cathedral.JPG
Yosemite cathedral
(Fred Contrada)
Nature in its magnificence is like a cathedral, and so I entered Yosemite Valley as if into a church. Half Dome. El Capitan. There were redwoods and sequoias here as well, but not the real giants. Somewhere in the far reaches of the park there's that tree you can drive through.
I'd been to Yosemite twice before, but long ago. Once I hiked up to Lower Yosemite Falls. The other time, I drove in the west entrance and all the way over the Sierras to the east.
This time I was with friends, the only things better than mountains. Some of us have slowed down over the 40 years of our friendship, but we all made it to a pond a mile or two up a trailhead. The temperature dropped into the 40s and it rained a bit. Even so, it wasn't much of a challenge.
Two days later, two guys named Dean Potter and
Half Dome
Graham Hunt jumped off a 7,500-foot peak in Yosemite. They were each wearing something called a "wing suit." The drop to Yosemite Valley from Taft Point, where they jumped, was about 3,000 feet. I don't know what went wrong, but they didn't deploy their parachutes and they died. Potter supposedly shot video with a head camera but I couldn't find it anywhere online. I saw other videos: of him climbing almost to the top of a rock face and letting go and flying (scary); of him
wing-suit jumping with his dog on his back (funny)
. There was a short documentary in which he tells the camera the earliest dream he can remember was about flying. I didn't really want to watch the video of his death.
Potter was a pioneer in the sport of wing-suiting. They look sort of like sleeping bags only when you spread your arms it's as if you have wings.
Potter was a daredevil who free-climbed some of the big rock faces in Yosemite. Free-climbing is when you go up without a rope or pitons or a partner, without a second chance. I sent a lot of time staring at Half Dome and El Capitan. Climbers can see route there. All I could see was the clean-shaven face of death.
Wing-suiting is illegal in Yosemite, but Potter didn't care. His mission, he said, was to establish the right of humans to fly in national parks. Still, the rangers still don't like it.
Pond with rock: Yosemite National Park
Two nights before Dean Potter died, my friends and I had a few beers at the hostel where we were staying. On the wall was a poster of an Ansel Adams photograph of Yosemite. Ansel Adams knew how to see magnificence, to see God. I couldn't see through Dean Potter's eyes, but I don't think he saw the face of death. He saw himself flying.