Despite the inclement weather of the past two days, a bright sunny morning greeted us on Thursday, August 31, 2000-2001. Someone "up there" must have been looking down on us. (It began raining again the next day.)
This picture was taken at about 7am in the morning. We had planned to start at 6am but we couldn't force down our Cornflakes and, for some, those awful-tasting PowerBars fast enough that early in the morning. We established a 1pm turnaround time, which gave us 6 hours to get up there.
We'd all figured out the pseudo-mantras we'd be using for the long hike (10-12 hours average). Tanming would try to get past the first verse of "American Pie" (if so, he could sing it a nauseating 84 times...), Liane would try to figure out the identity of a mysterious David Crosby/Phil Collins song with the lyric "he knew it" she'd been struggling with during the past two days, and Tak & I would go through the Beatles catalogue.
Here we are at the trail sign. As you can see, it's 8.2 miles to the top of Half Dome (and 211 miles to Mount Whitney). If we look like we're just about to keel over in this picture, we are. It was taken after we got down.