Petition to end Half Dome permits begins online Yosemite

The crowded cables on a late summer weekend afternoon. The impatient ones, choose to go outside the cables - considered a risky decision. The crowded cables on a late summer weekend afternoon. The impatient ones, choose to go outside the cables - considered a risky decision. Photo: Michael Maloney, The Chronicle Photo: Michael Maloney, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 15 Caption Close Petition to end Half Dome permits begins online 1 / 15 Back to Gallery

A citizens group wants to end Yosemite National Park's limits on the number of hikers who make the final spine-tingling scramble 400 feet up to the top of Half Dome.

The group, SaveHalfDome.com, has begun an online petition drive urging the National Park Service to stop requiring permits to climb the world-famous precipice and allow more hikers to flirt with danger on the summit cables if they want to, preferably after a third cable is installed on the sloping granite slab.

"We're not asking the Park Service to do anything radical," said Mason Harrison, 25, of Washington, D.C., who began the campaign on Independence Day. "We think the radical position is to continue this permitting process that effectively closes down access to one of the most popular sites in the park system to thousands of people."

The Park Service began limiting the number of hikers on the enormous sliced-in-half granite dome in 2010 to combat regular bottlenecks on the sloping 8,842-foot-elevation peak. As many as 1,200 people - including children, flabby tourists and the elderly - were making the grueling 17-mile round trip on weekends and then squeezing together onto the cables.

The jostling on the slick rock wall, which features drops into the abyss on both sides, turned one of the world's signature hikes into a flirtation with death. Four people have tumbled from the cables to their deaths since 1996, and dozens have had to be rescued after falling or getting stuck.

The permitting system - which provides 300 permits a day to day hikers and 100 a day to backpackers - was an attempt to make the final push up the Half Dome cables a little less spine-tingling. The permitting system was expanded to seven days a week this year. People can now order permits from the Park Service three months in advance for a $1.50 service charge.

Harrison, who grew up in Sonora and has climbed Half Dome several times, said the problem is that the hair-raising climb is so popular that a black market system has developed in which the permits are all being snatched up and then sold on the Internet.

"Since they implemented this permit process, I haven't been able to climb Half Dome," Harrison said. "The permits are impossible to get, and part of that is because of the black market."

His group would like Yosemite to end the permitting system and build a third cable so that people climbing up the slab of granite do not have to cling to one cable while squeezing by the people climbing down from the top. He said hikers surveyed in 2008 opposed a permitting system 46 percent to 27 percent. That same survey, which was commissioned by the Park Service, showed an overwhelming preference for a third cable, Harrison said.

Scott Gediman, the Yosemite spokesman, said Half Dome was designated a wilderness area in 1964, and the summit cables, which were installed by the Sierra Club in 1919, were grandfathered in. Installing another cable would require hearings, rule changes and enabling legislation, and would probably evoke howls of protest from environmentalists and rock climbers, many of whom would like to see the existing cables removed.

"We do not see how adding a third cable would provide any wilderness values," Gediman said. "We're just not going to do it. It's not going to happen."

The Park Service plans to issue an environmental assessment of the Half Dome permit and trail system this summer or fall that will include information and options to manage the crowds. Gediman said the report will make a recommendation on whether to make the permitting system permanent.