Arcturus, Northwest Face of Half Dome. Late in the afternoon of July 18, Dick Dorworth and I arrived at the base of the northwest face of Half Dome. It was like a furnace there. The spring, as we had feared, was dry, but luckily we discovered a trickle elsewhere which saved us a 1000-foot descent through thick brush for water. We started about 80 feet right of the normal route, and climbed a little over a pitch that day, bivouacking on the wall. In the morning we continued straight up via rotten, dirty climbing to a bivouac a rope-length apart just below the great traverse of the regular route. I was mucking about in the darkness, trying to get the hauling bag up to a better ledge and using two Jümars to protect myself while climbing around on broken ledges and thinking I should use only one Jümar–it s so much simpler–when the Jümar holding my weight came off and there I was hanging by the other, wondering once again if I have been lucky or smart to be alive after twenty years of climbing.

The next day we followed the regular route across the traverse, and then up the dihedral at the end ot it. But instead of moving right into the flake system that the standard route follows, we continued straight up. We suffered greatly from the heat and thought about Charles Ostin and Rick Sylvester, who were trying the Integral route on the face of El Capitan. “Boy.” I told Dick, “that wall is almost 3000 feet lower than us, and looks directly at the sun. Those poor bastards must be frying. They don’t have a chance. The upper part of this route is much more elegant than the lower half, but there are two dangerous pitches where loose blocks threaten both the climber and belayer. One is a 15-foot pillar fractured by an almost imperceptible horizontal crack about halfway up its length. The wrong use of even a nut might bring it down. At the other place, an aid crack meets a chimney, the mouth of which is choked with blocks. Lassoing a block further back helps reduce the danger of disturbing those in front. We got through the night by rappelling onto the regular route about 100 feet above the Undercling. The ferocious heat continued the next day and sapped our strength. We ate almost nothing the whole time we were on the wall and were surprised to find ourselves feeling better on top than we had at the bottom. On this last day we found some artificial climbing of the best sort, that is to say, continuously challenging and varied and requiring a different solution to the problems presented by each move upward. In other words, it was climbing where one could make use of the skill so laboriously acquired through the years.

We reached the top late in the afternoon of July 21. The ascent had its Eiger-like qualities; for three days we received rockfall from hikers tossing granite from the summit. Had we been on the Direct route the chances of our getting killed would have been excellent. As more and more of our less thoughtful brethren venture into the mountains, it becomes more and more necessary to make the obvious explicit. Perhaps a sign enjoining the throwing of rocks at those who cannot throw back would be well placed at the beginning of the cable on the Dome. We returned to the torrid Valley happy with ourselves and confident that Ostin and Sylvester could never have made it. They had. A normal big wall piton selection is adequate. We placed a few bolts, but I cannot remember how many.

Royal Robbins