Alpine Lifestyle in the Canadian Rockies: Yosemite: Half Dome, Northwest face (23 pitches, 5.9 C1)

The Northwest face of Half Dome
with the Death Slabs approach bellow.

Our climb on Half Dome turned out to be an epic 27 hour adventure!

At 01:00am Pat and I left Camp 4 on our bikes guided by headlamp to reach the start of the climbers trail up the “Death Slabs”. (Pat found a shortcut yesterday). We stashed the bikes and took off on foot. It took us just under 4hrs to reach the base of Half Dome from Camp 4 with some time lost searching for the climbers trail now and again up the Death Slabs.

We started climbing at 05:30am while it was still dark. We were on the second pitch when the first sign of daylight came across the horizon. It was nice to have daylight at last! Climbing in the dark made the climbing feel more difficult and had slowed us down. To help save time I brought up the extra slack in the rope and used a technique in big wall climbing called short fixing. This newly acquired technique allowed me to start climbing up the next pitch while being belayed by a GriGri as Pat climbed the pitch bellow with his ascenders. Once he reached the belay station I had just left. He could put me back on belay and fixed the gear he cleaned from the last pitch onto my trailing tag line. This allowed me to gain extra ground as he came up.

As we gained higher ground we came across the Robbins Traverse on the 10^th pitch. It’s needed to get across a blank section of rock. This was my first pendulum on a climb. I was lowered off of a bolt placed higher up and began running from one side to the other to gain momentum. After a few runs back and forth I was eventually able to throw myself far enough to grab a flake and pulled up onto higher ground. It was a different feeling!

We managed to make it to the 20^th pitch as the last of the light dimmed over the horizon. We had three more pitches ahead of us to do in the dark. We pulled out the headlamps once again. On the second last pitch, Pat made it up halfway before realizing that I forgot to hand over the sky hooks that he needed for his pitch! I tied them off to the trailing tagline and he quickly pulled them up to finish the pitch. By now we were definitely feeling the accumulated fatigue and were looking forward to the walk back down. Without daylight our progress slowed down for the last part of the climb but we made it on top of Half Dome. It was 11:20pm. We were exhausted and quite thirsty. We had rationed 5 litres of water between us. It was enough to get us up the climb but we were feeling slightly dehydrated and could have drank more if it wasn’t so heavy to carry up.

From the top of Half Dome we needed to walk over 15km down the John Muir trail to reach the valley bottom. We were looking to hike what seemed to be an ultra-marathon ahead of us. To our advantage we were already familiar with the trail from having done the climb named “Snake Dyke” which goes up the opposite side of Half Dome and goes down the same trail. Getting lost in the dark wasn’t a big concern.

When we topped off on Half Dome we had talked of spending what little time was left of the night sleeping in the washroom lower down on the John Muir trail (desperate times = desperate measures). We also knew there was a drinking fountain next to the washrooms! I felt like I could have polished off a five gallon bucket of water in one sitting. We put our heads down and marched along the trail. After an agonizing 2+ hours along the rough trail, a few close calls on rolling my previously injured ankle. We finally reached the washrooms. Big deception! There was a sign on the door: “Closed for the season”. To make things even worse we found the water fountain nearby also closed for the season. NOOO!!! I was sooo thirsty! We could have called it there and settled down shivering all night in our emergency foil blankets waiting for sunrise. But instead we chose to keep going down the trail. The fatigue was really setting in now. I was digging deep into my energy levels. After another 45 minutes we finally reached the road at the end of the trail. We were still another 4 or 5km from Camp 4 and because the approach to the climb was different from the walk down. We were left without our bikes. By now it was 03:00am and hitching a ride wasn’t going to be possible on this quiet road. Pat offered to run back to Camp 4 to get the van and pick me up. My ankle was in no shape for a run and the walk back would be painfully slow. We passed a bus stop where there was a bench and from there Pat took off and ran to Camp 4. He was then going to drive back with the van to pick me up. Shortly after he had left, I had fallen sound asleep on the bench and made good use of the coiled climbing rope as my pillow. Pat made it back in what seemed like no time. Even with Pat’s puffy jacket on top of mine I woke up shivering from the cold. I was so passed out from the fatigue that I wondered how long I would have been able to sleep with the near freezing temperature.

Finally we both made it to Camp 4 and crawled into our sleeping bags. It was 04:00am.

Click on photos to enlarge.