YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, California (AP) – Two skiers navigated a thin layer of snow with no margin of error down the steep slope of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park and alternately skied and ran back down the valley in a unusually bold feat.
Jason Torlano, 45, and Zach Milligan, 40, completed the descent in five hours on Sunday, making their way carefully through the crunchy snow and using ropes to rappel across various sections of bare rock known as “slabs of death” under the iconic face of the Half Dome, Fresno Bee reported Thursday.
“If you fall to the left or the right, you are definitely dead,” said JT Holmes, a free professional skier friend of Torlano. “If you fall in the middle, you have a small chance of not falling to your death – but it’s a maybe.”
Snowboarder Jim Zellers is believed to have been the first to descend the upper 800-foot (243-meter) section on the shoulder of the dome in 2000. But no one is known to have attempted the entire 4,800-foot (1,463-meter) descent from peak to peak. OK.
Torlano said he had dreamed of skiing in the dome since his family moved to Yosemite when he was 5.
He climbed the Half Dome for the first time when he was young, clinging to the same cables that tens of thousands of visitors make every year to climb the final steep flight to the rounded side of the polished granite. He advanced to become one of a group of elite climbers to scale the face of pure granite using ropes just to prevent it from falling at least a dozen times. He later became a park ranger.
“It’s always been there,” Torlano told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I have been attracted to Half Dome for as long as I can remember.”
After also serving in the US Army, he settled with his wife and children in a community near Yosemite. He specialized in the use of ropes to work in dangerous and high altitude environments.
He said he had tried skiing at the Half Dome for the past three years, but gave up after finding inadequate snow. This year, a storm in early February filled Yosemite with fresh powder, including about 2 to 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) of snow at the peak of Half Dome.
He rented a friend’s small plane on February 19 to study snow conditions and the possible route before calling Milligan, a climbing colleague, to join him.
Milligan said he initially planned to film only Torlano skiing, but decided to make his own descent by carefully sliding sideways on his skis. He said things quickly became dangerous when he skied over part of one of the cables and lost control before using an ice pick to stop his slide and get straight.
“I was just trying to stay in control and stay alive,” said Milligan. “You are in that column and you don’t have much room for error.”