'A beautiful soul': Arizona college student falls to death from Yosemite's Half Dome cables
A 20-year-old hiker out with her dad fell to her death from Half Dome in California's Yosemite National Park during a heavy rain storm.
Grace Rohloff, an Arizona State University student, was descending the cables on Half Dome with her father on July 13 when she slipped off, according to SFGate and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Rohloff's father, Jonathan Rohloff, told SFGate that he and his daughter had made their way to the peak of Half Dome when a storm suddenly hit. While trying to descend the precarious 400-foot cable section before rain made the granite peak slippery, Grace Rohloff lost her balance and tumbled down the mountain, the Chronicle reported.
"A black cloud was rolling in like gangbusters," Jonathan Rohloff told SFGate. "I was like, 'We have got to get down now, because we don’t want to be up here with any rain.' It rolled in literally out of nowhere."
USA TODAY has reached out to the National Park Service for details of the accident. The service has not yet released information about it and declined to comment to multiple other news outlets.
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Dad stayed near daughter, not knowing if she had died
Jonathan Rohloff recalled his daughter telling him that she was feeling very happy 10 minutes before the accident, KMPH-TV reported.
The father-daughter duo, who were longtime hiking buddies, had driven all the way from Phoenix to cross Half Domes off her bucket list.
He told SFGate that his daughter was wearing a new pair of hiking shoes that were supposed to have good traction.
“Dad, my shoes are so slippery,” Rohloff said Grace nervously told him. He responded by trying to calm her down, saying, “OK, let’s do one step at a time.”
Soon after she " just slid off to the side, right by me, down the mountain,” he said. “It happened so fast. I tried to reach my hand up, but she was already gone.”
Dad tries to comfort daughter after fall, though he couldn't see her
After his daughter fell out of sight, Jonathan Rohloff waited amid cold and giant hale for rescuers, not knowing whether Grace had survived.
"I was with her, and I wasn't going to leave her," Rohloff told KMPH-TV. "And even up until the chopper came, I mean, it was miserable up there, cold. I wasn't going to leave her, and I continued to yell down at her and just let her know. 'Hey, if you can hear me, I'm here, Grace, I'm not going to leave you. I'll wait for you. I'm by your side. They're coming to rescue you. Stick with us. I love you."
When rescuers made it to Grace several hours after the fall, they pronounced her dead and, and a coroner later told Rohloff that his daughter probably died right away from head trauma.
"That was at least comforting,” he told SFGate. “If she was gone, that she didn’t have to suffer.”
Grace Rohloff had previously hiked hundreds of miles at notable trails like Angels Landing at Zion National Park in Utah during the snow, the Chronicle reported. Her cousin Emily Samora told the paper that Grace Rohloff was also passionate about education, pursuing a career as a math teacher as she worked with a girl with Down Syndrome and as a Dutch Bros barista.
Father calls Half Dome cables 'unnecessarily dangerous'
The father called the cables at Half Dome "unnecessarily dangerous" as he noticed that the granite had become worn down and felt like a "slip n’ slide."
He urged officials to implement additional wooden planks to minimize the 10-foot gap of slippery granite or install a wooden path above the granite. He also suggested requiring hikers to wear hiking clips.
"My daughter’s life is worth more than a couple hundred or couple thousand(dollars) to put into the cable system to make it more safe," Jonathan told the San Francisco Chronicle. "You never really know until you’re there. I tragically lost my daughter because of that."
He told SFGate that he wanted to make sure people heard his daughter's story.
“Grace was such a beautiful soul,” he said. "She had a way of connecting people and making them feel special.”