Snake Dike is the easiest actual climbing route up Half Dome.
The year was 1981… plus or minus. Tisha, Bruce, and I were supposed to be climbing in Yosemite, but just weeks before our departure Bruce parked his Norton Commando into the rear end of a stopped car at about eighty kph. The bike was a real mess and so was Bruce. He lived to climb another day, but just not on this trip unfortunately. Eventually the day arrived and after some adventures like me driving off I-5 asleep at the wheel, and the obligatory psychedelic stopover in Frisco we finally made it to the valley.
After we had a weeks’ worth of good climbs under our belt we left the squalor of camp four and headed for the high country. Even though afternoon was wearing on by the time we started, it was still a hot and dusty slog up the John Muir trail while passing the lines of sad old glue ponies hauling tourists back down the trail. Eventually it got cooler as we got higher and as evening approached. At some point we left the trail by the river and headed up a bit into open country where we planned to bivi for the night. There really aren’t words to adequately describe being warmly cocooned in a cozy sleeping bag staring up at the stars on a cloudless night; with all the intoxicating thoughts of the infinitely big and the infinitely small, and the upcoming climb….you just have to experience it.
Morning dawned clear and very cool. Words didn’t need to be spoken here either. We ate a cold breakfast, silently as monks, and sorted the meager amount of gear we would require for this climb. Soon there was nothing left to do but go for it. The route and the start of it are very obvious and in short order we found ourselves at the base and tied in. The plan was for me to lead all of the pitches and Tish would second. The first pitch is polished fourth class with a roof and a bulge to negotiate, but it does take some gear. Remember this is 1981… cams were not common place. All we had were a handful of wired stoppers and some slung hexes. But then again this climb really doesn’t take a lot of gear, and is mostly run out, as we were led to believe and as we soon discovered. Pitch two took a bit of gear early, and was fun with another small roof to surmount. The fun however, quickly ended there and the wheels started to come off of the cart. The guide book had warned about getting off route somewhere around this point, and with that in mind I thought I was paying close attention. Turns out I guess I was so worried about it, that I actually got off route before where most people get off route, and well before the ‘poorly protected’ 5.7 traverse.
So there I was, frictioning across this steep slab looking for the mid-point bolt and heading for the dike proper. I was unfortunately well below the bolt in question; just sketching like crazy. I couldn’t comment on the grade here, other than likely not 5.7, and way run-out. Next thing I know is that I was off and sliding like mad; then… bam… I bounced over the lip and hit hard on the wall. The gear held. Man that was something! I collected myself a bit, straightened things out, checked the pro, and decided to give it another go. Of course trying the exact same path I took last time. The result was the same, although I made it a bit further on the traverse before I came off, resulting in of course, a longer fall. This time when I impacted the rock on my hip it really hurt. What’s that they say about third times a charm, or is that three strikes and you’re out? And yes, you guessed it; I tried the exact same path, being the stubborn or stupid cuss that I am. I mentioned this was 1981 didn’t I? No sticky rubber either, just my trusty EB’s.
Traversing in a leftward slightly rising manner; there were no holds, just pure friction plain and simple. Oh sure there were some small nubbins and crystals here and there; the odd divot; but to borrow from my physicist friends; they were merely ‘tendencies to exist’. I really don’t know what possessed me to be out there again, but I was; inching across, thinking light, trying to blend with both gravity and the granite. The air was dead calm, and being early, still had that nice crispness to it. The morning sky was so very blue. The dike was getting closer, and then my hands were on it and then my feet. It rose above me for pitches. Looking for anything like a fossilized spine of some prehistoric saurian. I was almost dry heaving at this point although I was on the relative security of the dike, I was also acutely aware that my last pro was a stopper I placed under the roof that is about twenty metres or more below me, and that there is nothing on the dike itself that will allow any gear to be placed whatsoever. There are supposed to be belay bolts somewhere, but I was so disoriented at this point in time, that I really had no idea if they were above me or below me on the dike.
Not much choice but to carry on upwards. The climbing now was super easy, with nice (but small) blocky holds. But it also felt very insecure as I was now run-out well beyond any sane amount. Tisha and I could still hear each other, and now she was calling out to me about how much rope I had left, and it wasn’t much. I still couldn’t see those bolts. I was obviously on route now, so they had to be somewhere. I was starting to get a bit gripped. Scratch that… a lot gripped. The options were ricocheting around my skull like a pinball. Down-climb? There is no way I could manage that. The dike portion would be doable, but the friction traverse, no way. I could ask Tisha to unclip from the belay and we could simul-climb; but recall there is only one small stopper as gear; it’s close to her and as soon as she passed this, we would be in essence soloing with a rope tied between us. In other words if one goes, both go…. Third option I thought was best and that has me untying and letting the rope drop back to Tisha. That way she could rap to the ground; and I could finish the route (or attempt to) solo. It’s supposedly mostly 5.4 from here on with a small bit of 5.6 so how bad could it be? Only five more pitches until the third class stuff. I was still moving upwards when she called up that I had only one meter of rope left! The lid was totally off at this point. This was so very bad. I took one more move upwards and my left hand felt steel…. Holy crap, two bolts on a little flat portion of the dike that you can only see when you are right on it and not from below. I had a white knuckle death grip moment on those things as it took me a few minutes to regain my composure, and get clipped in. Tisha managed to follow the pitch in style; probably wondering what all the fuss was about. This was some kind of intermediate belay station, so I led out past another bolt and up to the next belay.
At that time I noticed that my hip was throbbing, and that my psyche was pretty bruised as well. I cajoled Tish onto the sharp end, and up she went. There is a spot where the dike splits into a left and a right half, and today I think that there is a belay station there, but back in the day I think the pitches were a bit different. In any event the guidebook never mentioned this split and we had no idea which side to take. I was well below her and we were trying to suss it out. She chose left. Bad choice. It was a ‘variation’ that ends up off route and was probably clocking in at 5.7 or a bit harder. I saw her up there futzing around drying her hands on her pile jacket trying to make the moves. She was a very long way past the old ¼” bolt that Bridwell probably put in there, way back in 1965; maybe twenty metres out when off she comes… It all happened pretty fast, but she must have fallen about forty metres, and ended up right beside me hanging upside down. She appeared unharmed and was cursing like a drunken sailor because her new jacket had sustained a rip in the sleeve. There was some small amount of blood on her head, but the wound looked small. Nobody wore helmets in those days unless you were alpine climbing, and then only maybe. Tisha was more pissed off about her jacket than anything else, and was soon back at it on the dike and climbing up to the split. This time lets’ try the right hand dike. It’s maybe 5.6 and she breezed through it and soon had me on belay. The next two or three pitches to the end of the difficulties are a blur in my memory. It was mostly low class five with opportunity for some small gear; totally enjoyable stuff. After that there are class three slabs for a very long way to the summit. We could almost run up these. We stopped for a breather and to un-rope and noticed that a team of two was on the last pitch below us, so we waited for them to catch up. A couple of guys from Portland. They had witnessed Tisha’s fall from below and immediately thought they were going to be involved in a rescue; they said that they were surprised as hell when they saw her moving, and even more so when they saw her starting to lead the pitch again. She was pretty hard. We chatted for a bit then boogied to the summit up the seemingly never-ending slabs.
This was ‘back in the day’, and maybe we were gumbies then, but it was a big deal for us at the time. I know a guy who on-site soloed the climb, and the late Dean Potter had done it (solo) car to car in 3 hours. But you might want to think about it twice before you attempt something like that. It’s a big climb.
There was a small contingent of tourists on top, who reacted to our appearance with the usual incredulity. It’s not like we came up the North West Face or anything like that… but I suppose it’s all the same to them. We struck up a conversation with a couple of Deadheads and the girl of the pair was willing to swap t-shirts with me right there on the summit of Half Dome. How often do you get an opportunity like that? Trouble was that it was my lucky shirt…. We had the foresight to pack in two beers to our bivi site, so I agreed with this girl to trade a beer for the shirt if we could meet up below by where they were camped. We ended up hiking down with them. This was still fairly early in the season and the cable route was down. I guess that explained why there were so few people on the summit, as the ‘trail’ could be rather intimidating to many people, without the security of the hand lines. We made good time down. I exchanged the beer for the shirt (which I still have by the way) and she even shared half the beer with me… what a deal!