Samurai Of Yosemite

To be the first to ski down Half Dome’s most dangerous line, it helps to be a warrior—and a little bit nuts.

- By Chris Van Leuven

Seemed like a swell idea at the time. This past March, an intrepid trio of veteran backcountry trekkers gazed upon Half Dome, the granite monolith that rises majestically from California’s Yosemite National Park, and decided to ski down a steep, icy furrow that runs near its famously sheer northwest face. Never mind that their chosen route, dubbed Bushido Gully after the moral code of the samurai, is seldom used even for summer climbing ascents, and never for descents in inclement weather—too rugged, too exposed, too damn easy to slip to certain death. That’s just the sort of wintertime fun they crave.

Shortly after a frigid-but-glorious sunrise, the trio’s deputized photographer, Eric Rasmussen, balances shakily on a precipitous slope with Half Dome’s lookout spot, known as the Diving Board, looming over his shoulder. Immediately below, snow funnels into a wave of rock cliffs that drop 3,500 feet to the valley floor. Moments ago, his companions, seasoned climbers Jason Torlano and Zack Milligan, squeaked through this section ahead of Rasmussen. Now it’s his go. Inching forward on his skis, scraping close to the void, he jabs ski poles fastened with ice axes at the frozen ground. They skitter and slide. “You scraped off all the snow!” he hollers down, but his hoarse recrimination is lost in the wind.

THIS IS SKI MOUNTAINEERING, a mix of skiing, rappelling and climbing required to challenge such imposing terrain. “It’s never pretty,” says Rasmussen. “It’s just a matter of getting down alive.”