Half Dome hike - Yosemite

27-28 August 2022

This time a different kinda trip. It's about an AMAZING hike in Yosemite National Park. This hike was on my bucket list for a long time after my host dad told me about this hike. I needed to do it before my time in the US was over, and I did it!!

Before I’m gonna tell you eventing about Half Dome, I want to tell you that the hike was actually way better then I thought. On internet you will find many horror stories or people really preparing you for the hike, but might scare you a little. I want to give you all the information you need and I will tell you, use your brain. You know your body the best and you can image if you could see yourself doing this hike. Know your limits. Yes it's a long hike, but most of the time it isn't that steep, and hard. It is just very long. Be good prepared with good shoes, water, food and clothes. Don't be too scared about the hike, I think its absolutely worth it! I am a 21 year old girl who loves to be active, hike and be sporty. I even thought on the way back it was exhausting and my legs were definitely tired in the end, but we all made it!

The first part of the blog I will tell about everything you need to know about Half Dome, the second part is my experience about hiking Half Dome. Have fun reading about Half Dome!!

Half Dome hike

To start I will give you some background information about the Half dome hike. Half dome is the highest point (8,839 feet (2694 meter)) in Yosemite National Park, in California. It is a 14-16 mile (22,5-25,7 km) loop hike up and down the dome with a 4,800 feet elevation gain. It is a long long hike, it took us over 12 hours to do it. We took many food breaks, water breaks and on top we spend many hours enjoying the view, getting some rest and preparing ourselves for the hike back down. We started our hike at 6am and got back right before dark around 8pm. The Half Dome hike isn't open all year around, during the winter the hike is closed due to snow. The last half mile until the top is a cable climb, this part is only open from Memorial Day (last week of may) till the second Monday of October. You won't be able to climb up to half dome if the cables aren't on. You can still hike the first 7ish miles up, and then you can just stop before the cables. The view from up there is still beautiful!

Preparations

There are a few things you need to do before even starting the hike. I will help you to be all prepared for this hike! First of all you need a permit to hike Half Dome. The hike isnt always open to hike. During the winter the cables are off and you can't hike on them. Like I mentioned before you can still hike up to the bottom of Half Dome if you want too outside of the dates that the cables are on. Be aware, that when there is snow you might can't hike the hike anyway.

Okay back to the permits. Back in March I signed up for the lottery to get hiking permits for Half Dome. The whole month of March you can enter the lottery. You fill in a form and the weekend when you want to go and how many permits you want. I filled in every possible weekend I had, to make the change big to get a permit. You want know if you got the permits until a couple months after. I got 8 permits for August 28, 2022! I was so happy when I found out I got the permits and I started to ask around who wanted to hike Half Dome with me. I found 3 other friends who were crazy enough to hike it with me!

Be prepared

Now that we had a date and the permits we started looking online and asked friends and family who did it for all the things we need for the Half Dome hike. I will share the list below. I asked some friends if I could borrow some stuff from them, like a water filter and a head lamp. Be prepared when you do the hike, it just makes it a little easier. You need a water filter, because there is no water filling station on the trail. The last one is in the end of the Mist Trial, just 2 miles in. Your last change to get water is when you're 5 miles in. You will find a creek where you can get your water, but with a water filter. Without a water filter I wouldn't recommend drinking the water. You could try to carry all your water, it might be heavy, and if its really hot you might need more water than usual. We all carried 2,5/3 liters of water with us and we used the water filter to fill up our water before going up and when we got back we filled our water again. Wear good hiking shoes, it makes it way easier if you have them. One of my friends didn't had hiking shoes so she hiked the whole thing in tennis shoes. It was okay, but it might cost you a little bit more energy and the cable part is gonna be hard... She was struggling with the cable part a lot, because she didn't had any grip at all on the steep cliff. She did it anyway tho!

So it's not impossible. Also what I would recommend for the cable part is to have gloves. The cables are iron cables, it would make it easier and more comfortable if you have gloves which you can use. The gardening gloves for example would work perfectly, but anything with a little bit more of a grip to it would work. Be aware that the gloves might get ruined a bit. Also sometimes people leave their gloves behind for other people that go up. So if you want you could even do that. The other things on the list make sense I think.

The list of things you need for Half Dome:

- Water (4 liters at least/ 1 gallon)

- Water filter

- Head lamp / flashlight

- Hiking shoes

- Food (breakfast - lunch and lots of snacks/bars

- Gloves for cable part

- Screenshot or printed permit (you need to show the permit by entrance of the park too)

- Sunscreen & hat/cap

- Layers clothes

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Are you ready for my experience of hiking Half Dome?

The Day before

On Sunday August 28 2022 me and 3 other friends hiked Half Dome!! I was so so so excited for this hike. We went up to Yosemite a day before, on Saturday. We were actually planning on doing a medium hike that day, but when we arrived we couldnt find the trailhead and we just ended up driving around Yosemite. The park is beautiful, really one of my favorites. I will post another blog about Yosemite soon too, to talk about more beautiful places in Yosemite. But for now we just drove around, we wanted to go to a view point for sunset, but unfortunately because of road work that road was closed, so we couldn't. We ended up driving to our campsite, and it wasn't just a campsite. Ohhh it was so beautifull! It was more Glamping. In the middle of nowhere an 1,5 away from half dome we found on AirBnb this accommodation. It was a grass field on top of a hill with 2 big tents on top. The whole layout was so simple, calm, beautiful, peaceful, just magical. We watched the sunset while getting unpacked. We enjoyed the silence, each others company, we made s'mores above the fire! and when it got dark we looked at the stars. It was really magical! We went to bed not that late because we needed to wake up early early.

Let's Hike

Good morning! It was 3 in the morning, or something like that. I slept outside the tent for a while under the stars until I woke up around 2 am, because I got cold. When walking back to my tent I got scared of a sound behind me. I turned around and ended up having a staring contest with 4 giant horses not that far away from me. You could say that was kinda scary, but I was save, nothing happened. I got back in my tent and fell back asleep, while hearing horse sounds outside my tent. Our alarms went off around 3.30 am. Buttt the animal noises didn't stop by just the horses, because when we woke up we heard coyote noised from a distance as well. With all those animal things happening, we got ready, packed our stuff and left! It was a 1,5 drive to the Half Dome trailhead.

We started our hike at 6 am, this is the time that many people were recommending us to start the hike to avoid the crowds. That means that we could see the sunrise on the hike too!! and we indeed saw a beautiful sunrise on the Mist trail. The first 7 miles up you will cross different parts of Yosemite. You start at the Mist Trial, this is a trial where you can see 2 beautifull waterfalls. This is also one of the most famous hike in Yosemite. Many people will hike it, it's actually a 3-mile (4.8 km) loop hike to the first waterfall, The Vernal Fall, and if you want to see the Nevada Fall, you can hike for 7 miles (11 km). After the falls you will walk mostly in the woods until around 6/7 miles in. Then you will be on the rocks and cliffs. The rock and cliff part is cool! It is a steep part with many steps, it took us a little to get all the way up, but this part was fun! It brought some challenge to it and in general I like the more climbing kinda hikes/parts of a hike anyway. After the steep part you can see the cable part already! You're so close! The view from up there is beautiful, you can see all over the valley.

The cables are my absolute favorite! It took us around 20-30 minutes to get all the way up the cables, but take your time. It was kinda crowded on the way up, many people were going up and down on the same time, what makes it sometimes even more challenging.

On top of the world!

We made it to the top!! We were so tired, but when we reached the top we got so much more energy! The view was absolutely beautiful and we spend a lot of time up here. We could finally take our backpacks off and just place them somewhere on top of half dome and run around. Yes when I say run around, that is exactly what I did. During the whole hike up I started to hate my backpack a lot, because it was slowing me down, it was heavy and it started to irritate, but I needed it so I kept it with me. But on top we could leave it laying around while exploring the top of Half Dome and walking around.

There was a kinda diving board, a rock sticking out of the rest of the cliff where you could walk over. It was beautiful up there! I was so so so happy when we all made it! My bucket list item is crossed off!

The journey back down

After a while it was time to hike back down. The other 8 miles, back down. It wasn't as hard because you're going down. But it was still exhausting, because it was just very long. The cable part down was fine, it was not crowded at all, but we got someone in frond of us who was a little slower then us, so we needed to wait for him to go down. Oh and on the way down the cables, one of my friends was having my water bottle on the side of her backpack... and you might can guess already what happened. My water bottle fell all the way down the cliff. Bye, bye water bottle hahah. Sorry Yosemite for littering. Learn from our mistakes, and tuck your water bottle away, while doing the cable part.

Again, the part down was fine, it was all downhill so pretty easy, we were just very exhausted and our legs were tired. Also at a certain point not far from the cable part we run out of water, me and my friend were fast walking to the creek where we could fill our water bottles again. And we were almost running to the bathroom, on the trail there aren't many bathrooms, so you either can go in nature (bring back your wipes though), or you hope and wait till you can find a bathroom. We knew we were close to one so we started to run. It is funny to see how you have some energy boost sometimes.

The last 2 miles were torture... Our legs were now just walking and walking to get us close to the car. It felt like we were walking as zombies or just on automatic pilot. It was a weird feeling. This hike really gave us all the things: blood, sweat and tears. We got scratches from climbing, we sweated a lot (as we should) and in the end we left some tears from being exhausted.

Eventually we made it to the car and we were so so so happy to finally sit in the car again, eat some more food we left in the car and drank some water. We made it back around 8pm, right before it was dark dark.

Looking back to it

The Half Dome hike is absolutely my favorite hike so far! I enjoyed every part of it! Even the parts that I didn't like it, back then. When I got home I told everyone that I wouldn't do a hike like this ever again, but to be honest I would do it again in a heartbeat! The whole thing is just beautiful! Getting to see your limits and challenging yourself.Things I always loved to do and where I live for. I am so proud of my friends and me who did this hike! And actually everyone who did this hike! Doing amazing things with people is even better then by yourself, in my option! I am so happy that I found amazing people around me who are willing to tag allong with my crazy ideas, adventures and bucket list things!

This is a memory I will never forget and it will be my first and definitely not my last big hike! More to come! You will see.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope it was helpful and if you're going to hike half dome, please let me know! I would love to hear all about it! Also if you have more questions, you can always reach out to me on my instagram or in the comments. :)

Doeiiiii