Yosemite Facts

Yosemite ran a real fire waterfall for nearly a century. On summer nights, workers built a bonfire of red fir bark at the edge of Glacier Point. At 9pm, a caller shouted, "Let the Fire Fall!" Workers then pushed the embers off the cliff in a 3,000-foot cascade of flame. The Park Service banned it in 1968, calling it "as appropriate as horns on a rabbit."

Half Dome is the granite dome in Yosemite that looks impossible to climb without ropes. It isn't. Every spring, a park crew hauls two steel cables up its steepest stretch. Every fall, they take them down. In between, permit holders haul themselves up hand over hand to the summit. Up to 300 people go up on any given day. The cables are up right now. Hikers are climbing them this week.