderful extended church service in Yosemite was that the coming back was to academic hell. Of course, I’d left plenty of work until the last few days, and so I scrambled to slap together some excellent work. Excellent work isn’t usually slapped together, but I thought it ought to be possible, so why the hell not? As it turns out, the work wasn’t quite as excellent as I’d hoped, but it was a good deal better than I’d thought it actually would be, and apparently my professors did too.

So on Wednesday, June 9, I walked out of Bldg 100 in the Stanford Quad, and had completely satisfied all my academic requirements for what is very probably ever. The next day, my grades were in and I had satisfied all the unit requirements for the BA and the MA in Philosophy–with 0 extra units. I do like to cut it close. As exhilirating as the Half-Dome hike was, I don’t think that I’ve ever felt quite as much relief as on the day. Well, it spanned a couple days–all the way through the night of graduation.

Graduation weekend was spent packing and figuring out how on earth I would get all my stuff back to Florida. There were also parties to attend and lots of people to say goodbye to. Graduation itself was Sunday morning, and was unbearably hot under the California sun. But I didn’t care. I had my cool MA hood on and I allowed myself a little pride, just for effect, but mostly all I felt was relief. I received my two diplomas from our department head in the private department ceremony in the Philosophy department arcade.

Then I loaded up my car, slapped my bike and snowboard on top, and drove to San Francisco for a family graduation dinner and party, with grandparents and aunts and uncles and everybody. It was simply amazing, and still all I could feel was relief. So I drank a good amount of vodka in praise to God and fell blissfully asleep.

Thus ended the longest and most significant chapter of my life (to date, anyway).