I was clinging for my life to a cold steel cable high up on a nearly vertical rock face in the Sierra Nevada and the soles of my hiking boots just couldn’t find any grip.

My forearms kept slipping and my fingers hurt, and my feet slipped on the mercilessly smooth granite.

A fall from that height – onto the climbing ropes that mark the final 400-foot climb to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park – could easily be fatal. So I clenched my fists even tighter and slowly struggled upwards. The only relief came from irregularly placed wooden slats drilled into the rock, which provided much-needed support.

My nervousness was justified. The wide sections between some of these wooden slats, especially on the steepest parts of the final climb, are notoriously treacherous.

Last month, 20-year-old Grace Rohloff slipped on the same section during a sudden rainstorm and lost her grip on the ropes. She slid past her father’s outstretched hand, who watched helplessly as she fell hundreds of feet to her death.

She was not the first: at least ten other people died in falls from this section, mostly when the rock was wet.

In a phone interview last week from his home in Phoenix, Jonathan Rohloff said he kept asking himself during the perilous descent, “Why is this forest so spread out?” He estimated it would cost a few thousand dollars to double the number of rungs. He estimated that amount could easily be recouped from the 50,000 people who pay $10 each year to climb Half Dome.

He therefore wonders why nothing has been done to eliminate the obvious risk.

“My daughter’s life was worth much more than a few thousand dollars,” he said.

The need for safety improvements was also a major theme for more than a dozen climbers interviewed on the ropes last week, all of whom had heard the tragic news about Rohloff’s daughter.

They were men and women from all over the country, ranging in age from 18 to 54. Among them were experienced climbers accustomed to steep terrain where any fall could be fatal, and casual hikers who had never attempted anything so hair-raising before. They all agreed on one thing: Safer footholds would be welcome.

“I would definitely appreciate more wooden rungs,” says 25-year-old Ruthie Smith of Cincinnati as she celebrates with her friends at the summit and tries not to think too much about the upcoming descent.

On the way up, someone had passed Smith and shaken the cable on one of the wide stretches between the wooden slats. “All I could do was hold on,” she said. “I would have slipped so easily.”

Hudson Sauder of Livermore had a similar experience.

“I consider myself a strong 19-year-old,” he said. “I thought it would be a piece of cake to climb up the mountain.” But then his feet started to slip, even though he had bought running shoes with slippery soles specifically for the climb. “I was afraid I would lose my grip,” he said. “It would have been a nightmare.”

Juan Santiago, 39, of Dallas, still gasping for air at the top of the cables, said the upper body strength needed to hold on to them was a shock – and joked that it made him “question a lot of my life decisions.” Doubling the number of wooden slats, he added, would be a great idea.

Yosemite National Park declined to answer The Times’ questions about the possibility of additional security measures and the associated costs.

Rohloff said he told park rangers who questioned him about his daughter’s death, “Grace died because the cables are unnecessarily dangerous.” But he has not heard anything from park officials about planned improvements.

“The silence was deafening,” he said.

Danger and drama on the ropes of Half Dome are nothing new. They have been around for over a century and are almost as iconic as the summit’s unmistakable silhouette.

Facing them is a rite of passage for California’s outdoor enthusiasts – something people usually do once and remember for the rest of their lives.

The ropes were created in the late 19th century after famous geologist Josiah Whitney declared the 2,600-meter-high summit of Half Dome “utterly inaccessible” and said it would “never be climbed by man.”

A Yosemite guide named George Anderson decided to prove him wrong.

At the time, mountaineering was in its infancy and methods were primitive. Anderson tackled the problem by hammering huge holes in the rock and filling them with heavy steel anchors – an approach that is the exact opposite of the “leave no trace” philosophy popular today.

According to the Mariposa County Tourism Association, Anderson first reached the summit in October 1875. The cable system, which consists of two braided steel cables supported by vertical steel posts, was installed in 1919, but has not been significantly modified since then.

The cables are ugly, crude and dangerous, but they fascinate adventurous souls from day one.

That may be because most of us will never scale the towering rock faces that make Yosemite sacred land for hardcore climbers.

Conquering El Capitan, the 3,000-foot vertical wall across Yosemite Valley, is arguably the pinnacle of any technical climber’s career. Even the nearly vertical north face of Half Dome is out of the question for all but the most experienced climbers.

But thanks to the ropes, any fit flatlander with a strong grip and nerves of steel has a good chance of making it to the backside of Half Dome – weather permitting, and getting just a small taste of the heart-wrenching drama that elite adventure athletes experience.

Over the years, there has been much debate about what, if anything, should be done to make the system safer. One argument against improvements to the cables is that they would make them too easy and could attract people who are not fit enough to try it safely.

But just reaching the base of the cables requires a considerable amount of preparation and fitness.

First, you must enter the park’s online lottery system, which opens months before the summer climbing season, and hope to win a permit. The park limits the number of people who can climb Half Dome to 300 per day. This cap is designed, among other things, to avoid congestion on the ropes. If you’re out without a permit and get caught, you’ll be fined $280.

And then there’s the grueling hike itself. According to the fitness app Alltrails, my round-trip hike from the nearest parking lot to the trailhead in Yosemite Valley was more than 20 miles long, with an elevation gain of over 5,000 feet. That’s a long day no matter who you are; for someone out of shape, it would be virtually impossible.

Another serious obstacle is the weather. The last place you want to be in a rainy or thunderstorm is clinging to a steel cable on slippery granite high above the tree line. Injuries have occurred in bad weather because climbers simply freeze in place out of fear and others resort to risky maneuvers to avoid them.

As for equipment, a good pair of gloves is the most important thing. The best are those worn by electricians: thin and with sticky rubber palms that form a strong bond with the steel cables. There are often a pile of them at the base of the cables, donated by other climbers, but park officials discourage them, as it is a chore to clean up the hundreds of pounds of rotting gloves left behind each year.

Some people take it a step further and wear a harness with ropes that they can attach to the cables. This slows you down because you have to constantly unclip and reclip to get past the vertical posts. This can be irritating for more experienced climbers who have to wait behind you, but it provides another layer of potentially life-saving protection should you lose your footing.

Such a belt, if used correctly, would probably have saved Grace Rohloff.

Despite proper preparation and equipment, some people reach the base of the ropes, crane their necks to follow the ropes almost vertically up the steep rock face, and conclude that there is simply no way forward.

“I just thought, this is a big no,” said Grace Luttrell, 33, of Oakland, who decided to wait at the bottom and nibble on a sandwich while her friends continued toward the summit.

“You see people improve: in fitness, in age, etc. And I feel like you put pressure on yourself to try,” Luttrell said. “But I don’t regret anything.”

Another athletic-looking woman, carrying the necessary equipment, made it about a quarter of the way up the ropes before abruptly turning around. “This is scary. This is so scary,” she muttered as she passed me, frantically clicking in and out as she descended. “This is not my thing.”

Another argument against drilling more wooden rungs into the rock has its origins in the 21st century’s aversion to adding anything man-made to the natural environment. However, since the ropes are already in place, none of the climbers interviewed thought that their improvement would detract from the landscape.

“This isn’t really wilderness anymore,” said Erick Ulferts, 54, of Portland, Oregon, as he took a few deep breaths and looked back at the ropes for a long time after safely descending. Adding more footholds would “not change things dramatically.”

He had been wearing a climbing harness, but that didn’t stop his feet from slipping on the smooth granite. At one point he slipped and almost fell when one of the steel posts hit him right between his legs.

“None of this is particularly safe,” he said with a wry grin. “That’s the beauty of it.”

For Rohloff, an elementary school principal still reeling from the horror of watching the eldest of his three children slide to his death, the goal is to get park officials to work to make Half Dome safer.

“To me, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing that could have been done but wasn’t done,” Rohloff said of adding some rungs. “I find it hard to believe I’m the first person to think that way.”