Hiking Half-Dome

This weekend Kevin and I went with a group from the Stanford wards (about 20 adventurous people) and hiked Half-Dome in Yosemite National Park. It was an incredible experience... although really tiring! We did the 5 hour drive up to Yosemite after Kev got home from work on Friday and we arrived around 11:30pm. We started hiking at about 12:30am and didn't stop until about 5:30am when we reached the top of Half-Dome. We arrived just in time for sunrise and then we collapsed, took pictures, and I took a brief 15 minute nap before we started hiking down around 7:30am. The most memorable moment of the hike was going up the cables (400 feet) at a 50 degree angle- it basically felt like we were walking straight up the mountain. It was cool to do it when it was dark! Going down was much scarier! I felt like spiderman- walking up buildings. The giant granite steps we got to walk up and down were also unforgettable- imagine walking up and down the RB stairs 1,000 times... with the steps sometimes being 3 ft high. It felt like we did a massive stairmaster for about 3 hours. Although we thought that walking down would be easier than the climb up... it took us almost as long to get to the bottom. We arrived back at our car around 12:00pm. We were so excited for a long drive back home just to SIT DOWN! It was an incredible trip!