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Half Dome with my Daughter Carly
A trip with my daughter Carly, nephew Owen and my daughters fiance Derek to Little Yosemite Valley for the night then a early morning climb up the cables to watch the sunrise on Half Dome. I am pretty impressed with those that day hike Half Dome, that's a lot of elevation gain and miles in a day. Although a couple years prior we hiked North Dome as a day hike, 18 miles r/t and roughly the same in elevation gain, hiking to Little Yosemite Valley is highly suggested.
We left Yosemite Valley at 10:30am and smartly used the John Muir Trail, that added a mere 8/10 of a mile but we avoided the hundreds hiking The Mist Trail. At a slow pace we arrived at Little Yosemite 3 hours later and set up camp, and then walked down to the Merced River, over to the granite slabs at the base of the Southwest face of Half Dome and then ate dinner. We had with us some wine a beer for our summit beverage but decided that we would rather indulge that evening and not at 7am the next morning. By 8:30 we were in our tents as the alarms were set for 4am.
We were up and on the trail at 4:30, as we were preparing our day packs we did see one lone head lamp that was about 20 minutes ahead of us. As we approached Sub Dome we saw numerous head lamps and there were about 10 hikers/climbers resting prior to setting out for the cables. I didn't ask but I would have to assume they came over from the Sunset Trail as we had only seen one hiker earlier that morning. We hit The Cables at 6:40 and 15 minutes later we were all at the summit to watch a spectacular sunrise. We were the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th summiters for 9/29/2015 and after one hour of taking in Yosemite Valley, Tenaya Canyon and her surrounding valleys and mountains we headed down.
On the way back to Little Yosemite Valley we were a bit surprised at the amount of hikers on their way up. Starting from Little Yosemite was nice as with such an early start we basically had the summit to ourselves and not with 300 other hikers. For a change of scenery we took The Mist Trail back and we did dodge a hell of a lot hikers but it still only took 2 hours to get back to out car. My wife was suppose to go (to celebrate her birthday) and wasn't able to as she recently started a new job. I hope she wants to climb Half Dome next year, I would do that again, really a must do!