Shattered Air: A True Account of Catastrophe and Courage on Yosemite's Half Dome

by Bob Madgic

  THE MERCED RIVER BEGINS on the glacial slopes of Mount Lyell, Yosemite’s highest peak at 13,114 feet. After crashing down Nevada and Vernal falls, the river meanders through Yosemite Valley where the current remains strong, especially in spring and early summer. That and its frigid water have accounted for several drownings over the years. With additional volume from Yosemite and Bridalveil falls and a host of smaller cascades, the Merced surges again by the time it leaves Yosemite, tumbling down steep chutes and cascading for several miles over and around boulders the size of cars and houses. Then it drops more modestly—a long run of swift current, intermittent rapids, and deep pools that attract kayakers, whitewater rafters, swimmers, and anglers. From Happy Isles in upper Yosemite Valley to the Lake McClure Reservoir, the Merced flows 135 unobstructed miles.*

  Swimming in the Merced’s chill water and treacherous current can be exceedingly dangerous at any time. The risk is many times greater above a waterfall. From 1975 through 2000, there were 37 drownings in Yosemite, which made up 22 percent of the park’s 166 accidental deaths during that period. Twenty-nine of the thirty-seven occurred in and around waterfalls. Five happened in the Merced River directly above Nevada Fall, and four of those individuals were carried over the falls. Ten drownings took place near Vernal Fall—three of those victims went over. Another three people lost their lives at Yosemite Falls, while one got swept over Bridalveil Fall and another over Ribbon Fall. Hidden Fall was the scene of four deaths.

  Several common denominators characterized the drownings in and around Yosemite’s rivers and waterfalls. People who misjudged the current may have been swept off their feet or unable to swim out of it. Some may have lost their footing in the water or slipped on a rock and fallen in, only to be carried downstream. In other cases, the force of the current pinned them under a downed tree, rock, or other obstruction in the river. Hypothermia as a result of the Merced’s frigid temperature can quickly sap a person’s strength and make it almost impossible to escape the current. (Hypothermia is a drop in body temperature caused by exposure to cold conditions. Depending on the circumstances, it can set in slowly or rapidly. You lose your ability to function and, without counter-measures, can die from hypothermia itself or from the loss of bodily function that leads to drowning, a fall, or other fatal mishap.)*

  RICE AND PIPPEY STRIPPED off their clothes and dove into the icy water fifty yards upriver from Nevada Fall. Esteban and three others joined them but kept their shorts on. Given the gentle, midsummer flow, this exercise wasn’t too risky. They all swam the few feet out to a large, flat boulder and sunbathed. Despite other hikers and campers nearby, Rice and Pippey weren’t the least self-conscious about being naked. Rice seldom hesitated to flaunt his body; for him, it was all part of overcoming inhibitions and gaining freedom. On Half Dome’s summit, he regularly strolled about and sunbathed in the nude.

  Returning to the riverbank, thoroughly cooled and refreshed, the men got dressed and ate lunch.

  They left for Half Dome after eating. At the bottom of the cables, Pippey totally freaked when he saw the steep grade and cable handholds, which looked perilous. He kept his fear to himself, though, hoping he could make it up by focusing on the stone at his feet. He waited until the others were ahead before starting. One hundred feet up, he glanced to his right and saw nothing but emptiness. Panic seized him. His body trembling, his face ashen, he retreated inch by inch, unable to look left or right and gripping the cables with a steel hold. He collapsed at the base of the cables, still trembling as he embraced the ground.

  Esteban and Rice retreated down the cables to check on Pippey. They encouraged and cajoled him, but Pippey, convinced he’d never reach the top, told them to go on ahead. After a few minutes, Rice lit a joint, inhaled deeply, and passed it to Pippey, who took a couple of hits and then several more. Soon stoned, eyes glazed, he bounced to his feet raring to go—anywhere. He tackled the cables again, with gusto, bellowing the Batman theme song all the way up the granite slope.

  Pippey survived his first journey up the Dome and, his dues paid, was henceforward a Dome regular. Being with close and supportive comrades filled a longtime void in Pippey’s life. He became Esteban’s housemate. He also was swayed by Rice’s leadership and charisma, and counted him among his best friends, though he tended to be more cautious than Rice about taking risks.

  Pippey: “To me, taking risks is like confronting a fence. Some individuals stop when they see an obstacle and stay safely on their side. Others might go to the top of the fence, to at least see what’s on the other side before deciding. And then some just jump over the fence without knowing what’s on the other side. I saw myself as the second type, one who looks first and, if things appear too dangerous, stops. Rice was the latter type, one who is willing to plunge into something without sizing up the possible consequences if anything should go wrong.”

  PIPPEY OFTEN DROVE his outlandish, souped-up truck on these trips, including that first one to Half Dome. After purchasing it in 1981, he invested more than seven thousand dollars and much of himself in creating what everyone called the “Bip Mobile,” totally reconstructing the half-ton, extra-long-bed ’72 Ford inside and out. Pippey disassembled the cab, then built a frame from half-inch steel tubing and covered it with sheet metal rippled with dents. He painted the metal blue, interweaving stripes of silver, gold, and copper. He fashioned a wedge-shaped and tilted front end with a big hood scoop, including fenders and radiator, that all opened as a unit, like a big-rig truck. He installed two square headlights and a square fog light below each to form a triangle. The cab interior had gold-colored, diamond-tucked crushed velvet on the headliner, side panels, sun visors, and seat, which also sported foot-long strips of brown- and gold-patterned crushed velvet. Brown shag carpeted the floor. A T-shaped console on the interior ceiling housed four lighted switches for dual gas tanks, dual fuel pumps, dual batteries, fog lights, and a stereo. There were eight speakers in the cab and two in the customized aluminum camper shell Pippey had installed. Inside the shell were side paneling, brown- and gold-patterned crushed-velvet strips where the sides and headliner intersected, gold crushed-velvet headliner with a 110-volt outlet in the center and two lights, and more brown shag, beneath which lay a four-inch-thick foam-rubber mattress pad. To rev up performance, Pippey overhauled the 302-horse-power, V-8 engine and converted the manifold to four barrels from two. He raised the compression ratio to 1.5:1, balanced and blue-printed the short block, and installed a new carburetor, recreational vehicle camshaft, headers, dual exhausts, power brakes, power steering, and automatic overdrive transmission.

  When he finished, the truck weighed a hundred pounds less than the original and was more efficient, enabling him to cruise at a hundred miles an hour and get twenty-three miles to the gallon. Pippey often drove that fast late at night on Highway 395 in the eastern Sierra Nevada en route to Mount Whitney, another of his favorite haunts. The Bip Mobile could accommodate eight people—three in the cab and five in back. Including the many trips to Yosemite and Mount Whitney, it logged more than two hundred thousand miles. The trucks roar and dual exhausts caused heads to turn in Central Valley towns—and drew the attention of police, who sometimes pulled him over, mostly out of curiosity.

  In the spring of 1984, Pippey proposed to Pam Skog, his girlfriend of three years. He and his buddies drove to Paradise for a bachelor party, for one last fling before that big leap to the altar. Pippey urged his best man, Tom Rolf, to jump from the high ledge. Just before Rolf hit the water, he assumed a sitting position—a common technique for creating a huge splash in a swimming pool, but not a smart maneuver while plunging thirty-six miles an hour into a creek pool. According to Pippey, Rolf “banged himself up pretty good” and, for weeks afterward, including at the wedding ceremony, suffered from a sore and bruised underside.

  RICE AND A HALF DOME expedition were inseparable in everyone’s eyes. He was the organizer, the motivating force, the one who planned everything down to the last detail, including
the timeline and all logistics. He even prepared the menu, which emphasized good nutrition: veggie sandwiches, gorp, PowerBars, fruit, and lots of water. Plus beer, especially a choice microbrew when the guys could afford it. Everyone else had only to show up and pay his share.

  Sometimes, instead of stopping at Red Bud after their long drive from the Bay Area, the men ditched at Camp Curry in Yosemite, where they slept behind a big rock so park personnel wouldn’t see them. Or they broke into an unoccupied tent-cabin, occasionally with help from an employee whom Rice had befriended and perhaps partied with. Rice knew a woman who worked in the cafeteria; she prepared custom-made sandwiches for the gang, filling them with avocado, sprouts, tomatoes, peppers, onions, lettuce, and cheeses, and plastering them with mayo, mustard, and black pepper. The men referred to these as Dome-wiches. A gallon-sized mini keg of imported beer they lugged into the backcountry was a Dome keg.

  Every trek had an element of competition and challenge: Who could race up the staircase, Sub Dome, and cables the fastest? Who could pack the heaviest load? Who could get closest to the edge? There was little tolerance for the timid—slackers were taunted. And Rice always tried to set the highest bar.

  Esteban: “Tom was one of the most competitive persons I’ve ever known. He would make everything into a game of competition, and he always had to win. If he could not be better than you physically and athletically, then he would try to be tougher than you mentally, which included not showing any emotional signs of weakness.”

  On the trail, Rice scrambled way ahead, stopped, and waited for everyone else to catch up. Then he set another killer pace to the next milestone. He drove everybody to keep on schedule so they could ascend the summit and descend before dark, if they weren’t camping on the top. Rice knew what it took to motivate Esteban: question his courage. He prodded others differently. If anybody questioned him, he just growled and said, “Eat shit and die.”

  His own personal frailties lay beyond anyone’s reach.

  On the summit, Rice typically gravitated to the diving board. There, occasionally wearing only his briefs, he assumed the diving position and inched backward until he stood at the end of that naked rock pedestal. The more people who watched, the more fearless he seemed to be. Sometimes his companions refused to look, either out of terror or to deprive him an audience.

  Esteban: “Every time we climbed the Dome, you knew Tom would do it. It always scared the shit out of us and yet we were drawn to it, and it was inescapable, his closeness to death and sheer will to overcome his fear of it.”

  In this and his other stunts, Rice was betting as always that he controlled the outcome.

  TYPICALLY, RICE CONCEIVED a plot to make each Dome outing special. It became part of the ritual.

  Once, on a “nighttime assault,” they drove to Glacier Point and hiked in the dead of night to Little Yosemite Valley. Pippey brought his wife. She slowed the group down considerably, which enraged Rice, who didn’t hide his displeasure or mince his disapproving words. Rice was adamant about excluding females from these forays into the wilderness. On this trip, they unwittingly placed their sleeping bags next to a steep drop-off and didn’t realize their peril until daylight.

  For their Memorial Day trip in 1984, accompanying Rice and Esteban was “Half Dome Jerome,” a summer employee in Yosemite National Park and friend of Rice, who bestowed the moniker. Half Dome Jerome was built like a shotputter. The threesome brought a case of San Miguel, a premium Filipino beer. The twenty-four bottles weighed just over thirty-three pounds, and to avoid breakage they carried the case in a separate backpack. Each hiker took a turn hauling it along with all his other food and gear—akin to adding a sack of bricks to an already oppressive load.

  When they reached the summit and saw unmelted snow in shaded areas, Esteban interpreted this as a “great message from the gods.” The snow guaranteed ice-cold beer.

  Part of their routine on top was to circulate among other campers, strike up conversations, and share stories and tangibles. On this overnight outing, the three men indeed had something special to share: cold beer, a few bottles of which they sold for five bucks each to some of the two dozen campers on the summit. With others, exchanges transpired. One camper, for example, invited everyone to peer through the giant lens of his telescope while he described the constellations. Elsewhere, a cheery fire stoked by wood that a camper had hauled up was attracting a friendly group. And there was a chef from a New Orleans restaurant who cooked up a killer stew and shared it with Rice and his buddies. They reciprocated with beer.

  Esteban met a camper who offered him LSD. In the drug world, this particular acid—“Orange Sunshine”—allegedly was the best, concocted by the Harvard professor and drug guru Timothy Leary Esteban downed it and soon was tripping. Lying on his back, he watched the flaming stars twirl about the moon in a gargantuan pinwheel pattern. He jumped to his feet and sauntered toward the western horizon, along the Dome’s surface that sloped ever downward. As Rice and others watched, Esteban, playing a game of chicken with himself, disappeared below the skyline as though he would continue into the abyss. Just before gravity started to overcome the grip of his hiking boots, Esteban stopped and turned back.

  Then he strolled toward the Dome’s sheer face. The full moon cast Half Dome’s image over the Valley. To Esteban, the shadow on a distant wall was an eagle, symbolizing his own powers, and the silhouette of Clouds Rest a giant pyramid. He tight-walked along the mountain’s edge feeling totally in control, invincible. He stepped down to a three-foot-wide ledge and walked along it with only a dark void on his left. He dropped to another narrow ledge. In front of him a rock structure jutted out, like the beak of a giant bird. On its facing side was a black hole—an opening in the granite, the eye of the bird. He climbed to this mysterious cleft, peered in, and saw a rock chamber.

  Later that night, after midnight, Esteban showed Rice and Jerome the cave he had discovered. They accessed it through an opening amid the jumble of rock slabs that covered this part of the summit. The chamber’s interior was conical: fifteen feet long, three to four feet wide, and six and a half feet at its highest point, close to where they stood. It dropped to four and a half feet in the middle and to four feet at the farthest end. There Yosemite Valley was visible through the small portal Esteban had stumbled upon.

  In the chamber’s outer side—actually its own separate cubicle, which extended still farther out—was another four-foot-wide, five-foot-high opening that looked out to the upper Valley and Tenaya Canyon. Just beyond the gap was a ledge about four feet wide and thirty inches deep. You had to clamber over a two-and-a-half-foot boulder, then lower yourself down, to reach it. Esteban, Rice, and Jerome each slid over the boulder in turn and eased himself into a sitting position on the ledge, which conveniently tilted back slightly. A stone slab provided back support. Sitting there was like occupying the open cockpit of an airplane with only empty space in front of and below your legs.

  Squeezed together, legs dangling over the edge, each swigging beer, the trio took in Yosemite’s northern ridges and domes, all bathed in moonlight. The stars danced above, and a vast empty space loomed immediately before them.

  They dubbed this bench-like perch the King’s Chair.

  KARL BUCHNER WAS ANOTHER Dome compatriot whom Esteban recruited from Spectra Physics, a company that had bought out Quantra-Ray, where Esteban, Pippey, and Buchner still worked. Although an outdoorsman, Buchner wasn’t a regular on Esteban’s and Rice’s outings. He and Esteban had met while playing together on a softball team. Buchner’s friends called him Beach Boy or Surfer Dude. He looked and acted the part—blond hair, blue eyes, almost six feet tall, a muscular 185 pounds, laid-back. He did in fact surf and was active in a variety of other sports as well.

  Esteban’s descriptions of Half Dome and the King’s Chair persuaded Buchner to join him and Rice on a Memorial Day weekend trip in 1985. On the summit, they smoked pot, mingled with other campers, and swapped stories. Buchner likened the communal sp
irit to that of a cult gathering, a mini Woodstock. As the sun disappeared beyond the granite pinnacles to the west and darkness settled in, Rice and Esteban led him to the cave, where they wedged together on the King’s Chair and passed around a jug of “bug juice”—Gatorade and vodka. “Totally awesome” was how Buchner described this experience. The three men talked about returning later that summer. They would invite others and somehow make the outing really special. Buchner wanted his best friend, Steve Ellner, to join them and experience what he had. Esteban would invite his new supervisor at work, Bob Frith, whose passion for the outdoors was just getting ignited. Pippey would surely join them. He’d likely recruit the young Jordan twins, whom he had wanted to include on a Dome journey for quite some time.

  They set the date for the same weekend as Rice’s twenty-eighth birthday: July 27–28.

  FOOTNOTES

  *The Muir Glacier in Glacier Bay honors him as its discoverer.

  *The natural beauty and assets of the Merced River were given added protection when its upper seventy-one miles from Yosemite to the town of Briceburg, and the forty-three-mile-long South Fork of the Merced, were designated National Wild and Scenic Rivers in 1987. The lower part of the main stem was given this federal designation in 1992, thus preserving the free-flowing state of this spectacular waterway.

  *A classic example of misjudging river hazards is the twenty-nine-year-old man who parachuted illegally from El Capitan on June 9, 1999. He was BASE jumping, one of the most dangerous of all sports, which entails parachuting from Buildings, Antennas, Spans, and Earth. It has been illegal in Yosemite since 1980, mainly because jumpers violated the rules when it was legal. In this case, the jumper had planned his escape in advance. He landed safely, quickly removed his gear, and, before the authorities could snare him, dove into the Merced River in the hope of reaching a getaway vehicle on the other side. But the man disappeared, surely overcome by hypothermia and the current’s strength and turbulence. His body was found nearly a month later three or four hundred yards downstream, pinned horizontally in the upstream undercut of a large boulder and out of view.