Friday, January 18, 2013

Big Accomplishments - Half Dome

Accomplishments...today is a big day for Foxy's Domestic Side, it's my 100th post! I can't believe I've been blogging long enough to have 100 posts, wow! In lieu of this, I thought I would blog about one of my big accomplishments, besides Baby Fox of course.

The time that Curtis and I hiked this guy, also known as Half Dome:

We took this picture the day before when we went for a drive, we couldn't believe we were going to hike that!
So how this came about, I saw a picture of Half Dome on my cube-mates wall and asked what it was, I said, I'm going to hike that, I wrote Mr. and email and said, we're hiking Half Dome, he said..."Okay", not knowing what it was just that I wanted to do it. What a guy!

So we reserved our camping space 5 months in advance and we were set, besides the fact that we had never hiked anything before. My training...consisted of walking with an incline on the treadmill...and we took a small hike when we got to Yosemite two days before the BIG hike.

In case you didn't know Half Dome is a 16 mile hike round trip, with an elevation gain of 4500 ft.

We were going to leave about 4am so that we could have plenty of light to get back. We woke up about 2am and it was POURING rain...we thought, great, but went back to sleep in hopes that it would stop raining before we started. We didn't really sleep and just listened to the rain coming down. Our alarm went off at 4am and it was STILL raining...so we sat and tried to sleep, around 7am it's still raining but it's just drizzling. We figured let's just go for it and see what happens.


Waiting in the tent for the rain to stop
So got our rain ponchos on and started hiking...no one else was out there, we were the only crazy people enough to try it! So let's get this show started!




The rain eventually stopped and we kept on going, running into people here and there, but mostly it was just us and nature. It was pretty awesome. At time we weren't really sure we were on the right path, but we just walking and we would eventually find signs that said we were.




At Nevada falls, most people turn around cause the hard part is after this, but we felt great and wanted to keep going.


We kept seeing these signs. We'd run into some rangers and they would tell us that we should turn around that the Half Dome is probably wet and it's super dangerous to climb up when it's wet. But we kept on going. Figuring lets at least get to where we really can't go any further.


We're getting closer!
 

Right before you get to the top, you have to climb these switch backs...so hard and really narrow, especially for someone afrad of heights!

 
Yep no railings
 
 
We finally make it and have to take the cables...I don't know if I can do this!
 

Yep we climbed up that!

 
I was resting and Mr. said he was going to go check it out, I look down to get something and look back up and he's half way up the cables...a few choice words came out and I thought, well I wasn't sure I could do it, but he is NOT going to leave me behind! Another guy that was there said that he had already gone up and back down and he would go up with me, his friend came along.
 
We made it! Remember that little point jetting out in the first picture? Yep that's where we are standing!
 
 

What made this trip so amazing was that usually there are hundreds of people hiking this and you can sometimes wait hours to get up the cables...but us, there were about 10 people there because most people did even start the hike because of the rain. We took the longer less steep way back to camp...
 
We made it! Still smiling and ready for some dinner!

 
It took us about 11 hours to finish the whole hike and it was worth every single sore muscle I had the next few days. I don't think this experience can ever be repeated just based off of the fact that there was only 5 people on the top of Half Dome with us, which will probably never happen again.
 
On our way back home, we got a call from our realtor who told us that we had gotten the house we put an offer in on!
 

Want to read some more about hiking? Check out Amy's blog, the Dirt Life, she hiked both the Appalacian Train and the Pacific Crest Trail for about a years worth of time, different trips though. Talk about amazing!

So that is one of my big accomplishments along with of course blog post #100! Have a great weekend, our weekend is jammed packed and of course I forgot my camera!

2 comments:

  1. Congrats on your 100th post! AND climbing Half Dome. I love that those guys who had already gone up, went back up with you. The pictures make it look really intense. I don't know if I would have the guts to do it!

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  2. I love that you referenced Amy because as I was reading this I thought to myself.. "Amy would be all over this.." She has influenced me to love hiking, and so believe it or not I am jealous of this hike of yours and would love to do it.

    Freaking Amy.

    Very impressive, very!

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