Half Dome is one of the most famous hikes in Yosemite National Park, and after seeing it for ourselves this is hardly surprising. In fact, it’s such a sought after hike that a permit is required to summit it. These permits are available only through a lottery system and you can read about our experience with that here. It can be tough winning permits for this, but if you are not able to win one in the advance lottery there are other options:
Option #1: Apply for the last minute lottery that takes place two days prior to the day you’re wanting to hike. You have to apply for it online by 1:00pm PST. So if you’re looking to hike on Sunday, you need to apply that Friday morning before it by 1:00pm PST. You’ll be notified later that night or first thing Saturday morning if you win or not.
Option #2: Hike the trail up until you almost reach the end where the check point is for permits. Then wait and hope that a passing group will have an extra spot available on their permit that you can join. I read online about this working for people and we met people on the trail that day who had done just that. They said it’s not uncommon to find groups of hikers who had someone drop out of their group last minute so they have an extra slot to fill.
Option #3: Start late enough in the morning that the ranger at the check point will be gone by the time you get there. Even though we had won our permits, we started a bit later in the morning than usual and by the time we arrived at the check point at 11:30ish am, the ranger was gone. We heard from other hikers that he had only stayed until 10:30 or 11:00am. After that anyone was free to hike the rest of the way up.
I’m not sure that any options are guaranteed without a permit, so that is still the safest route to go. But it’s nice to know there could be alternatives available as well. If you do win the permit, make sure to bring a printed copy of it with you along with a photo ID of the person who is listed as the leader. This is what the ranger will check.
Campgrounds are also extremely difficult to come by so you can also read about that adventure of reserving one here. Once you have one, be prepared for the rangers to check your ID upon check in. We stayed at the Upper Pines campground which is one of the closest to the trailhead for the Mist Trail which we were taking to Half Dome. We hiked out of the campground down the road and around following the map- however realized later on we could have just hiked through the trees out the side of the campground and would have cut our time in half to reach the trail head. While there is also a parking spot near the trailhead, be sure to be there early before the lot fills up with cars. At 6:00am there were still spaces there but it was about the same amount of time for us to just walk to the trailhead from our campsite than to drive to the parking lot and walk from there.
We set out from our campground around 6:00am for the hike which is estimated to take from 10-12 hours to complete. The shuttles start running at 7:00am so if you wait until then you can take the shuttle to the Happy Isles stop and then walk the additional 5 minutes to the trailhead from there. We didn’t want to wait that long and it was probably about 1 mile from our campsite to the trailhead to start.
Though everyone uses the same trailhead to start, there comes a point where you need to decide whether to take the Mist Trail to the top of John Muir trail. Both trails meet up later on but the Mist trail is approximately 1 mile shorter and much steeper with lots of stairs. John Muir trail is longer but not as steep. We chose the shorter route via Mist Trail but I’ve heard rumors that John Muir is actually faster because it doesn’t have as many stairs to climb.
We did pass both Vernal Falls and Nevada Falls while hiking the Mist Trail and I’m so glad we got to see them both, especially Nevada Falls. I’m not sure if you’d get to see those via the John Muir trail and if not I’d recommend keeping to the Mist Trail. It was tough, but we still made it. I was also surprised to see a few actually bathrooms along the way with porta potty type seats and actual toilet paper. One thing the trail does lack is water. There are fountains to fill up at the base of Vernal Falls but this is very shortly after starting the trail so we were still pretty full with what we had packed. There are no other water fountains along the way, but we were glad we had a water filter with us as we used this for filling up at a river later on. We had packed 2 liters of water each and were glad to have more than that, I’d estimate closer to 2.5 or 3 is what we each used in the end. Keep in mind you’re hiking in very dry California!
The trail itself was not as bad as I was expecting. Once we passed both falls, there were not nearly as many stairs after that. And though it starts out paved at the beginning, the rest of the trail is mostly dirt after that. Since some in our party were sick, we were going very slow along the way and taking lots of breaks, but the trail was all around in very good condition and anyone in decent shape should be able to complete it without a problem. We brought hiking poles and I found them VERY helpful to have along the whole way.
You can hike almost the whole way before reaching the ranger check point which is at the base of Sub Dome. This is where I started to get scared. In order to reach Half Dome, you have to make it up Sub Dome first and the way up is via a lot of steep, big, stairs carved into the rock. The views are spectacular along the way, but I was VERY scared the whole time and couldn’t really look around without freaking out. It’s so steep and I felt like I was just going to fall off down the whole dome! While people advise that Angel’s Landing is very steep and many people find it too much to complete, I was not nervous at all while doing our hike there. This one was a whole different story for me.
I was so thankful to reach the top of Sub Dome which was very wide and flat. And the views made it absolutely worth it, they were just incredible! It reminded me a lot of Angel’s Landing in Zion with the complete panoramas. Then a whole new terror set in as I gazed at the cables in front of us to summit Half Dome. Once you summit Sub Dome it’s only about a 3 minute walk from there to the cables and I was dreading it the whole way. Everyone else was leaving their backpacks on the top of Sub Dome in order to do the cables so we dumped our stuff and headed over to the base.
Next big piece of advice for here: BRING GLOVES WITH GOOD GRIP. You’ll need it in order to hang on to the cables along the way up. We had picked up some gardening gloves to use and they worked out just fine. There was also a giant pile of used gloves at the base of the cables from past hikers and they were free for taking. It’s not recommended to dump your gloves there when you’re done as that creates garbage that the rangers need to clean up, but it was nice for anyone who had not brought gloves with them.
The cables are up from about mid-May to mid-October and there are also wooden planks spread about every 10 feet along the way. I’m not sure how long the cables stretch along for because I made it up maybe 10 planks and then completely burst into tears I was so petrified. The route the cables follow is so incredibly steep and it involves quite a bit of upper body strength to pull yourself up every step of the way. The planks are there to rest on, but other than that there’s nothing keeping you from falling down the whole way. I was so absolutely terrified I couldn’t move up or down and just stood there, frozen, crying. Finally I had to turn around and go back to the base and I made it slowly, crying the entire way.
When I reached the bottom I immediately felt better. I could barely even watch the people go up the cables, I was so scared just looking at them. But from what I gather it takes about 45 minutes to get up them because there are a lot of other people going along the same way and everyone goes pretty slow. There’s only one route for those going up and down so you also have to take turns and let others pass you who are going the opposite direction. Heading down was much faster, taking only about 15 minutes, described as a “controlled slide”. Basically meaning your feet don’t have much traction on the way down so you just slide the whole way and use the cables to help control your speed.
While some love doing the cables, I have no regrets about not completing them. I’m convinced I may be having nightmares for weeks about them as I’ve never experienced that kind of fear before. I’ve heard the view from the top is pretty comparable to the view from Sub Dome and I was very satisfied with the view we had there. Keep in mind there tend to be a lot of wildfires in California so it was a bit smoking when we summited which interfered with the view slightly but we were still able to see quite a bit.
Going slow and with all our breaks, we reached the top of Sub Dome at 12:30pm, 6 1/2 hours after we had started the hike. We knew sunset was around 7:20pm so I really wanted to make sure we were back at our campsite before then. We started our descent back down and were surprised to find a lot more people on the return trip. There were many who had hiked to see the falls that day so it was pretty crowded at times. We made it back to our campsite at 6:45pm, close to 13 hours after we had started. While my legs weren’t too sore, my feet were in a whole lot of pain from all the downhill steps coming back. Going down was actually much harder on my body than going up as the stairs and rocks were just continually very hard. But we made it in the end and lived to tell the story!
I might advise to start a little earlier in the morning, but really it was not all that bad with our given timeline. We had a bit of hiking in the morning when it was still dark, but really not too much at all. Even at 6:00am we could see the sun starting to appear. We started out with a few layers as it was pretty chilly in the morning, but it warmed up very quickly. I had quick dry pants, wool socks, a tank top, long sleeve shirt and fleece jacket along with a buff. It was perfect for the beginning of the hike and I wore the long sleeve shirt for quite a while. By the time we got close to the top I had switched to just the tank top and very early on I had zipped off the bottom of the pants into shorts. The one thing I did not pack that I would highly suggest is a pair of sunglasses. It’s VERY bright on top of Sub Dome and I was glad to have sunscreen but wished I had sunglasses as well. One bonus: no bugs along the way!
Fire Round the World 