High Sierra Topix

Yosemite NP:

A hiker fell from the Half Dome cables in Yosemite National Park yesterday afternoon at approximately 4:30 pm. The male hiker was on the Half Dome cables hiking with another person during thunder storm activity. Park Rangers were notified that a hiker had slipped and fell off the Half Dome cables. Rangers arrived on the scene and provided assistance to the second hiker.

The hiker did not survive the fall and Yosemite National Park Rangers recovered his body at approximately 1:00 pm today. No further details about the incident are available at this time.

This is the first fatality on the Half Dome cables since 2011* and this is the first visitor fatality in 2018.

The identity of the deceased hiker will be released pending family notification. The cause of the incident remains under investigation. No photographs are available of the incident or the search and rescue operation.

Such a terrible thing to happen. I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often tho.

More than a hundred people have lost their lives trying to hike Half Dome. What you don't hear about are all the people who might have, and didn't - before the permit system the average number of incidents per day was a dozen medical interventions, along that trail. It was cut in half with the institution of the permits.

Read the book Shattered Air for what happens when you ignore advice to not go up in a storm.

People have fallen off the cables several times, once due to the automatic response of leaning to pick up something someone else dropped. People have fallen down the Death Slabs, which are below the dome and the trail at the bottom of the cables. People have died due to lightning. People have died due to heart attack and heat stroke. The majority of those who died did so on the hike up to the dome.

Many, many, many more have had difficulties requiring intervention along the trail. Some days a SAR member stands next to the river with a big bucket filter giving away filtered water to people, because too many will dip water raw out of the Merced -- it's tested positive for e coli a number of times in the past, not surprising given the camp in Little Yosemite Valley is full most of the season.

Be careful out there.

AlmostThere wrote:More than a hundred people have lost their lives trying to hike Half Dome.

Even in our age of "alternative facts," this is a wild exaggeration. The correct estimate would be "more than twenty" on Half Dome itself; "more than sixty" if the entire trail from Happy Isles onwards is counted as "trying to hike Half Dome." Most of those fatalities involved drownings in the vicinity of Vernal and Nevada Falls.

See Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite, by Mike Ghiglieri and Chuck Farabee. Two longtime NPS staffers who know their stuff.