In 1974, Scott Crollard, a teen on a church youth group trip, casually climbed cables to help reach the lofty summit of Half Dome, whose name describes a unique rock formation in California from which you can see the Yosemite Valley some 5,000ft below. “I remember sitting on the edge of the lip of Half Dome with my buddy and just gazing over the edge. And when he got off, he kind of nudged me, and I darn near fell off the thing just because we were so nonchalant about it,” said Collard, now a 65-year-old retired emergency room physician in St Louis who again ascended Half Dome in 2017 with more appreciation for its magnitude.
These days, climbing Half Dome by the terrifyingly steep cables attracts far more visitors than a half-century ago and has become more difficult to do – not because the landscape has changed but because the National Park Service implemented a to limit how many people could obtain permits to hike it. Since then, the number of applicants for Half Dome permits before the season starts has doubled from about 17,000 in 2013 to 35,000 in 2023, . That is part of a larger surge in visitors at US national parks in recent years.
In 2013, the number was 273 million. Last year, people visited the parks. Not everyone sees that as a positive for the preservation of the parks’ natural beauty and people trying to escape the chaos of modern life.
Now, in the wake of the death last month of , Grace Rohloff, who was descending the cables with her father, Jonathan, .