Snake Dike on Half Dome

Taking some liberties with the camera angle on Snake Dike.

Strava

Photos

While we didn’t complete the link-up of El Cap to Half Dome yesterday, we decided to finish it off today, with a lap on the ultra-classic Snake Dike. Our routine each morning is the one we’ve adopted ever since we started adventuring together. I get up at least thirty minutes before Derek and handle getting everything ready. Then I tell Derek to get up. Derek does the bulk of the work the night before. He fills all the water bottles, stows all the food, etc. So, it’s a nice division of labor and works to our strengths: I’m better in the morning and he’s better at night.

The alarm went off at 5 a.m. and I snoozed it once before getting up. We had to pack up the site, as we were moving camping sites again. We were hiking at 6 a.m. Derek carried the pack with our light harnesses, four cams, seven slings, food, and four 20-ounce bottles of water. I carried our 60-meter 7.8mm rope. Our other small pack’s zipper failed completely on our El Cap descent, so we only had the one light pack.

The impressive Nevada Falls

We hiked at a steady pace and passed by many hikers headed for Half Dome. Fifteen minutes below Nevada Falls, we caught and passed four guys, all about my age, and moving along pretty well, especially their leader. They were headed for Half Dome, of course, and we’d pass them again, on our way down in Little Yosemite Valley. When we pulled up next to them, I asked them if they were the same guys we’d passed earlier. One guy looked us over for a bit and then said, “Yup. I remember telling my buddies, ‘I bet they are from Colorado.’” I just looked at him for a beat, thinking if we had even talked to these guys, when he asked, “Where are you from?” Cool. Colorado has a rep because of people like Jason Wells and Stefan Griebel and Layton Kor, who come out to the Valley and crush things. But these guys didn’t know climbing at all. When we told them we did a rock climb on the opposite side as Half Dome, one guy asked, “So, do you rappel up it?” I wish. He pegged us as Coloradans only because we seemed to be handling the 6000-foot altitude well. 6000 feet! It’s true that people from Colorado don’t even consider that an altitude. There isn’t a lot of Colorado below 6000 feet.

Derek ascending the first pitch, above the roof.

Fours years ago, when Derek was 16, we did the Dean Potter approach to Snake Dike and it was so horrible and so stressful for Derek that he didn’t even want to do the climb. I insisted, we did it, and he had a great time on the climb. This time we didn’t take that approach, but the standard one that branches off the Half Dome Trail in Little Yosemite Valley, above Nevada Falls. I’d done it a couple of times but not for at least 25 years. I was just about to double back, when we spotted a climber’s trail branching off and some cairns.

Derek arriving at the second belay.

We followed the climbing trail clear to the base of the route. Before the ledge traverse to the left, just below the South Face of Half Dome, we encountered massive, fresh rockfall. Manzanita branches were cleaved off cleanly and anyone that has dealt with that plant knows this takes the equivalent force of ten-kiloton nuclear device. Derek had been pounding out the trail to that point, but he didn’t like that terrain and slowed, picking his way carefully over the unstable terrain.

Once we got on the climber’s trail we saw only two people — a couple with overnight gear coming out. The next two people we saw were when I was, literally, thirty seconds from the base of the route. They were coming in from the north, having probably hiked by the start of the route, which is apparently common. If it wasn’t for that mistake, we’d have been second in line. I’m sure they would have let us pass, though. They were a nice couple. The guy was from the Bay Area and the woman was from New York. He told her, “I guess we have a little time to hang out.” I assured them that we’d be fast.

Traversing to the correct dike on our variation fourth pitch.

The approach had taken us 2h45m and we geared in less than two minutes. We were doing the entire day in our approach shoes, we just needed to pull on our harness and flake the rope. I led up to the roof, put in a piece, downclimbed twenty-five feet to easier ground and then friction-climbed across the face to the left side of the roof and then ran up the easy crack/ramp thing to the first belay. I did the pitch in just a few minutes and we were out of their way before they had shoes or a harness on. We were on the fourth pitch by the time they had both left the ground.

When Derek arrived at the belay I assured him that we had no need to rush and I did that pitch fast just to clear the route for them. Derek agreed that there wasn’t a reason to go fast, except that it was fun to climb fast and efficiently. Where do kids get ideas like that…?

Incredibly fun climbing on the Snake Dike

I zipped up the second pitch but on the third pitch I followed a bolt up and slightly right before finding another one back left and high up there. I think I normally do this traverse to the dike on the left lower. Anyway, I traverse over to the dike on exciting friction, then easily up the dike for a bit and then back right to the two-bolt anchor at the base of the dike on the right. This is a strange place for the belay, since the proper dike to climb is the one on the left. But that’s so unintuitive, despite thinking that was the right dike, that I headed up the dike directly above the belay. I got up about eighty feet and put in a very marginal .75 Camalot. I then did spot a bolt, way below me on the other dike. Not wanting to reverse the eighty feet, I climbed twenty feet higher to where the dikes were closer together, hoping to make the traverse there, but I found the extra slick golden granite there and couldn’t get in any protection in the seam above my last placement. So, I climbed back down to my 0.75 and then another fifteen feet lower and made a delicate traverse over to the other flake and the 2-bolt anchor. When Derek cleaned my only piece, he did not approve, thinking it wouldn’t have held body weight, let alone a fall. When he arrived at the belay he asked me, “Now, what have we learned?” Hey, who’s the father here? I answered, “Go with your gut instinct?” He said, “No! Down climb!” I can’t be retreating at the first sign of adversity. Plus, that would admit that I had made a wrong route-finding decision. Isn’t it better to risk a 150-foot skin-grating slide?

What a gorgeous place to climb.

On the fifth pitch I headed up the dike for one hundred feet, finding no bolts enroute to the two-bolt anchor, and stopped to belay. On the sixth pitch I led out 250+ feet on our 200-foot lead line (you do the math) and belayed. We did one more long, easy pitch to make sure it was safe to unrope. Then we did the long, calf-burning slab walk to the summit, arriving there at 11:30 a.m.

Calf-burning slab walking to the summit.

We hung out on the summit for forty minutes, eating all the food we brought, which is rare for us. We downed two of our four bottles, too. We still had an 8-mile, 5000-foot, knee-jarring descent, but it went smoothly and we arrived back at the car in just under nine hours.

On the summit.