Climbing Half Dome: 'There But for the Grace of God Go I'

As friends and family ache for , 26, a San Ramon resident and graduate of Castro Valley High School, many of us who didn't know her are feeling a deep connection with her nonetheless.

If you're like me, you remember containing your terror and pushing away the realization that perhaps the extraordinary experience of climbing Half Dome in Yosemite shouldn't be allowed at all.

Twenty people have died on Half Dome, according to a website called www.yosemitehikes.com. The website describes this hike as "the one you can't die without doing, and the one you're most likely to die while doing."

Another website called www.hikehalfdome.com lists details about these accidents. One woman slid 150 feet and came to rest on a ledge. She suffered multiple fractures (ribs, jaw, cranial, clavicle) and lived.

Most of the deaths are associated with bad weather. A sign at the base of Half Dome warns: "If a thunderstorm is anywhere on the horizon DO NOT PASS BEYOND THIS SIGN. Lightning has struck Half Dome every month of the year."

KGO-TV reported that this was Haley's second time to climb Half Dome but that the first time the weather had been fair.

On Sunday morning, thunder and rain pounded the 5,000-foot-tall dome, which stands at 8,800 feet above sea level.

Haley, her sister and two friends may have thought they were safe because that storm had passed. I don't know. 

Patch readers, what do you recall about your climbs up Half Dome? Please add your own details to the comments section below.

I can so easily imagine the accidental letting go. The sensation as I think of it now is like the moment when you jolt awake after a bad dream: adrenaline, alarm, the awareness that what's happening doesn't make sense, the mind casting about in crystal-clear micro-seconds for rationality. I vividly recall how tenuous my own grip was. 

I was scared when I made the 16-mile round-trip about 20 years ago.

Not at first, of course.

I was in my late 20s and filled with bravado. I was fit. I had recently finished Peace Corps service, during which I lived on a mountain amid steep rice terraces in the tropics. I had climbed the tallest mountain among those mountains, carrying a torch at night in a rain forest, where things grow out of things that grow out of things, endlessly, so that you don't know which is solid ground and which is a matted canopy above more forest.

On Half Dome a year or so later, I prided myself on passing people on the way up. I was athletically competitive and had something to prove. At the time, I was regularly running 10Ks and doing aerobics and weight-lifting classes.

It's all so vivid: the thrill of anticipated accomplishment, the dare of it, the strength in my legs and lungs. I even remember what I was wearing. I still have those same hiking boots.

I felt proud, strong and superior. Endorphins, an opiate-like substance released in the body during strenuous exercise, made my natural high even higher.

That is, until I got to the cabled section just before the summit, and then again on the descent of that same portion, the portion of the climb where I'm told that Haley fell a wicked 600 feet to her death.

She could have been any one of us. It's that precarious.

Literally, you pull yourself up the final 400 feet with the strength of your arms, hauling your weight upward rather than forward, almost as if climbing a rope. And then you let yourself down the same way.

When we hear the word "cables," we tend to imagine safety ropes or barricades intended to keep people from going somewhere dangerous or otherwise off-limits. But these cables are the means by which you propel yourself upward, not a security system.

It's you and the mountain, and all that's below it. That's it.

Click here to see photos of the cabled portion of the climb.

As athletically confident as I was at that time in my life, I was petrified on that smooth, tractionless, sheer granite where I had to depend more on the strength of my upper body than my lower body. And it hadn't rained that day. The rock was dry. The sky was blue.

There were stacks of gloves at the base of cables, left as a kindness by previous hikers for future ones. They were sliced in the palm area, due to the friction of glove on cable. I wore more than one pair at once to compensate for the slices. After I ascended and then descended, I removed the gloves and put them back in the pile for the next hikers below me.

When I put the gloves back, it wasn't with a sense of responsibility but reverence. 

"There but for the grace of God go I."

Click here for Half Dome guidance from the National Park Service.