Newsletter: Half Dome isn’t safe because nature isn’t safe. Hike accordingly

Good morning. It is Saturday, Aug. 17. Here’s what’s happening in Opinion.

Last month, 20-year-old Grace Rohloff slipped and died descending from the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. This accident, though unquestionably tragic, was not unique: The final 400-foot ascent up the steep granite batholith, known to provide unsteady footing even on dry days, becomes horrifically slippery when it rains. Hikers hold onto a set of cables bolted into the granite for the final ascent and initial hike down, but deaths caused by falls happen. Every responsible adventurer who has trained and prepared for the hike (and there are ample resources for this) knows this before taking a single step on the 16-mile round-trip journey from Yosemite Valley to the 8,800-foot peak. When wet weather arrives, as it did when Rohloff fell — and as it often does, unpredictably, in the mountains — the danger becomes much more acute.

What’s different now is that the victim’s father is calling for greater safety measures on Half Dome — specifically, for more wood slats to be placed beneath the cables so hikers can have better footing. That would, undoubtedly, make the final push up Half Dome less perilous — but as the several readers who sent us letters about Rohloff’s accident have said, that doesn’t mean we should pound more wood into the granite or do anything else to make the hike safer.

About 95% of Yosemite is designated wilderness land, and the purpose of the National Park System is to both maintain access for the public and preserve the natural beautify and wildlife that draw crowds in the first place. That doesn’t mean facilitating easy access to remote corners of the park — and despite its popularity, the summit of Half Dome is about as remote a location as you can imagine for a place that draws 4 million visitors per year.

And then there’s the harsh truth of adventuring outdoors: The risk of injury or death looms, always. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the San Gabriel Mountains on L.A.’s doorstep (where the Montrose Search and Rescue Team is among the country’s most active rescue units), in Big Sur along the postcard-perfect California coast (where a bicyclist fell down a rock slide and nearly died last week, despite being warned that what he was about to do could kill him), or in Death Valley (where people still go hiking despite oven-like heat, sometimes resulting in arguably the most avoidable deaths in nature).

This proximity to wild, natural beauty demands our good judgment (and as fire season intensifies, good judgment might tell you to stay out of the mountains). As reader Sean McGraw of Colorado, who identified himself as an avid climber with ample experience in Yosemite, wrote in a letter to the editor that came in Thursday:

“We should resist altering mountains to bring them down to our skill level. Instead we should try to raise our skill levels to meet the challenge of the mountain. If we bolted cables up the face of every mountain it would be an atrocity against nature.”

Trump and other Republicans call Kamala Harris a failed “border czar.” Here’s the truth. Wayne A. Cornelius points out that the vice president was tasked not with border security, but with addressing the root causes that turn so many people into migrants seeking entrance to the U.S. “Investments in addressing root causes aren’t a quick fix,” he writes, “but neglecting them entirely or until the border is ‘secure’ — as Trump and other Republicans insist — only delays sustainable management of immigration.”

The full truth of Sept. 11 is still emerging — and no, that’s not a sop to 9/11 “truthers.” Columnist Jackie Calmes says the release of heavily redacted government documents and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s new book are filling out a troubling picture of Saudi complicity in the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington almost 23 years ago.

We need a route to safer chemotherapy. Oncologist David Kerr has been in cancer medicine for decades and has seen the emergence of new therapies that take less of a toll on the body than traditional chemotherapy. Still, chemotherapy is a mainstay of modern cancer treatment, putting patients at serious risk of complications not directly related to their disease. He says mandating a “simple genetic blood test could help cancer patients get the care they need and better protect them from medical tragedies brought on by the treatment itself.”

What do you want to see change in L.A. before the 2028 Olympics? In Wednesday’s newsletter, my colleague Kerry Cavanaugh noted that “Paris leaders used the Olympics as the impetus to transform their urban landscape,” and Los Angeles could undergo similar changes before 2028, lest the world see the traffic-choked freeways and car dependence we live with every day. She asked you to send your ideas for sprucing up L.A. before the world arrives in four years; you can send those ideas to letters@latimes.com.

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