[fivethirty]

An note about the cables, mostly because I've always found this to be a weird historical aside.

The cables today were put up in 1919, but follow closely both the style and path of the first ascent of Half Dome, which took place in 1875, 15 years _before_ Yosemite became a National Park. The first ascentionist basically drilled a bunch of holes up the side of the dome and used sticks or poles or something stuck in them to pull his way up like a ladder. In a sense the Cable Route thus really does "provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner" as Yosemite was before it was a park :)

In any case, and I say this as someone who spends a lot of time in Yosemite, it's best to think of the ditch as a big piece of land that we are sacrificing so that people can have some appreciation of what real wilderness is like and (hopefully) want to protect it. Most certainly nothing going on there is about keeping it preserved in it's original state.