After a young woman falls to her death in Yosemite, Half Dome’s risks are on everyone’s mind

Clinging for life to a cold steel cable, high on a nearly vertical rock face in the Sierra Nevada, the soles of my hiking shoes simply could not find traction. A fall from that height — on the climbing cables that mark the final 400-foot ascent to the summit of Yosemite’s Half Dome — could easily be fatal. Rohloff said he told the park rangers who interviewed him after his daughter’s death that “Grace died because the cables are unnecessarily dangerous.” But he has heard nothing from park officials about any planned improvements. The cables came into being in the late 1800s, after celebrated geologist Josiah Whitney proclaimed the 8,800-foot summit of Half Dome “perfectly inaccessible” and declared it would “never be trodden by human foot.” A Yosemite guide named George Anderson decided to prove him wrong. “That’s sort of the beauty of it.” For Rohloff, an elementary school principal who is still reeling from the horror of watching the oldest of his three children slide to her death, the goal is to get park officials to commit to making Half Dome safer.