With much effort, I got my tent set up in the dark. Despite the cold, I decided not to put the rain fly on my tent, since I wasn't sure how to put it on and didn't feel like figuring it out in the dark. We got to bed by 11, which wasn't bad considering the slow start.
I woke up many times in the night. The first couple times, it was due to the cold. Later, it was a flood light shining directly into my tent by the campers in the next site setting up. At 2am, I woke up when rain hit my forehead. At this point, I decided I should really learn how to put the rain fly on. I stepped out into the rainy darkness, held the flashlight with my mouth, and began affixing the rain fly to anything I could. I had the door on the wrong way and it wasn't tied correctly but it covered all the screened areas of my tent, so I thought it would be good enough. I got back into my tent and the rain stopped.
I woke up several more times due to the cold. At about 4:30am, the sound of the rain starting again woke me. When my alarm went off at 5:30, it was still raining. Nobody else was up. I thought I'd wait a little longer to see if the rain would stop. It didn't. At 6, I got everyone else up and we packed up in the rainy darkness. In another of a series of misjudgments, I left my sleeping bag and other stuff in the tent.
We had a half hour drive to get into the valley. According to our schedule, the shuttle wouldn't start until 9, so Eric would drop the three of us off near the trailhead, park the car, and walk the extra half mile to meet us. Minutes later, Eric arrived. The schedule was wrong; the shuttles were running. I had thought the closest parking was Curry Village but he said he found a closer spot (this will be important later).
We started the trail at 8am. This was pretty late for the short days of late September, so we hurried as much as possible, quickly climbing the stone steps of Mist Trail. It later occurred to me that perhaps we should have taken the longer but less steep John Muir Trail since Mist used up the climbing-straight- up muscles that I needed at the top. It continued to rain on us most of the way. My rain poncho made a portable steam bath, so I stopped to remove my jackets and wore only my T-shirt under my poncho.
The trickle of water left to Vernal Falls was still beautiful despite its lack of volume. At the bottom, the Merced River was a streambed of boulders. Most the of surrounding cliff face was obscured by thick fog with occasional pines poking through it.
At the top of Nevada Falls, our group split up. I can go uphill at a good pace but I'm really slow going down, and I wanted to race to the top so I could be back down before sunset. For the next couple miles, Eric and I passed a number of people, but by the last 2 miles, I was really trudging. I could feel my uphill muscles aching with every step.
At this point, we started meeting people coming down. They looked cold and unhappy. They said near the top it was too cold and windy to climb the cables. No one was able to make the top.
Undaunted, we pressed on. Every 100 meters or so, we passed a sign indicating that conditions at the top were bad and telling us how and why we would die if we continued. Also at about this time, it started hailing. We pressed on.
About the time I thought I couldn't go on, the trail turned into steps. Here's where I really wish I hadn't burned out my climbing-straight-up muscles. Eric quickly realized that his only chance to make the top was to leave me behind. He bounded up the steps alone.
Somehow, resting after every flight, I made it up the steps. The altitude and fatigue made me giddy. At the top of the steps, there was no clear trail, just steep rock. A single cable was stretched to aid climbers, and everyone else pulled their gloves out of their backpacks and climbed up the cable. I used my bare hands and felt every heat-carrying electron in my body seep out through the frigid, metal cable. Thankfully, the guy in front of me warned of metal spikes sticking out where the cable had frayed.
At the top of this section, I crossed into an alternate universe made only of wind and cold. I rejoined Eric here. We were at a plateau where the main cables attach at the bottom. The wind was fierce. My rain poncho was blowing all over the place and I was afraid it would trip me as I scrambled over rocks. I crouched into the corner of some rocks and took it off and put on my fleece jacket and windbreaker. My hands were totally numb at this point. I couldn't move my fingers, so I was trying to start the zipper with the heels of my hands. After a long and frustrating time, I got the jackets zipped.
The cables were much taller and steeper than I imagined. I didn't even cross to the bottom of them, because the wind was pushing me all around. Eric had started to climb but lost feeling in his hands partway up and returned. The gloves left at the bottom of the cables had been open to the rain. Apparently, wet gloves on the cable conducted heat out of the body even faster than bare hands.
We had been on the plateau about half an hour when Steve and Munazza arrived, but I didn't stay to talk. All I could think about was getting out of the wind and cold. I headed down with several other people, but we lost the trail in the open area. Finally, one of us spotted the trail, but we had to scramble on all fours to get back to it.
One nice thing about being on top was that the fear of freezing and blowing off the rock face had rejuvenated my muscles. Going down was easier than I imagined, but I still went extremely slowly to avoid slipping (as several other people did). On the way down, I ran into the guy who had warned me about the spikes on the cable. He was headed back up. He had removed his backpack at the top and forgotten it. He now remembered hiding it behind a bush; he just wasn't sure where the bush was.
I made it to our pre-arranged meeting place by 5:45 and waited for the other three. I thought I should stretch, but I was too cold to move my extremities far enough away to stretch them. Even though I was protected from the rain by an overhang, I was already drenched and if I had to wait very long in the cold, I was in trouble. I managed to dry my hair, T-shirt, and jackets by invoking the bathroom hand drier about 150 times. Even so, I was very cold. Eric arrived at about 6:30 and said that Munazza had slipped and hurt her back and had to go down very slowly.
By 7, Steve and Munazza arrived, cold and tired. We scrambled onto the shuttle bus. I had envisioned sitting comfortably in a warm bus on our ride to Curry Village. But the shuttle bus had open sides without windows. The wind blew through the bus making it much colder than the outdoors, as unbelievable as that seemed.
The bus dropped us off at Curry Village and we warmed up over hot chocolates. The next hurdle was getting the car. One of us would have to be brave enough to take another ride on the windmobile to get to the car and bring it back to Curry Village. Eric volunteered. On route, he was talking with the bus driver about the closest shuttle stop to the car, when he realized the car must be at Curry Village, but just far enough away so that he didn't see signs when he parked it. The shuttles only go one way, so rather than make the entire circuit on the ice bus, he elected to get off at the next stop (which is also the trailhead where we had just gotten on the shuttle) and walk back, which entailed walking in the dark through deep puddles that he couldn't see.
We drove back to our campsite. My sleeping bag and other stuff were flotsam in the marsh that was my tent. Only the thought of spending the night here was worse than the thought of packing up our gear in the cold and rainy darkness. We threw all of our mud-laden gear into the car. In our hurry, we were not quite able to pack very efficiently. The car was crammed with all of our not-well-folded camp gear, along with an extra 20 pounds of mud and water, and the two sets of food that we never ate.
The chances of finding a motel room near Yosemite are remote, so we drove all the way back. At 3am, we arrived at Eric and Munazza's place and received our belated sleep.
Looking over the maps the next day, I read a warning that hadn't been on the signs. The reason you shouldn't climb halfdome in bad weather is that lightning likes to travel through the cables.
Views from the top.
