Half Dome

An 1865 California state survey declared Half Dome perfectly inaccessible. It was climbed ten years later. George Anderson, a Scottish-born trail builder, made the first ascent on October 12, 1875, by drilling holes and inserting iron eyebolts five or six feet apart, standing on each bolt while he drilled the next. When his boots slid on the granite he tried stocking feet, then bare feet, and finally coated his feet and legs in pine pitch. The sheared northwest face drops some 4,800 feet to the valley floor, and hikers now reach the summit by the cable route bolted up the rounded eastern shoulder, a tidier version of Anderson’s idea.

This map makes the dome’s asymmetry plain. On the northwest face the contour lines compress into nearly solid bands where the wall drops toward Mirror Lake, then relax across the long curve of the eastern slope and the subdome. Tenaya Canyon cuts a deep trench along the northern edge of the terrain, and to the southeast the lines open into Little Yosemite Valley, where the Merced River runs wide and flat above Nevada Fall.