Yosemite, California

On embracing the uncertainty of "luck"

All I had left to hike was the remaining 400 feet in front of me. Even after powering through eight miles up 4,800 feet of elevation gain, considered an “extreme” level of difficulty by any hiking standard, 400 feet would normally be a cute cherry on top of a strenuous, yet rewarding, Sunday hike. You could knock out 400 feet just by puttering around your apartment while you cook dinner one evening or by walking down to the corner store for hangover Gatorade. It is a distance so short, you barely register that you’ve walked it.

But the 400 feet in front of me was anything but an imperceptible, implied distance. Instead, the 400 feet was less in front of me as it was staring down at me from a crystal clear blue sky nearly 5,000 feet in the open air, completely independent of its surroundings. With its cold, grey face and intimidating solitude, the 400 feet not only went unnoticed but taunted me with its presence as the unobstructed rockface provided a constant reminder that I would be required to not only hike this distance but pull myself up using dense metal cables lining a narrow, two-way path.

I’d waited years to face that terrifying moment just before the final ascent. How I got there can only be attributed to the seemingly magical phenomenon known as luck. If you don’t believe that luck is real, let me take you back 48 hours prior to that moment, standing at the last 400 feet left to climb of Half Dome.

I drove from Reno to Lake Tahoe on a Friday morning in mid-June. I’d spent the majority of the past two months in California alone, driving up the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Monica and back down the interior of the state through the Sierra Nevadas. With only a week and a half left in the state before I had to trek back east - and with the entirety of the famous mountain range still left to explore - you’d think my itinerary would be meticulously planned to cover the sheer number of stops I had left to make, including three National Parks.

Nine months of living in the van had already taught me how futile making plans can be. Before the van, I didn’t understand that there is a difference between planning and preparing. Planning is the static act of identifying the steps you will take to achieve a specific, premeditated outcome; preparing is the continual act of readying oneself to achieve new goals as they are presented.

With less than two weeks left, the only sanguine goal I had left in California was to hike to the peak of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. The iconic granite mass has been immortalized in fleece and plastic and film enough that its grandeur is recognizable beyond outdoorsy culture.

As a kid, I remember hiking to Washburn Point with my family to watch the sunset over Half Dome. It was a perfect view, and I knew at 12 years old that I would be back again one day to attempt the summit. In spite of the intricate planning and effort my mother made to get us there, we still had to leave the viewpoint pre-sunset due to inadequate layering. All the planning in the world can’t evade unpredictable weather. But being prepared would have helped.

I entered the lottery for a permit to hike the summit, but my first attempt failed.

The truth of the matter was that if I really wanted to hike Half Dome, I should have applied for a permit in the yearly lottery back in March. Half Dome’s iconography has drawn thousands of hikers and backpackers each year to attempt the summit despite its “extreme” difficulty and intimidatingly technical cable portion: a 45-degree slope up a slick, well-worn granite path about four feet wide for hikers moving in both directions, supported only by two metal cables on either side and wobbly wooden planks to serve as “steps” every 10 feet, assuming a plank wasn’t missing.

After multiple deaths over the years, in 2010, the park instituted a permit system to limit the number of hikers on the cables to 300 per day. 225 of those permits are for hikers and 75 are for backpackers. All but 50 of those permits are issued in the March lottery. Of the 144 days available to apply for a permit, I had a three-day window open to do this hike. It’s hard to say exactly what my odds were at this point, but for a long weekend during a peak-season month in the “post”-Covid era of record-setting attendance, it’s safe to say it would be a long shot at best.

Second lottery attempt: failed. I was starting to think winging it wouldn’t be enough when the goal I sought was so specific.

I decided to lay low in Lake Tahoe and hike while I waited for the next day to enter the lottery one final time. Hiking a trail along the Nevada coast of the lake, I kept an awkward pace with a family of four riding bikes along the same path heading in the same direction. Every time they stopped to take a picture, I caught up again, and we’d make small talk.

“Wow, so, you really live in a van full-time, huh?” the mom of the family asked me.

I nodded, “yep! It’s been about nine months! Where are y’all from?”

“Amazing. That is truly amazing. We’re from Jersey. Never been to the West Coast before. Hon, isn’t it just remarkable, what she’s doing? Could you be doing that?” the mom asked as she turned to her adult son.

He sighed a familiar please stop asking me about my life sigh before saying, “no, Ma, I can’t take off work like that.”

“Oh, actually, I work full-time,” I corrected. As someone stuck in student loan debt and regular cycles of struggling to pay off credit cards, I felt righteous to explain that I wasn’t some trust fund #vanlife baby. But it backfired.

The mom perked up again “oh that’s amazing! Just amazing! Can you do that Jay?”

Her son sighed again, “no, Ma, it doesn’t work like that. I don’t have that kind of job. I have to be on-site at 8 am every weekday.”

She continued, “well, she must be a special kind of lucky then, huh? To have a job like that and get to live like this?”

I shriveled with guilt. I appreciated her enthusiasm (kind of) but felt somehow embarrassed that I still hadn’t earned the right to live this kind of life. She was right, I was lucky, and it felt terrible.

To change the subject, I asked “do you want me to take y’all’s picture?” (Pro-tip from someone who travels alone all the time: ask someone attempting a selfie if they want their picture taken. They’ll say yes and offer to take one for you, so you don’t feel like a fucking idiot setting up your tripod in public to take a picture of just yourself again.)

“Sure, thanks!” she replied, and the family shuffled their bikes around to pose together in a line. “It’s just amazing that you can do this. You’re so lucky.”

I didn’t like hearing from others - or thinking of myself, for that matter - that I was lucky. I’d had an aversion to the word and even the concept of luck for a long time, especially as it related to the van. I didn’t like being seen as someone who just got things easily: a person who hasn’t struggled and gone through some shit and worked incredibly hard.

But why did I have an impulsive need to justify my worthiness through work? It is through that capitalist lens that I saw one person’s luck as another’s misfortune: because living in a society that tells us there is a scarcity of resources leads us to believe that we can’t all live good lives. Ironically, the scarcity isn’t there, really. It’s manufactured through patenting drugs and hoarding wealth and monopolizing entire industries. So by disassociating the concept of luck with this false narrative of scarcity, I started to trick myself into thinking maybe things can just work out easily for me at no one’s detriment. “Luck” could evolve from a measure of comparison to an equal-opportunity mindset.

Back at the van, I prepared to check my email for the final lottery confirmation. Theoretically, it would be possible to push into a fourth entry and try for a Tuesday hike, but work would be too complicated to reschedule last minute and each entry cost $10 which, with gas nearing $6.50 a gallon in California, was needed cash down the drain. After that, there would be no flexibility left, and I’d have to make my way back to the east coast defeated, unfulfilled by my own lack of planning for this hike back in March.

Still, I had done the more important thing in lieu of planning: I had prepared to hike regardless of the lottery outcome. I’d gone on a short, easy hike at Lake Tahoe to keep my body warm and loose, but I didn’t push it. I moved throughout the day assuming this hike was happening and told myself, through preparing to hike, that it would work out.

I opened my email exactly at 5 pm.

Third and final lottery attempt: successful.

That was the easy part. The opportunity. The tiny sliver of chance I’d been given from the universe on terrible, impossible odds. Opportunities present themselves to us in ways we don’t need to overthink. It’s the easy part because you aren’t - you can’t be - in control of making it happen.

The downside of the lottery is that you are notified at 5 pm on a Friday for a Sunday permit. A hike like that requires a 5 am (or earlier) start time and there’s no possibility to camp inside the park without a reservation because it’s peak season. And you’re six hours from the entrance of the park — not that it matters, because you don’t have a timed entry pass either, meaning you’d have to enter the park after 4 pm with the rest of the non-planners, unable to make it to the Visitor’s Center in time to ask them a million questions. You have no choice but to lean into the chaos and accept that you’ll be where you need to be there. And even better, you’re prepared. You’ve been prepared.

With one day to get my shit together, I left Lake Tahoe immediately and drove six hours south to Yosemite. I stopped only to stock up on trail snacks - Snickers, mostly - and to purchase a pair of rubber work gloves to aid in gripping the Half Dome cables.

I found free dispersed camping in the Stanislaus National Forest, just outside the park’s entrance. Before settling in for the night, I wrote down everything I felt grateful for: not just the exciting things like winning a hiking permit and getting to travel around in a van, but the mundane things like the forecast looking nice the next day and the store having exactly one more pair of rubber gloves in my size left. Then I made a big dinner, stretched my body, smoked some weed, and fell asleep at 8 pm.

The moon was almost perfectly halved at 4 am the next morning as I drove into the park, down into Yosemite Valley, and straight to the trailhead. I was so eager to get moving that I had to turn back to the van twice: once for my sandwich I left behind, and once to redirect after starting down the wrong path. Maybe a little planning is necessary.

The first three miles of Half Dome are immediately no joke. The trail follows the Merced River up dense stone stairs to two waterfalls, which keep the granite staircases slick and in need of careful attention and deliberate footing, made all the more difficult by the slow accumulation of dozens of hikers and tourists on the unpermitted section of the trail.

As expected, a lot of people don’t win the lottery to climb the cables. But that doesn’t stop people from trying. I learned that many folks try winging it anyway by talking with other hikers on the trail to ask if anyone has an extra permit. I overlapped with a group of three backpackers who asked me if I had one, but I had to disappoint them.

“Sorry, I entered the lottery two days ago, and it’s just me.”

“Woah, are you kidding me? I’ve been trying the daily lottery for a week! You’re so lucky!”

I paused as if to correct him, but stopped short and just agreed: “yeah, I’m pretty lucky. It just worked out.”

“Finally I said, fuck it, I’ll figure it out!” he laughed. He celebrated my luck with good humor and wished him luck on finding an extra permit along the hike. He didn’t seem to see my luck as a detriment against his luck, he just knew he’d find his own luck.

The next section was a flat, sandy stretch through Little Yosemite Valley. Pacing becomes incredibly important when faced with seemingly easy segments, and I watched several groups of competitive tourists barrel ahead of me. This happens most often on popular, busy hikes when it feels like you need to beat everyone else to get a great view as if walking at a slightly faster speed will grant you some magical vantage point. But I’d been caught with this mentality before - feeling a need to keep or outpace strangers to stay ahead on a hike - and learned the hard way that ignoring pace on “easy” parts is a great way to exhaust or injure yourself. Along this path, I was asked by four more hikers if I had an extra permit; I said no, and they continued power walking. Then I hit the halfway point.

Four more miles uphill, through rocky redwood forests, the strikingly blue sky slowly became more visible. I stopped to notice a massive sequoia with burn marks scorching the base and up the side of its trunks and marveled in awe when I craned my head upwards to see how little the fire seemed to affect the rest of its growth. I took deep, long breaths timed evenly with my deliberate strides as I felt the air thin around me ascending to 8,000 feet.

The final section before the cables is called the sub-dome. Again, hundreds of flights of stone steps zig-zagged back and forth up above the tree line. A handful of exhausted hikers lined the trail to catch their breath in the few spaces still shaded by a lone bush; many of them I recognized as hikers who’d blazed through the flat segment. Even though I knew nothing of the format of the hike beforehand, months of hiking through the desert, or at elevation, or in miserable heat, or for an entire day nonstop had prepared me for this ascent. I didn’t look up at how much farther I had to go and I didn’t look down at the increasingly obvious elevation. It kicked my ass.

So there I was: standing at the base of my last 400 feet. I gave the park ranger my permit information and walked to the base of the cables. Even with restrictions, the cables were crowded and it would take an hour just to make it those last few feet. A couple around my age asked if I wanted my picture taken before the cables and after a few minutes of talking, I learned that they also lived in a converted vehicle as well - an ambulance, no less - and we started up the cables together.

The timing of meeting Jessica and Chris was perfect. It’s not that I couldn’t have done the cables alone, but it certainly made the otherwise terrifying experience much lighter. We laughed and shared van stories as we slowly climbed the narrow two-way path at a 45-degree angle, waiting for every few rungs to let a person climbing down pass. A few times I felt my foot slip on the well-worn granite and caught myself. I’d laugh it off to my new friends as if I did this sort of thing all of the time, all the while knowing for damn sure I was out of my element.

We reached the summit together and I found a place to collapse on the hard ground. My legs, wobbly and confused, felt pulsating as I laid like a lizard in the sun and inhaled my turkey sandwich. Looking around, I saw the hiker that told me he’d figure out a way to get to the top — and he had. He didn’t need the lottery to be lucky, and frankly, I probably didn’t either. He found his opportunity when it was presented to him and lucked out.

Is luck something metaphysical, like a silent blessing from your favorite deity? Or is it the act of noticing when things are going your way and letting yourself see a pattern of good in your life? After nine months alone in the van, carefully observing my own thoughts and ritualistically taking the time to recognize even the smallest things that seemed to be going my way, I began to think of myself as a perfectly lucky person. Small moments of positive coincidence snowballed into larger and larger bouts of luck. And eventually, I didn’t care if luck came from something in the ether or from my own imagination — it was real whether I could justify it or not.

After some pictures, chugging water, and a cute 15-minute nap, I was ready for the descent. With new friends in tow, the eight miles back down the mountain went by much more easily; important, considering walking down stone stairs is measurably worse on your body than going up them.

Back in the village, I met up with Jessica and Chris for the most important part of any hike: replenishing one’s body with salt (in the form of margaritas). I listened to them describe their awesome lives working on yachts and traveling around to the most beautiful places in the world. “Wow, y’all are so lucky,” I told them, consciously abstaining from complimenting them with comparison.

Jessica smiled, “yeah, it just kind of worked out for us.”

That night, we decided to try our luck again and park next to each other in a lot for the guests of the cabins and lodges of Yosemite Valley. Of course, you’re not supposed to park overnight in any National Park without a permit or reserved campsite. Embracing my evolving philosophy, I decided that it would work out just fine, and of course, it did. No park rangers came knocking at 5 am telling us to leave. I even got to use a real shower that night meant for campers — for free. Lucky me.

Seneca once said: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” If preparation is the better-rounded, more balanced version of planning, all that’s left is leaving a little space for opportunity to magically fill in the blanks. How opportunity finds us - through divine timing or truly dumb, inexplicable coincidence - doesn’t matter as much as noticing when it has arrived.