IIn 1974, Scott Crollard, a teenager on a church youth group trip, leisurely climbed ropes to reach the high summit of Half Dome. Half Dome takes its name from a unique rock formation in California that overlooks Yosemite Valley, some 5,000 feet below.
“I remember sitting on the edge of Half Dome with my buddy and just looking over the edge. And as he was coming down, he kind of bumped into me and I almost fell off the thing, just because we were so calm,” said Collard, a 65-year-old retired emergency room doctor from St. Louis who climbed Half Dome again in 2017 and appreciated its grandeur even more.
Today, climbing Half Dome’s terrifyingly steep ropes attracts far more visitors than it did half a century ago. But it has also become more difficult – not because the landscape has changed, but because in 2013 the National Park Service introduced a lottery system to limit the number of people who can get a permit to climb it.
Since then, the number of applications for Half Dome permits before the start of the season has doubled from about 17,000 in 2013 to 35,000 in 2023, according to the park service.
This is part of a larger increase in visitation to U.S. national parks in recent years. In 2013, 273 million people visited the parks. Last year, 325 million people visited the parks. Not everyone sees this as a positive for the preservation of the parks’ natural beauty and for people trying to escape the chaos of modern life.
The climb has come under renewed criticism following the death last month of 20-year-old Grace Rohloff, who was descending the ropes with her father, Jonathan. Among other things, Jonathan is suggesting that the federal agency install more wooden slats to make it easier for people to negotiate the steep, slippery granite.
Others counter that there are risks in all aspects of life and that people should simply take appropriate precautions and use their judgment to decide if the hike is worth the risk of an unlikely fall, rather than adding something else that detracts from the national parks’ pristine state.
“I don’t necessarily want them to drill more into the mountain because I’m a naturist and I firmly believe that we don’t want to destroy nature,” said Jonathan, whose daughter planned to follow her parents to school. “I would just like to see better safety measures.”
When you ask people who work with national parks why traffic there has increased so much in the last decade, they point to social media.
“There’s this feedback effect where more people come by, take photos, share them with their network and that leads to more visits,” said Casey Wichman, an environmental economist at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
This increased interest is not necessarily a bad thing, Wichman said.
People who browse Instagram and are inspired to visit the parks “may develop a greater appreciation for nature and protecting natural landscapes,” Wichman said. “On the negative side, there are certainly overcrowding issues that diminish the quality of a visit for others. There is destruction of environmental resources.”
Cris Hazzard, better known as “Hiking Guy,” believes social media has made hikes like Half Dome and Angels Landing in Utah’s Zion National Park particularly enticing.
Rohloff and her father had hiked thousands of miles together, but many of the people who go on such hikes often have little experience, Hazzard said.
“Everyone has an equal right to experience it,” said Hazzard, 52, who has climbed Half Dome at least 10 times. “The problem is that social media is accessible to anyone who downloads an app and can move their finger five millimeters, whereas actually doing one of these hikes requires a fair amount of preparation.”
Some people want professional photos of Half Dome like they see on Instagram. In Yosemite National Park, photographer Shawn Reeder shoots wedding photos and portraits where women wear what he calls a flying dress that flutters in the wind. He took three wedding photos of Half Dome.
He loves his job but admits the culture in the park has changed since a trip to Yosemite in 1995 inspired him to move west from Maryland.
“You just saw that there were a lot more people present, and with the advent of social media, a lot more people were going to places just to take a photo,” Reeder said.
When asked if he thought his company had contributed to this change, Reeder said that this was not necessarily a concern and that Yosemite had long been visited by hordes of people.
“We live in a world today where social media is a part of it. This has an incredible number of positive aspects, but also some negative ones,” said Reeder.
Regarding the suggestion that the park administration should increase the number of wooden slats on the cables, Reeder said that was a great idea.
“It doesn’t change the character. It’s still the cables, it’s still an adventure,” he said.
And as Grace and Jonathan Rohloff discovered, the lack of bars can cost even experienced and cautious climbers their lives.
On July 13, Grace and Jonathan Rohloff, who had also climbed Angels Landing and the Grand Canyon together, finally reached the summit after years of struggling to obtain permission.
It was a strenuous trek, “but we are used to exertion,” says Jonathan, who, like his wife Astraea, is a school principal in Arizona.
Below, a park ranger warned them that there was a heat warning and that thunderstorms could occur in the afternoon. But when they looked around at the top of Half Dome and Grace told her father how much she loved him, the skies were clear. Then, as Jonathan was taking a photo of Grace, he was startled by a bang and saw a black cloud approaching quickly.
As the rain got heavier, they began to descend the ropes. Grace, an elite athlete and care worker, had to stop repeatedly because a traffic jam formed beneath her, even though there is usually enough space for people to walk around each other.
“She was concerned about the safety of the other people around her and didn’t want to rush down even though we were getting soaked by the rain because others were slipping. So she ended up putting other people’s lives before her own,” Jonathan recalled.
Grace lost her footing and fell hundreds of feet. Jonathan climbed down the ropes and spent hours telling Grace that he loved her and that she should stay with him, but he got nothing. A helicopter arrived with rescue crews who confirmed that she was dead.
“It was devastating,” he said.
Jonathan contacted the park rangers to retrieve Grace’s backpack, which had her phone on the top with the photos she had taken. They retrieved the backpack, but the phone had fallen out and they could not find it.
During an interview for the investigation, he shared his proposal to convert the cables into more of a suspension bridge style, with the slats spaced one foot apart rather than roughly every 10 feet.
Following an article in the Los Angeles Times in which Jonathan presented his idea, several letters to the editor expressed their sympathy but argued that ropes worked well and that adding additional boards would only provide a false sense of security on this potentially dangerous hike.
“It’s tragic that a young woman fell to her death while descending Half Dome and her father watched her die. I feel for him,” one person wrote. “But we shouldn’t commemorate her death by trying to suppress Half Dome and national parks in general. Wild places, even semi-wild places, are good for the soul.”
Jonathan said he doesn’t believe “everyone should be walking around in bubble wrap.”
However, he believes that adding a few wooden boards would not destroy nature and that people would not have to use the extra slats if they did not want to.
The park service has not commented on Jonathan’s proposal and did not respond to The Guardian’s request for an interview.
“I don’t know why Yosemite wouldn’t do a little work on the cables to make them safer,” Jonathan said. “That’s the hardest thing for me. Grace isn’t coming back, so I really want them to make it safer so that a situation like Grace doesn’t happen again.”
