I'm the aforementioned Mr Half Dome....yesterday I did my 38th hike. I know a lot of NPS people and try to share tidbits I pick up.
Life is a roll of the dice. There are no guarantees in life, so you gotta take chances. There can be no money exchanged for any permits. The park is all-out for stopping scalping type schemes. They encourage people to cancel if they are not using all their slots. Only the Trip leader and Alternate are listed by name and one must be on the hike. The remaining slots can be replaced but not sold. The point is to maximize a fair way to allocate hiking slots.
50 + all cancellations are in the mini-lottery. I went yesterday without a permit, but tried the 2-day.....if you go to recreation.gov, you can see the total they are giving ($8) each day so far. There were 108 for yesterday and I won. Since well over 300 could legally go each day, AND that only abut 240 average each day, the odds of sliding into another's permit are high. In June I had no permit and it took me 10 minutes to link up. I do it up top by the ranger - they don't care - that way I'm not going with real slow folks.
September weekdays are really light...again check the rec gov site and the park's.
Just do it...NIke
Rick
HikeHalfDome.com
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