Scaling mountains and ogling waterfalls in Yosemite

My high school friend Aaron invited me to a camping trip in Yosemite with fifty of his friends and their friends; most of them from Stanford where he went to college. He was coming from Orange County but most of his friends live in San Francisco, so his friend Rainer picked me up in his truck along with two other girls and we headed out listening to blue grass and songs with lines I loved like, "California, California. In the sun and in the weather no one's ever loved me better. California California you're the place for me."
I wasn't expecting Yosemite to be as fantastic as everyone said, being from Colorado and having lived in Washington I thought nothing in C. could compare. But I was absolutely blown away. Once you enter the park the mountains rise is sharp relief against the blue sky, with nary a tree along their steep granite sides. The contours were carved by glacial ice and look as though they were chiseled with knives. Everywhere you look waterfalls are pitching off the tops of cliffs and coming down in torrential white gusts that are so powerful they spray out like smoke and drop hundreds and hundreds of feet with nothing to impede their free fall. We camped in the bottom of the valley, in the beautiful trees. It was easy to make fast friends of such smart, adventurous and fun people. I always love making friends of a group that are perfect strangers mere hours before.

We woke up at five thirty AM to climb half dome, which is seventeen miles round trip. It was a beautiful climb with more waterfalls and spectacular views across the high Sierras. After about a mile of switchback staircases we came to the half dome. The cables go up the dome at what seemed to me a ninety degree angle. The granite was so smooth and slippery that the only hold was the two cables that you pulled yourself up on. Every ten to fifteen feet wood boards were nailed to the ground, so you could rest before continuing to climb. At the apex of the dome you are literally going over the corner of a circle that's 13,000 feet in the air (does that make any sense, a corner of a circle)? If you fell to either side you'd fall straight down to where the granite is concave like a slide. From their you'd shoot all the way down to your death. A water bottle fell and smacked twice before shattering on its third hit. A woman died on the cables just last week. Women were hyperventillating, having panic attacks, crying and trying to come back down. I made it most of the way twice and chickened out both times. I have no death wish.
On the second early morning five of us drove to Twualame Lake and looked around. Right in front of us were three large peaks straight up. We immediately said “let’s do that!” It looked like quite the scramble, so we verbally mapped a route and embarked on the journey. It quickly went from hiking to rock climbing. The granite slabs of mountainside were smooth and sloped at about 60 degrees or steeper. We crept through the crevasses between granite slabs;i nching our way up by digging feet and hands into nooks and crannies; experiencing the puzzle-like job of rock climbing.
The extremely scary part was when one crevasse ended and we had to crawl/slink in my case to the edge and climb up and over into the next crevasse.The guys said this was much scarier than half dome, so I should have just climbed to the top. I had to breath deeply to keep from hyperventilating, and I was shaking the whole time. But it was also extremely thrilling. For over two and a half hours we climbed up and up. Towards the top we hit some spots that were unclimable so we bushwacked through thick and prickly bushes that made our hands and legs bleed. One of the guys was the nineteenth best climber in the US in high school. He said this was between a class four and five climb and that he didn't really feel comfortable with us doing it. He told this to the guys, not to me and to the other girl Anna. I kept asking, "Do you think I can do this section?" thinking I could not and should turn back, and the guys would say, yes of course you can. So I continued and made it all the way to the top of the peak. It was one of the most scary and thrilling experiences of my life. I felt so very alive. Both Anna and I told each other afterward that we were thinking the same thing; my parents would cry if they saw me doing this.
At the top of the peak we felt so triumphant and happy that naturally we stripped down to our birthday suites to feel the cold mountain air brush our skin, and threw our arms out towards the snowy peaks across the valley. We had lunch up there, ran around, took nudie pictures, scampered around like billy goats and observed some tiny tiny people down below on the same path as us, only they had ropes and harnesses and everything else we should have had.
Coming down was terrifying. At some points we had to use tree branches as ropes and rappell down them to get to points where we could actually stand up without sliding straight down. Aaron was being an unbelievable friend, turning around at every point and telling me exactly where to place my hands and feet and catching me at certain points when I had to jump and plant with only a couple of feet before the next drop off, and didn't quite plant, so would have gone careening over an edge.
When we got down we went swimming in the glacial lake with snow all around us. The guys were hilarious. doing things like taking their mini boom boxes out to the woods to go pee to tunes, singing with each other to country song and just being jovial and wonderful.
That night we danced on the tables, sang too loudly, ate chicken cooked on a bond fire and told our other 45 compatriots about our epic climb. The day bonded the five of us and we spent the whole night goofing around together. Just check out my facebook pictures for amusing evidence of this.
At one point Aaron was so excited to find his chapstick that he held it up like the torch lady liberty holds, only he was tilted to the side. Slowly slowly he toppled straight over and bruised his head and eye so badly he had a black eye the next day.
We made "en fuego smores" which involved putting the marshmellow into the smore while it's still on fire (takes two people and a lot of trust) and yelling En Fuego!!! before smothering the flames with the top Graham. Oooooh WHAT a weekend!!! To be continued in the next blog....