I tied in and started up the cliff. The route was rated only 5.6, and because one of my friends had led it a few minutes before, I had a top-rope belay. It was the first time in 15 months that I had climbed outdoors—the longest such hiatus of my adult life. 

Two years earlier, the 70-foot pitch would have been a trivial warm-up before I tried something “real.” Now it was all the challenge I dared face. 

In July 2015, I was diagnosed with Stage IV throat cancer. During the next four months, I got zapped with 35 doses of radiation and seven weeks of chemotherapy. Confined to a hospital for a third of that time, I thought I was about to die on three occasions, and at one low ebb, racked with pain, I was ready to embrace oblivion. By January, back home in Watertown, Massachusetts, I was so weak that when I tried to walk a single block of my street, I had to stop and sit on a neighbor’s wall every 200 feet. 

Sometime in early 2016, I called my climbing buddy Ed Ward. We’d been partners on the rope for 45 years, and back in our glory days had paired up on two of the finest first ascents of our lives—Shot Tower in the Brooks Range, and the southeast face of Mount Dickey in the Alaska Range. “I guess no reunion this year,” I said. “Though you could organize one without me.”

“Nah,” he said. “Nobody has the heart for it.” 

Back in January of 1996, Ed and I had dreamed up what became a nearly annual reunion, one that grew to involve our best friends in the worlds of climbing and writing. In Las Vegas, on a freelance magazine assignment to cover the AVN Awards—better known as the Oscars of porn—I spent a week interviewing such starlets as Juli Ashton and Jenna Jameson. After a few days I realized that, only 15 miles west of the Flamingo Hotel, the sandstone massif of Red Rock Canyon erupted from the desert—one of the best climbing arenas in the country.

I invited a few of the porn stars to go on a climb, but they politely declined, so I called Ed and demanded that he drop everything, grab a rope and rack, and fly to Vegas. We had so much fun that the next year we invited what we thought of as our old gang on a return trip to the same crags.

In 1997, the gang ranged in age from 41 to 53 and had added other charter members: Matt Hale and Jon Krakauer. My linkage with Matt was even older than with Ed. Back in 1965, when we were in our early twenties, he and I climbed the west face of Alaska’s Mount Huntington, the subject of my first book, . Jon was a student of mine and Ed’s at Hampshire College starting in 1972, and he soon became our equal on rock and ice. (A few years after Jon graduated, I convinced him to quit pounding nails and try to make his living as a writer.) The two junior members of the group, Chris Wejchert and Chris Gulick, both in their forties, had stormed peaks with us over the years, ranging from Katahdin to the Tetons.

Soon we added Aussie-born Greg Child, one of the most talented all-around mountaineers of his generation, whose résumé boasts new routes on El Cap, K2 from the north, and the second ascent of the prize of the Karakoram, Gasherbrum IV. Greg had become a trenchant writer, whose book is the classic account of the 2000 kidnapping and self-rescue in Kyrgyzstan of four young American climbers, including Tommy Caldwell and Beth Rodden.

At Red Rocks, we had such a fund of shared adventures and mishaps that a big part of each day was devoted to dredging up old tales and improving them with each telling. But the trips also generated great new stories. In 1997, for instance, we were hiking in to one of the walls. A team of younger climbers were hot on our heels.

Were they trying to beat us to the first pitch of Epinephrine? No. When their leader caught up to Matt, he breathlessly asked, “Would that be Jon Krakauer in your group?” had been published only months before.

Matt said yes.

“Wow. Do you think I could ask him for an autograph?”

Matt frowned. “I don’t know. He’s a little touchy about that sort of thing.”

“No, no! It’s all right,” the guy said. “It’s enough just to have seen him.”

Throughout the rest of our trip, sitting in our favorite Vegas bar, we would clink beer glasses, gaze at Krakauer, and say, “It’s enough just to have seen him.”

Though we missed a year or two, by 2015 we had rendezvoused on 15 different trips, extending our range from Red Rocks to Skaha in British Columbia and Estes Park in Colorado, as well as the Dolomites of Italy and the Calanques in France. Sometimes we camped, sometimes we rented hotels or condos. Gradually, we added a few more members. Meanwhile, there was an ongoing debate that actually threatened to become contentious. 

Some of us, including me, believed our outings should remain all-male; others thought such a stricture was juvenile. The half-spoken worry was that the presence of nonclimbing wives and girlfriends would sabotage our precious brotherhood. Complicating things, back at our home crags, several of us had found female climbing partners who were accomplished enough to join us on these trips. 

Fueled by beer and wine, the debate came to a head in 2009, around a bonfire at 10,000 feet in the Uintas of northern Utah. At one point, Chris Reveley, a veteran of Longs Peak and the Diamond, decided to settle it. “The answer is,” he proclaimed, pausing for effect, “women yes, spouses no!” Our laughter confirmed a unanimous vote.

The first recruit was Anne-Laure Treny, an engineer from France whom Ed had befriended at his local gym. Anne-Laure’s balletic grace on rock put us to shame, and she brought a teasing wit that helped civilize us. By 2013, our team contained almost as many women as men, but we still set the bar against wives. We weren’t able to imagine yet that, eventually, our reunions might not only tolerate but benefit from the ad­dition of spouses and kids. If we had, the more reactionary of us might have choked on our sexism.

Forty feet up the 5.6, I was panting to catch my breath, and my mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow. I had clipped a water bottle to my harness; now I managed to balance on small footholds, retrieve the thing, and take three or four gulps. The only climbing I had done in more than a year was in a gym two miles from my house, and the longest route I’d managed to do topped out at 45 feet. 

The crag, called Area 13, lay in a dry canyon near the California-Nevada state line. Around me, my friends were cavorting on 5.9 and 5.10 routes, but I thought that if I could reach an anchor 30 feet above, the 5.6 pitch I’d completed would amount to a minor triumph. In fact, it seemed as important to me as any climb I’d ever done.

Little more than a year before, in May of 2016, I had decided that some of my strength and stamina was at last returning. On a trip to Utah, I hiked as many as four miles at a stretch. But in June, driving home from a short visit to Montreal, I collapsed and had to be hauled to an emergency room in ­Hanover, New Hampshire. Only a month before, the doctors at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute had certified that the cancer was gone from my throat and neck. Now I learned that it had metastasized to my lungs. Once cancer metastasizes, it’s incurable. My best hope was to keep it in check with doses of a radical new form of immunotherapy. 

The wasted summer of 2016 passed in a blur of hospital crises and exhausted furloughs. But by January of 2017, I had stayed out of the sick ward for five months. I called Ed. “What the hell,” I said. “Let’s get the gang together for another reunion. Even if I can’t climb, it’d be great just to hang out with you guys.”

On June 17, we gathered in Mammoth Lakes, California, where four years earlier we’d spent a week assaulting five different local crags. One of Mammoth’s draws was the Snowcreek Resort condominiums, where we had basked in swanky lodging right next to a golf course. By this time, we had dropped the no-wives thing. Among the 18 people in our group, ten were women, including three wives, a teenager, and a sixth-grader. We ranged in age from 12 to my graybeard 74, and five of the original six—all but Krakauer—showed up. One of the wives was mine: Sharon Roberts, who in recent years had started climbing at the Watertown gym after a break of decades since our vagabond twenties. On Area 13, I’d reached the anchor and lowered off. She proceeded to solve the route. If I was proud of my first outdoor pitch in 15 months, she was equally thrilled by her first climb on real rock in 35 years.

To my delight, we climbed every day. At Benton Crossing, a granite massif out on the plains, I started a 115-foot route (5.6 again) that I knew would challenge my endurance. Halfway up, a sudden wave of nausea engulfed me. All at once I was vomiting my meager breakfast, spattering the small ledge around my feet. A hush fell. Sharon urged me to come down, but I took a swig of my water and headed shakily on up. I heard Greg Child say, “To one-up Roberts now, I’m gonna have to take a crap on the route.”

The best climb of our eight-day trip happened on June 20, when Sarah Keyes and Emmett Lyman—the most ambitious partners in our group, both in their late thirties—teamed with Greg and his 12-year-old daughter, Ari, to attempt a stern 550-foot, four-pitch 5.10 called Cardinal Pinnacle. During the past year and a half, Ari had blossomed under Greg’s tutelage, taking the lead on well-bolted sport routes. But she had never tried a semi-alpine challenge like this one, which requires a descent of three long rappels.

The grown-ups swapped leads. Ari calmly followed. On the crux traverse, Greg belayed her, out of sight around the corner, as she moved slowly but steadily. Pulling in the rope, Greg nervously pondered the fiasco that might ensue if she “came off” and hung dangling over the void. A small hand appeared. Ari pivoted around the corner and clipped in to Greg’s anchor.

“Was that scary?” he asked.

“A bit,” she admitted.

Ari became the élan vital of our gathering. She brought along a 26-inch aluminum bat and a hard yellow softball, as well as a slightly underinflated football. Late one afternoon, after the golfers had gone home, she lured us onto the grass near the eighth tee to throw and catch and bat. I lobbed slow pitches that she sent screaming past my head. Finding a lost golf ball in the rough, I surprised her by pitching it, too. On her third swing, she clobbered it into the fescue fringing the seventh green. She filled the lulls in our games by turning cartwheels on the grass. 

During the first eight months of my cancer treatment in 2015 and 2016, I spent only one night anywhere other than home or a hospital. Just a decade before, as a magazine writer and author, I had traveled up to 200 days a year, often to other continents. My new confinement seemed to strangle my spirit, and depression often sat at my elbow.

Beginning in March of 2016, with a cautious four-day trip to North Carolina, I fled Watertown five times. The longest such trip was a two-week ramble in the Anasazi canyons of southeast Utah. Each trip felt like a risky bargain, a dare flung out against the mindless cancer cells that were roaming through my body.

We’d usually been lucky—no big medical dramas—and it seemed like we were getting away with it again at Mammoth Lakes. But on the next to last morning, I woke at 4 A.M. shivering uncontrollably, my hands and feet spasming, trying desperately to catch my breath as I heard a gurgling rattle in my lungs. Sharon’s face looked stricken as she whispered, “We have to call 911.”

“No!” I pleaded. I had my heart set on the day’s plan for another new crag. Then I threw up, the vomit laced with blood.

EMTs carried me to an ambulance; an oxygen mask was clapped over my nose and mouth. In the ER, doctors and nurses hooked me up to IV fluids and monitors. Within hours, I was moved to the ICU, then to the Mammoth hospital. The doctors diagnosed “community acquired” bacterial pneumonia. Immobilized in a sterile, windowless room, I wept as Sharon held my hand.

“Tell the others to go ahead and climb,” I begged her, but instead they showed up in twos and threes, masks strapped on their faces. Their solemn looks seemed to mirror my own dismay, but there was no mistaking how much they had invested in my recovery. Ed later told me, “Everybody sort of needed a rest day anyway.” Sarah Keyes said, “There were many conversations at the house in which folks were brainstorming how they and we could all work together to take care of you both.”

Metastasized cancer is not an automatic death sentence. No doctor has told me I should expect to live for only x months or years, and immunotherapy is in such infancy that almost anything could happen. But one thing seems clear: I will never regain more than a fraction of the strength or stamina I used to take for granted.

In Mammoth, I was released after 30 hours. Back at the condo, my friends greeted me like a prodigal son, but the joy of our last evening was subdued. I wondered how many of them were thinking: Is this the last time we’ll meet together to climb?

When we first launched our rendezvous in the 1990s, the male camaraderie disguised an urge to hang on to the intensity of our younger years. All six of our original group, as well as Greg, had started climbing in their late teens or soon after. By our early twenties, all of us would have said that climbing was the most important thing in life—a pursuit so glorious that it was worth the risk of death. On the expeditions we orga­nized to the great ranges, the game was always played for keeps. We despaired of ever landing meaningful jobs, happy to embrace the bohemian squalor of the dirtbag life.

Our friends who rounded out the Mammoth crew, except for the two teenagers—Ari and Emma, Anne-Laure’s 18-year-old daughter—had come to climbing later in life, with well-established careers. None of them, not even Sarah and Emmett, would have sworn that climbing was worth all the rest of life put together.

By 2017, the diehard core of seven had moved in the same direction, at last accepting our diminished powers. We could admit, with Tennyson’s Ulysses, that “We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven.” By dropping our silly rules about membership, we had opened our hearts to the subtler glory of fine times on the crags, shared across generations. In passing on to his daughter a sliver of the vision he had won on K2 and Gasherbrum IV, Greg had affirmed that continuum. But if Ari had turned her back on climbing and flung herself into skateboarding or piano ­instead, that would have been fine with him. The spark was hers.

I never wanted to have children myself. But in Ari, especially after cancer struck me down, I rediscovered hope. At the age of one month, in 2004, she shared her first camp­out with me, as Greg and I crossed a highway during an 18-day traverse of the Comb Ridge in Arizona and Utah. At eight, along with Greg and Sharon and me, she backpacked for three days into a remote canyon where, decades earlier, I had discovered a pristine 1,500-year-old Anasazi basket tucked inside an obscure alcove by its owner. 

It was I who’d taught Ari how to throw a football and hit a softball, Greg not being particularly adept at those mainstream American games. During the Mammoth Lakes trip, in the forest below a climbing area called Horseshoe Slabs, she stripped the twigs off a fallen branch to craft a backwoods bat. As I pitched pine cones to her, she yelped with delight every time she con­nected. And at Area 13, I stood in awe beneath the cliff as she deftly led pitches on which I knew I could barely get off the ground. 

Often I think about Ari, gliding like a sylph toward her limitless future. I picture her at 25, having fulfilled some of her dreams—dreams I like to think I had a part in shaping. By then, alas, in all likelihood I won’t be around to share her joy. But I shared it in Mammoth Lakes, with all our old-new gang, for whom each night the dwindling of our energies only presaged a new adventure on the coming day.

David Roberts has written for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű since 1980. His books include , , and . Camilla Perkins is an °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đÌęcontributing artist.

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On the evening of June 22, some 16 to 20 local villagers disguised as Gilgit paramilitary officers hiked into base camp on the Diamir side of Pakistan’s 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat, the ninth-tallest mountain on earth, shouting in English: “Taliban! Al Quaeda! Surrender! Some fifty climbers from many different countries were on the mountain at the time, and more than a dozen were hanging out at base, waiting for better weather and acclimatizing before heading up to higher camps. The intruders roused these mountaineers from their tents, tied them up, and forced them onto their knees at gunpoint.

Nanga Parbat, earth’s ninth tallest mountain.

The attackers first demanded money. Interviewed by Peter Miller for National Geographic, Sehr Khan, a one of the men saying, “We know you can speak English. Ask them who has money in their tents.” Khan continued: “Everybody was scared. We all said, ‘Yes, we have money.’ The foreigners said, ‘Yes, we have Euros. Yes, we have dollars.’ And, one by one, they took climbers to their different tents and collected the money.”

The intruders next destroyed all the cell phones, satellite phones, and two-way radios they could find. “[S]uddenly, I heard the sound of shooting,” Kahn recounted. “I looked a little up and what I saw was this poor Ukrainian guy, who had been tied with me, I saw him sitting down. Then after that moment, the shooting started in bursts. Brrrr. Brrrr. Brrrr. Three times like that. Then the leader, this stupid ugly man, said, ‘Now stop firing. Don’t fire anybody.’ Then that son of a bitch came in between the dead bodies and he personally shot them one by one. Dun. Dun. Dun. Afterward we heard slogans, like ‘Allahu Akbar,’ ‘Salam Zindabad,’ ‘Osama bin Laden Zindabad.’”

Several of the climbers pleaded, “I am not American! I am not American!,” to no avail. In the midst of the carnage, one of the few survivors heard an assassin proclaim, “Today, these people are revenge for Osama bin Laden.” Yet only one of the victims was an American citizen, and he was Chinese-born. Two others were Chinese, three were Ukrainians, two Slovaks, one Lithuanian, and one a Sherpa from Nepal. The cook was a Pakistani. In all, 11 people were killed.

Within days of the massacre, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a Sunni Muslim branch unaffiliated with the Afghan Taliban, claimed responsibility for the deed. A spokesman said that the motive was revenge for the death, by an American drone strike, of the group’s second-in-command, and that the action had been carried out by a splinter faction of the TTP called the Jundul Hafsa. The Pakistani cook was apparently shot because the attackers assumed he was Shia. Sher Kahn believes he survived only because his name sounded to the killers like a Sunni cognomen, even though Khan is actually an Ismaili Shia.

In the more than two-century-long history of mountaineering, the murder of more than two or three climbers under any circumstances was utterly unprecedented. In fact, the killing of backcountry adventurers is so rare an event that the isolated examples resonate long afterward. In 1998, mountaineer and explorer Ned Gillette was shot and killed in his tent while trekking in Kashmir. But what was originally thought to be a terrorist act turned out to be a simple robbery gone wrong. Others were reminded of the four young American climbers who were shot out of their bivouac on a big wall in Kyrgyzstan in 2000, then taken captive, as chronicled by Greg Child in șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű and his book, . But in that case, the climbers were useful to the Kyrgyz insurgents who seized them only as hostages to be used as bargaining chips with the government—not as victims in a Muslim vendetta against the United States.

The Nanga Parbat massacre, however, bore spooky similarities to the 1995 kidnapping of six foreign tourists in Kashmir by a militant Islamic group called Al-Faran. In that case, one American managed to escape. The beheaded body of a Norwegian hostage was later discovered, but the other four victims were never seen again. A captured rebel not involved in the Al-Faran kidnapping later reported that he had heard that the four were shot to death after the kidnappers’ demands fell on deaf ears.

Nonetheless, the Nanga Parbat tragedy struck many observers as heralding a new and darker order of threat to adventurers afoot in Muslim countries. “It’s a game-changer, for sure,” claims one savvy observer of Central Asia.

“I found myself more disturbed by this tragedy than anything that’s come down in quite a while,” says Seattle-based climber Steve Swenson. “It’s the first time I’ve told myself, ‘Whoa, I’ve gotta pay attention now.’”

“I was deeply shocked and surprised,” adds Doug Chabot. “This came out of left field. But once I thought about it, I realized that this was a logical place for this sort of thing to happen.”

Swenson is a veteran of 11 mountaineering expeditions to Pakistan and is writing a memoir interweaving his climbs with the geopolitics of the region. Chabot, Swenson’s frequent partner, has gone on nine climbing expeditions to Pakistan himself; in addition, he is the co-founder of the Iqra Fund, an organization dedicated to furthering girls’ education in that country.

The impact on the Pakistan’ s tourism business, on which thousands of merchants and porters depend for their livelihood, promises to be both profound and long-lasting. “This is a great tragedy for Pakistan,” says Nazir Sabir, one of his country’s leading climbers and the head of Pakistan’s top trekking company. “I have talked to most of the operators,” reports Sabir, three weeks after the massacre. “Ninety percent of their trips are canceled.” For Sabir, it was a personal tragedy as well, for he knew the three Chinese climbers and the Sherpa well.

But many questions remain unanswered. If the Jundul Hafsa had struck to avenge the killing of Osama Bin Laden and American drone strikes on Sunni targets, why did they so readily kill non-Americans, even Chinese? Some observers speculate that the killers intended to disrupt the political bond between Pakistan and China, jointly planning a major dam project in the Diamir region. And there are strong indications that the Jundul Hafsa (or allied factions of the TTP) were responsible for a pair of attacks on buses in the Gilgit region in 2012, in which a total of almost sixty Shia were systematically identified and executed.

Others speculate that the poorly educated and mostly illiterate villagers who carried out the killings may have viewed all non-Muslims as “Westerners,” making little distinction between a Lithuanian or a Slovak and the Americans who launch drones against Taliban targets. As of July 22, the Pakistan government, under its new prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, appears to be making a concerted effort to round up the murderers. Sixteen have been identified by name, and four arrested.

Doug Chabot believes that the Nanga Parbat incident has little to do with Sunni-Shia enmity. Both he and Steve Swenson cite the numerous IED and suicide attacks in which innocent Pakistanis—many of them Sunni women and children—are killed along with the targeted victims. Voicing his outrage in an open letter to the the American Alpine Club, Manzoor Hussain, the president of the Alpine Club of Pakistan, wrote, “It appears that the mission of these enemies of humanity is to kill everyone living, including themselves, for reasons beyond our comprehension.”

Did the climbers at Nanga Parbat base camp just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Does the massacre mean that the several dozen expeditions now ensconced on the Baltoro Glacier in quest of the summits of the four other 8,000-meter peaks in Pakistan are equally vulnerable? The Diamir base camp lies at an altitude of 13,000 feet, only a three-day hike up the valley. To reach Concordia on the Baltoro at 15,000 feet, near which climbers establish their base camps, requires a rugged six-day trek through dangerously glaciated terrain. That inaccessibility in and of itself may impose a margin of safety for the climbers on the Baltoro. In addition, as Swenson and Chabot point out, there are very few terrorists in that part of Pakistan, and their arrival there would not go unnoticed by the strong military presence in the region.

In the aftermath of the massacre, nearly all the climbers on Nanga Parbat were immediately evacuated, leaving only a Romanian team on the opposite Rupal side of the peak—safer ground and harder to get to. Proceeding with their attempt, the Romanians placed four members on the summit on July 19.

Meanwhile, it was business as usual on the Baltoro. As of July 22, a handful of climbers had reached the summits of Broad Peak, Gasherbrum I, and Gasherbrum II, but others had perished in the attempt, including the great Polish pioneer Artur Hajzer. Hope is giving out for three Iranians stranded without food, water, or tents at 25,600 feet on Broad Peak.

On the formidable K2, some climbers had reached Camp III at 23,600 feet, but all the expedition members are now biding their time as they hope for a good-weather window to make their summit bids. Among their number is Mike Horn, the accomplished polar explorer, who with his fellow Swiss partner Fred Roux hopes not only to climb the world’s second-highest mountain but to paraglide from the summit down to base camp.  

Whether or not the Baltoro climbers are ignoring a new form of terrorism in Pakistan remains to be seen. Doug Chabot is not optimistic. “I’m worried that climbers are the new easy target,” he says. “We’re unarmed, we have lots of money, and we’re high-profile.”

According to Chabot, “The Jundul Hafsa are essentially a gang—like the Bloods and the Crips. There’s no overall leadership of the Taliban, and once the U. S. pulls out of Afghanistan in 2014, all these small gangs will be fighting for power and territory across both countries. It’s going to be a free-for-all. With the Nanga Parbat killings, the Jundul were saying, ‘We own this place.’”

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After a little more than two hours of climbing, Alex Honnold reached Thank God Ledge. He was nine-tenths of the way up the northwest face of Half Dome—the nearly vertical 2,000-foot granite wall that towers above Yosemite Valley. The ledge, a 35-foot-long ramp that varies in width from five to twelve inches, forms a blessed respite from the esca­lating severities of the face. By hand-traversing left—facing the wall, fingers jammed in the crack at the back of the ledge, feet plastered against the rock just below—climbers circumvent the utterly blank cliff above.

Twenty-three years old that day in September 2008, with a lanky five-foot-eleven build, big brown eyes, and prominent ears, Honnold was on the verge of pulling off an unprecedented feat. He had no rope and no nuts or camming devices to jam into cracks to catch him if he fell. He had no carabiners to clip into the bolts that protected the hardest moves on the climb. He had no partner. He wore only a light shirt and shorts and carried nothing but a flask of water, a few energy bars, and a chalk bag dangling from his waist. He was practicing the most extreme and dangerous form of rock climbing. It's called free soloing, and its fundamental rule is stern and simple: If you slip, you die. Before that day, no one had free-soloed a route in North America as long or as difficult as the northwest face of Half Dome.

No one witnessed the climb, and Honnold had told only two friends of his plans. Below him stretched 1,800 feet of sheer granite; above, the last 200 feet of the wall. Downclimbing the route was out of the question.

Once he reached the ledge, however, Honnold decided not to hand-traverse but to cross on his feet, with his back to the wall. In his mind, that was the purest of styles. “It was a matter of pride,” he'd later write in an unpublished essay on the climb. Delicately, he put all his weight on one foothold, pushed down on the ledge with his palms, stood up, turned around, and faced out. The wall at his back overhung by a few degrees, threatening to push him off balance.

“The first few steps were completely normal,” Honnold wrote, “as if I was walking on a narrow sidewalk in the sky. But once it narrowed I found myself inching along with my body glued to the wall, shuffling my feet and maintaining perfect posture. I could have looked down and seen my pack sitting at the base of the route, but it would have pitched me headfirst off the wall.”

The key to maintaining the cool it takes to free-solo a sheer face 750 feet taller than the Empire State Building is what Honnold refers to as his “mental armor.” But a few minutes after traversing Thank God Ledge and turning back to face the wall, his feet planted on small sloping holds, his fingers clinging to minuscule wrinkles in the rock, Honnold ran out of armor. It was a novel and disquieting experience. He froze, reeling with existential questions: What am I doing? Why am I here?

The first wave of freak-out seized him. And as Honnold knew full well, “The minute you freak out, you're screwed.”

Honnold displayed an affinity for risk at a young age. When he was five, his mother, Dierdre Wolownick, a French professor at in Sacramento, California, took him to a climbing gym in nearby Davis. “I was talking to the supervisor, and I turned around,” Wolownick remembers. “There was Alex, 30 feet up. I was scared to death he'd kill himself.”

When Honnold was ten, his father, Charles Honnold, an ESL teacher, started accompanying the hyperactive kid to a Sacramento climbing gym. “Dad was never a real climber,” Honnold says. “He was mainly there to belay me. I think he was relieved when I started biking to the gym on my own.”

But Honnold didn't wholly throw himself into climbing until after high school. He had other interests—namely, books. “I crushed high school,” he says matter-of-factly. “I was a huge dork.” After graduating with straight A's in 2003, he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where he planned to study engineering. But that didn't pan out—the second semester, he simply stopped going to class. “I just didn't like college,” he says. “On a typical day, I'd buy a loaf of bread and go out to Indian Rock”—a small rhyolite outcrop in the suburban Berkeley hills—”and do laps.”

In July 2004, 18-year-old Honnold competed in the Youth Nationals, an indoor contest for the country's top 300 teenage climbers. He finished second, winning a spot in the in Scotland that September. But before the competition, things changed. On July 18, 2004, Alex's father died of a heart attack at the airport in Phoenix. He was 55. Charles and Dierdre had recently divorced, an event both Alex and his older sister, Stasia, now 27, saw coming. “My parents waited until I graduated high school to get divorced,” says Alex.

Still, the death of his father—whom Honnold describes as a “great dad” but a “quiet and private man”—was difficult. “I was kind of depressed,” says Honnold. “I didn't want to do anything except climb.”

He went to Scotland and turned in a lackluster performance, finishing 39th. When he got home, he decided not to return to Berkeley. Instead, his mother lent him her Chevy minivan. Honnold threw a sleeping bag, some clothes, and his climbing gear in the back and hit the road. He's been on the move ever since.

That first summer, he traveled throughout California, living off interest from his father's life-insurance bonds. At , a friendly crag near Lake Tahoe, Honnold completed his first ropeless solo on a two-pitch, 5.3 route. (In the U.S., rock climbs are rated on a decimal scale ranging from 5.1 to 5.15, with the grades above 5.9 subdivided into four classes, “a” through “d.” A 5.3 is child's play.)

According to Honnold, he continued free soloing for practical reasons. “I didn't have any partners,” he says. “I was too shy to meet strangers and too intimidated to talk to 'real' climbers. At first I had no real gift for it. I just did a lot of soloing and slowly got better.”

For the next two years, Honnold traveled and climbed from Nevada to Utah to British Columbia. Then, in September 2007, he showed up in Yosemite Valley and free-soloed two long 5.11c routes, Astroman and the Rostrum, in one day. It was a feat that had been accomplished only once before, in 1987, by the great Canadian free soloist .

In April 2008, Honnold upped the ante by free-soloing , a 5.12d route in Utah's Zion National Park. Honnold scaled the 1,200-foot sandstone wall in just 83 minutes, inspiring an electric buzz on climbing websites. (Sample posts from the site : “Holy living f#ck!” “I get the Elvis just thinking about it.”) Five months later, he tackled Half Dome. Honnold was suddenly the talk of the climbing world.

Soon, sponsors came flocking: La Sportiva, Clif Bar, New England Ropes, Black Diamond, and The North Face. Honnold says he now makes enough sponsorship money “to support my climbing and save a little bit.” He's also used some of the cash to upgrade his current vehicle, a 2002 Ford Econoline minivan that he lives in, with industrial carpeting, insulation, and a two-burner Coleman stove. “It used to be way more ghetto,” he says proudly.

Thanks to his relationship with The North Face, Honnold also gained entrĂ©e into climbing's elite, becoming both protĂ©gĂ© and partner to the likes of Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and Mark Synnott. Anker, who is one of Honnold's heroes, puts the young free soloist's accomplishments in perspective. “Twenty years ago, guys like John Bachar and Peter Croft could climb 5.12, and they regularly soloed 5.10,” Anker told me last October. “Alex can climb 5.14, and he's soloing 5.12. He's fundamentally raised the bar.”

If Honnold has a peer, it's Dean Potter, the brash 39-year-old climber best known for his big-wall solos and BASE jumps with a wingsuit. Potter also invented a practice he calls freeBASEing—free-soloing with a parachute that he can open and use to float to the ground after falling off. Recently, there's been speculation that Potter and Honnold both hope to free-solo Yosemite's El Capitan, which is 1,000 feet taller than Half Dome and technically much harder.

Such chatter irritates Potter. “Let's talk about it after it's happened,” he says. “The magazines want a race, but this would go beyond athletic achievement. For me, this would be at the highest level of my spirituality.”

Though he's denied it in the past, Honnold acknowledges to me that he's considered free-soloing El Capitan. He's even pinpointed the route that would be the most logical—Free Rider, which has been climbed with a rope at 5.12d. “You'd have to really want it,” he says. “The hardest thing would be just getting off the ground. I kind of want to do it. It would be amazing.”

​Honnold, now 25, will be the first to admit that free soloing doesn't push the limits of technical-climbing difficulty. Nothing he does is as physically challenging as the short 5.15 routes that the sport-climbing master Chris Sharma works on for days on end. And Honnold himself routinely performs feats with ropes that are more demanding than, say, his solo ascent of Half Dome. Within the past three years, Honnold has set new world standards in the art of big-wall “linkups”—high-speed ascents of more than one 2,000-foot-plus cliff in a single day. He's also a terrific route finder: in April 2009, he spearheaded a first ascent on Borneo's 13,435-foot Mount Kinabalu, with Synnott, Chin, and Anker seconding his hardest pitches.

But Honnold's fame is due to free soloing. What makes the sport so mind-boggling is the obvious consequence of the smallest error. And not everyone can simply turn off his or her fear of falling. According to Anker, “I know I can do a route I've done ten times before, but I'd never try it without a rope. There'd be too much interior noise.”

Another of Honnold's heroes is Tommy Caldwell, 32, a leading big-wall free climber. Free climbing is different from free soloing in that it involves a rope and protection: Caldwell relies on a partner's belay as he works pitch after pitch until he can string together a continuous ascent of a long route with no “aiding,” or resting on gear. There is no climber alive whom Honnold admires more. Yet Caldwell echoes Anker's conservatism. “I've never tried to free-solo anything really grand,” he says. “I've fallen completely unexpectedly lots of times—maybe a dozen—on relatively easy terrain, when a hold broke off or the rubber peeled off the sole of my shoe or something. If I'd been soloing, I'd have died.”

The numbers support Caldwell's position. The list of athletes who've pushed the limits of free soloing in North America in the past 40 years centers on nine people: Henry Barber, Derek Hersey, John Bachar, Dan Osman, Charlie Fowler, Michael Reardon, Steph Davis, Croft, and Potter. Five of them are dead.

Hersey fell trying to free-solo the route in Yosemite in 1993. Osman, who also practiced “rope jumping”—leaping off walls while attached to nylon cords—died in 1998 when one of his ropes broke. A 2006 avalanche in western China killed Fowler, one of the few soloists to embrace high-altitude mountaineering. Reardon was swept off an Irish sea cliff by a rogue wave in 2007 as he free-soloed for a photographer. In 2009, Bachar fell while climbing a route he had free-soloed many times before, on a cliff near his home in Mammoth Lakes, California.

So why would anybody want to become a free soloist? Honnold finds the purity of the craft addictive. “I like the simplicity of soloing,” he says. “You've got no gear, no partner. You never climb better than when you free-solo.” He also finds that the sport fits his psychological makeup. “If I have any gift, it's a mental one,” he says. “Keeping it together.”

But how long can a person keep it together? Bloggers who've never met Honnold have pleaded with him to stop. Last March, Ed Drummond, a British climber and self-appointed pundit of the sport, posted “An Open Telegram to Alex Honnold” on . Drummond had heard a rumor (unfounded, it turned out) that Honnold planned to attempt to free-solo El Capitan's Nose route. He wrote:

Dear Alex,

Stop! Stop right now! While there's still a chance you might live to tell how you nearly fell for it … 3,000 feet more or less down the Nose route of El Capitan, bouncing and screaming for five seconds until you explode, hitting the earth at over a hundred miles an hour, beheaded at the feet of the waiting paparazzi.

When I ask Honnold about Drummond, he says, “If he's a big douche and feels like preaching, well, OK. But he should tell himself not to post that shit on the Internet.”

If Honnold spends a lot of time worrying about his fate, he doesn't show it. Last May at in Telluride, an annual festival, a 12-year-old boy in the audience asked Honnold: “Aren't you afraid you're gonna die?”

Honnold shrugged. “Hey, we've all gotta die sometime. You might as well go big.”

The blasĂ© attitude concerns his close friends. “I'm worried that he's going to kill himself,” says Chris Weidner, 36, one of Honnold's longtime climbing partners. “I think free soloing is a numbers game. The more you solo, the greater the chance of making a mistake. Alex disagrees. He says, 'Even though I solo a hundred pitches in a month, on each one the chances of falling are almost zero.'”

Caldwell expresses his concern more succinctly. “I really like Alex,” he says. “I don't want him to die.”

Last October, I spent a week with Honnold at , a massif of volcanic stone rising out of central Oregon farmland. Honnold wanted to visit Smith, the site of the first 5.14 ever climbed in the United States, before leaving on a four-month tour of Chad, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, and Greece.

We met in Portland and drove southeast, me in a rental, Honnold in the Econoline, which is clean and well organized. When we stopped at a motel, I asked if I could pose a few questions. “Sure,” he said. “Might as well get the media B.S. out of the way.”

I did a double take. “Don't take it personally,” he continued. “Going to Virginia next week for The North Face to do a dog-and-pony show. Banff”—the annual adventure-film festival where Honnold was scheduled to speak—”will be full-on B.S. It's fun sometimes, but it's annoying. It takes away from actual climbing.”

Honnold seems to have no self-censoring mechanism. He often speaks in short, pat locutions, and some of his one-liners can be abrasive. “There's only a handful of chicks in the world who can climb big walls on my level,” he told me. And: “I took a test once; they said I was a genius.” He recently erased himself from Facebook. “It was too crazy,” he says. “I was getting 20 friend requests a day. Some kid would ask, 'Hey, what kind of chalk bag should I buy?' You hate to blow him off, but, like, you don't give a shit.”

Some friends think fame has taken a toll on Honnold. Weidner, his climbing partner, says, “When we started climbing together, Alex was very polite, very safety conscious. Now he's more likely to badmouth you. About a year ago, I was trying to lead this pitch, and I kept falling off. Alex said, 'Dude, what's your fucking problem? It's only 5.13.' He may have been joshing, but it hurt my feelings. He's got a certain attitude now, like unless you're a world-class climber, you suck.”

But Honnold is equally unsparing with himself. When I asked if anyone had approached him about writing a book, he said, “Why? I haven't done anything yet.” At another point he claimed, “I'm a lot mellower than Tommy Caldwell. Which is why I'm not as good.”

I wonder if there isn't something of an enfant terrible in Honnold—the smart-ass kid who blurts out put-downs and boasts just to provoke a reaction. Or Honnold may simply be naive. I pointed out that calling the Banff Mountain Film Festival “full-on B.S.” in print might not go down well with the event's organizers. He shrugged. “I'm sure at some point what I say will bite me in the ass,” he said, “and then I'll stop talking to people.”

Once we reached Smith Rock, however, another side of Honnold emerged. We'd wake at sunrise and eat breakfast cooked on his stove. He'd have a four-egg omelet with bacon, onion, and cheese. He doesn't drink coffee, which he likens to “battery acid,” or wine, which tastes like “rancid grape juice,” or, for that matter, any kind of alcohol. “I smelled Scotch once,” he says. “I thought, 'I should be cleaning my sink with this stuff.'”

After eating, we'd stroll to the base of the cliff. On the way, I twice heard strangers whispering, “That's Alex Honnold. He soloed Half Dome.” At a diner where we ate most evenings, men asked for his autograph or to pose with them for a snapshot. Honnold treated his fans with unfailing courtesy.

On our fifth day, Honnold's girlfriend, Stacey Pearson, a 25-year-old nurse and distance runner from Cleveland, came to visit. She introduced herself to Honnold over Facebook, back when he kept a page. Despite a few rough patches at the outset of the relationship—”I had trouble adjusting to sleeping in Alex's van,” she says—it's obvious that the two share an irreverent sense of humor. When I asked Pearson if she was worried about his soloing, she joked, “I'll say, 'If you die, I can fly to Europe and find the European guy I've always dreamed about.'” Asked about her, Honnold softened. “I can see being with her for a long time,” he said.

I saw a less abrasive side of Honnold elsewhere at Smith Rock, too. One day, he came across a couple in their fifties struggling to climb and descend an easy 5.5 route on Morning Glory Wall. Honnold, recognizing that the man was in danger of rappelling off the end of his rope, quickly offered advice, coaching the man down to the ground, then lavished him with compliments. “You made it,” he said. “Well done!”

When I asked him later about this exchange, Honnold said, “They were cool. It's like they'd gone to a marriage counselor who told them to take up an extreme sport. But they were really giving it their best.” According to Weidner, “One quality of Alex's that I admire is that if he sees a climber trying his hardest, even on an easy climb, he respects the guy.”

Honnold's own intensity is Olympian. At Smith he climbed every day until dark, even though he found the rock hard to like. “It's techy, vertical, crimpy, and pretty much shitty,” he said. By “shitty,” he meant that the crag's routes were festooned with pebbles, like cherries in a fruitcake. If you're hanging on one of those pebbles when it pops loose, then, in climber's jargon, you're “off.”

Because of that texture, Honnold decided not to solo. Then, on our third day at the crag, as we loitered below a section of cliff called the Dihedrals, he abruptly stood up and muttered to himself, “You know, I'm going to do that 10a crack. Just to do something.”

In eight minutes, he sailed through 150 feet of crack and chimney. Only once or twice in more than 40 years of watching others climb have I seen someone move with such grace and strength, roped or unroped. I knew that a 5.10a route was easy for Honnold. But my breathing went back to normal only when he had safely returned to the base of the wall.

In 2008, Boulder-based Sender Films asked Honnold to reenact his solos on Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome. The 24-minute movie that resulted, “Alone on the Wall,” became a smash hit on the adventure-film circuit in 2009 and 2010, snagging major prizes at Mountainfilm and the Trento Film Festival in Italy.

Every time the climactic segment of “Alone on the Wall” unreels, the same thing happens: when Honnold leans back against the cliff, 1,800 feet above the ground, the audience gasps, as if the air has been sucked out of the theater. A still from the film, of Honnold frozen on Thank God Ledge, has become an iconic image in the adventure world, appearing in magazine ads for The North Face.

This sort of promotion raises a disturbing question: Could the attention from magazines, filmmakers, and sponsors tempt Honnold into a fatal mistake?

He rejects that possibility. “I did all those climbs for myself,” he says. “I didn't care what anybody else thought. Fame is a perk. It's recognition of a job well done.” He adds, “My sponsors don't even know what I'm doing.”

Not everyone sees it that way. “If Alex pulls off some heinous big-wall free solo, The North Face will act like they own it,” says one jaded observer of the sponsorship scene. “But if he falls off and dies, they'll do their best to distance themselves from him.”

I asked Katie Ramage, sports marketing director for The North Face, whether she worries about rewarding Honnold for taking risks.

“We never push any of our Global Team athletes to do anything,” she said. “We try to create an environment in which they can do what they want to do. We try to bring in safety nets, in the form of gear and support. Alex is smart, strategic, very calculating in making his decisions. If he was an irresponsible thrill seeker, we wouldn't touch him.”

“If he quit free soloing,” I asked, “would you still sponsor him?”

“I'd be thrilled if he quit soloing. When we get involved with an athlete, it's for life.”

Last November, at the Banff Mountain Film Festival, I asked Peter Mortimer, codirector of “Alone on the Wall,” if he was concerned about pressuring Honnold.

“I worry for sure about him risking his life with the camera on,” said Mortimer. “If we pose him on a wall and he slips and falls and dies, I'd feel 100 percent responsible.”

Then Honnold, who was sitting next to Mortimer, interjected: “Yeah, but if I fell 70 feet and broke my ankle, you'd say, 'Great! Can you do it again?'”

​Honnold didn't spend much time rehearsing the free solo of Half Dome. On September 5, 2008, the afternoon before the climb, he called up Weidner and revealed his plans. During the conversation, he admitted that he had climbed the route with ropes only twice before. A soloist such as Peter Croft would typically climb a route dozens of times before trying it without a rope.

“Dude, that's crazy,” Weidner said. “You should rehearse the hell out of it on a top rope before you try to solo it.”

“Nah,” said Honnold. “I want to keep it exciting.”

“Are you fucking crazy?”

Weidner knew he couldn't talk his friend out of the plan. Before he hung up, he said, 'OK, dude. I love you. Be careful.'”

The next day, Honnold was poised just above Thank God Ledge, his mind racing, his mental armor in pieces. He was so close to the top that he could hear the chatter of hikers who had come up the back side of Half Dome on a steep trail safeguarded by a pair of metal handrails.

For five long minutes that Honnold would later describe as a “very private hell,” he dipped first one hand, then the other, into his chalk bag, trying to give his fingertips better purchase on the tiny wrinkles in the stone. His feet were poised on “smears”—smooth planes of granite. To stand there, Honnold had to contort his ankles so that the front half of each sole—not merely the toes—pressed flat against the smears. His calves cramped with the strain, and he knew he couldn't linger—he'd soon start suffering from sewing-machine leg, uncontrollable spasms that would jar him loose from his hold on the world. He put all his weight first on one foot, then on the other, as he tried to shake out the cramps in his calves.

To make the move, Honnold had to plant his right foot on a smooth patch of stone, then step up and reach for a “jug”—a generous, sharp-cut edge of rock that would hold his weight. He took a deep breath and stepped up with his right foot. He glided upward, muscles screaming, and grabbed the jug.

Minutes later, Honnold pulled himself onto the summit. There, he faced a crowd of tourists. All of Yosemite stretched beneath him: El Capitan to the west, the High Sierra to the east. Far below, the Merced River wound along the valley floor. The hikers chatted on, not paying Honnold any attention.

“Maybe they thought I was a lost hiker,” he later wrote. “Maybe they didn't give a shit. Part of me wished that someone on top, anyone, had noticed that I'd just done something noteworthy.”

Then he reached down, unlaced his shoes, and began walking barefoot down the trail, back to his van.

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Every morning at 5:30 a pocket-size alarm clock rings next to Borge Ousland's stocking-capped head. In what must be the most difficult of his daily rituals, Ousland, a 32-year-old Norwegian who is trying to become the first person to cross Antarctica alone and unaided, fumbles his way out of a toasty sleeping bag and onto a mile-thick ice cap. He stops to fill his gullet with 3,000 calories' worth of steaming, lard-spiked oatmeal and then slides a Jimi Hendrix cassette into his Walkman, clips into a harness not unlike those worn by sled dogs, and shuffles his skis forward, pulling a 375-pound sledge.

If all goes well, this routine, which Ousland began last November 8 on Berkner Island, south of Punta Arenas, Chile, will render him sometime this month on the far side of the continent, due south of New Zealand, at the U.S. research base at McMurdo Station. Dodging crevasses and beating back minus-30-degree temperatures, Ousland will pass directly over the South Pole. But the 1,700-mile walk won't guarantee him a spot in the record books. As Ousland is all too aware, somewhere in the foggy distance another adventurer, 46-year-old Roger Mear of Great Britain, is also slogging across the ice, having set out on a similar course at nearly the same time. And while both men claim the timing was purely coincidental—Ousland says he learned of Mear's expedition when he booked his flight on the only airline that serves Antarctica–they are now going head-to-head in what's being called one of the greatest expeditionary duels of all time, on par with the fabled Norway-versus-Britain polar feuds of the early part of the century. Only this time, millions of armchair adventurers in their home countries are following the explorers' tracks in newspapers, on television, and over the Internet, thanks to portable transmitters that beam their coordinates back to civilization via satellite. As the Associated Press stated succinctly last November, “A race is on.”

Mear and Ousland, who are acquaintances in the relatively small circle of polar expeditioners, have shied away from using the word “race,” in part, they say, because of the haunting precedent set in 1911 by another Norwegian-British duo, Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. Although Amundsen and Scott didn't know each other personally, jingoistic fury in both nations raised the stakes. Hoping to lull Scott into believing that he could take his time in getting to Antarctica, Amundsen went so far as to announce that he was planning an expedition to the North Pole. At the last minute, however, the Norwegian sent his rival this terse message: “Am going south. AMUNDSEN.” He then boarded a ship and headed for Antarctica.

In the end Scott and his team reached the Pole—four weeks after Amundsen—but on the return trip things took a nightmarish turn. Traveling on foot, the team met up with horrendous weather, eventually succumbing to exhaustion and starvation just 11 miles from a food cache. The Norwegians, using dogsleds, made it off Antarctica alive, but only because their plan involved slaughtering and eating their dogs along the way. Such a grisly outcome isn't very likely this time. If either adventurer were to fall into a crevasse or run out of food, a rescue plane could arrive in less than 12 hours.

So who has the best shot this time around? Mear started with a five-day jump on Ousland, but he became bogged down in a whiteout and had to halt for a few days. At press time his lead had all but disappeared. Otherwise, things seem pretty even. Both men are pulling approximately the same weight, and each is making use of a high-tech parachute sail, which in stiff winds will drag the men like water-skiers behind a motorboat.

Certainly both men have good pedigrees. Mear, along with two teammates, made a ski trek to the South Pole in 1986. He's also a first-rate alpinist, having put up ascents of 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat and 26,749-foot Cho Oyu in the Himalayas. In 1994 Ousland, a former commercial diver, became the first person to make an unsupported solo trek to the North Pole, skiing the 609 miles from Siberia in 52 days.

In temperament, however, the two explorers couldn't be more different. Ousland is a methodical, pragmatic sort, going so far as to gulp a daily glass of pure olive oil. For inspiration, he's carrying a collection of essays by Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen–loose-leaf, to save weight. “As he reads through the book,” says his press agent, “the read pages can be used in the toilet.”

Mear, conversely, is a romantic prone to mystical melancholy. In his own account of the 1986 trek to the South Pole, he says one of his teammates found him “arrogant, unbearably moody, rude, ill-mannered, selfish, inconsiderate, and totally unsympathetic.” Not surprisingly, Homer's Odyssey and a collection of poems by Tennyson are in his sledge.

Of course, no matter which mental bent wins out, the long-standing Norwegian-British rivalry will undoubtedly live on. Should both men complete one of the finest, purest, and most difficult overland expeditions ever attempted and then hop aboard the same Russian icebreaker home, as is currently planned, will it really matter who arrived at McMurdo first? Perhaps not, though despite their declared mutual respect and forceful protests to the notion of a race, it's clear that neither wants to finish second. As Ousland's press agent recently said, sounding like a trash-talking NBA point guard with a Scandinavian lilt, “If Ousland succeeds, the British press will be saying once again, 'Why do you always beat us?'”

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On a Friday afternoon in the southern French town of Serre Chevalier, Isabelle Patissier stood at the base of a 70-foot aiguille of concrete and fiberglass, where she chalked up her fingertips and studied the route. Her straight blond hair, gathered in a ponytail, was tied with a black scarf. She wore the obligatory black maillot of the competition but had chosen white shorts, a purple chalk bag, and turquoise climbing shoes for counterpoint. The television cameras doted on her while the crowd roared for its favorite.

Twenty-four years old, Patissier stands five feet, seven and a half inches tall and weighs 108 pounds. Her long, long arms point. The television cameras doted on her while the crowd roared for its favorite.

Twenty-four years old, Patissier stands five feet, seven and a half inches tall and weighs 108 pounds. Her long, long arms and legs, bare on this sunny day in late July, rippled with sleek muscles. As she stared at the matrix of fiberglass holds bolted to the wall, her baby face with the Bardot moue remained impassive.

Then she began climbing. As she reached high for a fingertip cling or swung a leg far to the right to toe a fiberglass rugosity, her movements were fast and aggressive, but also balletic. Midway up the wall, on a dicey sequence where her predecessors had grimly labored, Patissier cruised. Everything she did was smooth. In fact, the purposeful economy of her effort was so elegant, it almost looked affected—a woman dancing rather than struggling up a climb. On the hardest moves, the faces of the other competitors had winced and twisted with strain. Patissier's serene mask never wrinkled. With more than half of her allotted 15 minutes still to go, she topped the summit overhang and clipped the last carabiner, automatically qualifying for Saturday's final. The crowd thundered; Patissier raised a fist and allowed herself a smile.

Some time later, Lynn Hill came forward and tied in at the bottom of the wall. The reception from the grandstand was polite. “Some applause for Lynn,” the announcer cajoled in French. With her black maillot, Hill wore black knee-length Lycra tights and black shoes. Her blond hair, shorter than Patissier's, hung loose around her face. Though Hill stands only five feet, one and a half inches tall and weighs 103 pounds, her muscles look bulkier than Patissier's, particularly in the shoulders. At 30, she was the second-oldest woman in the competition.

As she calculated her moves, a different sort of impassivity—inward, focused, almost hollow—claimed Hill's face. The gray eyes never blinked. She started up the wall and almost immediately faced a problem. She backed down a move, studied the sequence, then solved it with a hand change. Much slower than Patissier, Hill worked out her route like a chess master exploring a dubious opening. To reach several holds that were beyond her grasp (and that Patissier had clasped easily), she resorted to short leaps called dynos. The effort seemed immense, but with 20 feet to go, not a quiver of calf or biceps betrayed fatigue. With a remarkable last dyno Hill flew past the overhang and held on to a green blob of fiberglass, even as her legs swung free. The crowd cheered unprompted, and a moment later Hill was at the top.

It seemed likely that the women's competition at Serre Chevalier would once again come down to a showdown between Hill and Patissier. They were, at the moment, the two best women sport climbers in the world. By now, however, winning is old hat for Hill: Throughout the sport's six-year history, she has stood at its top level. No other competitor, male or female, can claim even half so long a reign. The case can be made that Hill is the best woman rock climber ever.

But at Serre Chevalier, many observers wondered whether this was the last gasp, however magnificent, of Hill's career, and whether Patissier, who had been on a meteoric rise for the past two years, would eclipse her. In the early days of competition climbing the two who usually vied for first place were Hill and Catherine Destivelle, a Frenchwoman who has since turned her attention to her original passion, mountaineering. The question now was, how much longer could Hill hang on? And just how good could her younger French opponent become?

The radical difference in the two women's climbing styles adds piquancy to their rivalry. “When you watch Isabelle, it just looks too easy,” says Robyn Erbesfield, long the second-ranked American woman sport climber. “She simply graces her way up the wall. Lynn battles, but she almost never falls. She has this tenacity.”

Erbesfield is not ready, however, to bow to Patissier. “Lynn held the candle for so many years,” she says. “What she's given to the climbing world is written in concrete—it will be hard for anyone else to duplicate it. But this year she can be beaten. I think any one of five or six of us has the opportunity to be Number One.”

At Serre Chevalier, a horseshoe of bleachers hugged the dramatic artificial pinnacle, affording intimate views of every heel-hook and dyno. A giant clock ticked climbing time off by tenths of seconds. The announcer was knowledgeable and glib, the soft-rock background music unobtrusive. The events rolled by on as tight a schedule as a TGV bullet train.

Saturday's crowd of some 5,000 spectators was charged up, even though many of them had to squat in a gravelly parking lot during the four and a half hours it took to determine a pair of winners. As each contestant untied after assaulting the wall, a mob of kids swarmed the barricade, thrusting programs—as ardent a bunch of autograph hounds as ever besieged Mickey Mantle in Yankee Stadium. Nervous that the climbing alone wouldn't pack them in, however, the organizers had added some splashy frills: a pair of absurdly costumed creatures engaging in what they called danse escalade on the lower precincts of the wall; a demonstration by the French national parapente team (pinpoint landings amongst the crowd); and, as the grand finale, a fireworks show during which the pinnacle itself spurted red and blue rockets.

Two years before Serre Chevalier (not a World Cup event, but part of a new climbing circuit called World Masters), at a cliff in southern France, Hill had suffered a nearly fatal accident. Distracted at the base of a wall, she failed to finish tying the rope into her harness—a maneuver so routine that any climber can do it in her sleep. She scaled a difficult route and then, 85 feet off the deck, leaned back on the rope so that her belayer could lower her. The rope flipped loose from the harness, and Hill plunged to the ground. It was her good luck to hit a tree branch on the way and to land on level dirt between two jutting boulders. Her injuries were serious but not crippling. Still, they knocked her out of contention for the first World Cup, which was won by Nanette Raybaud, a tall, dark-haired Frenchwoman who remains one of the five or six top female competitors.

In the fall of 1990, with only two events to go in the second World Cup, Patissier held an all but insurmountable lead. But Hill, having long since recovered from her accident, climbed brilliantly in Lyon and Barcelona, winning both contests. In Lyon she performed what may have been the single finest climb ever seen on the women's circuit. After she and Patissier topped out in the final, they were put head-to-head in a superfinal on the much harder men's route. Patissier fell 45 feet up—a superb performance—but Hill flashed the route, reaching the top without a slip. Only two of the 15 men finalists had been able to do the same.

Barcelona was the last competition of the year. As the dust settled after Hill's victory, officials of the Union Internationale Association des Alpinistes, the World Cup's governing body, went into conference to tally the year's final standings. Their calculations snagged on a single rule, which may or may not have been ambiguously phrased in French or English, depending on whose camp you're in. The rule stated that each competitor could throw out her worst performance of the year; the rankings counted only the five best results among the six World Cup meets. At Nuremberg in early November, Hill had hopped up onto the first foothold, then immediately stepped back to the ground. It was the kind of false start that climbers often make on real rock, but by the stringent rules of the contest it instantly disqualified her. Though deeply dismayed, Hill didn't argue with the ruling. She thus came in dead last, earning zero points.

The UIAA judges now realized that if Hill could throw out Nuremberg, she would end up tied for the year with Patissier, whose worst performance among the six was worth 12 points. The French read the rules to mean that in the event of a tie, the sixth finish should be used to decide the champion. The majority of judges disagreed, and after much hair-pulling the UIAA declared cochampions.
“I was quite happy,” recalls Hill. “I said to Isabelle, 'Let's go celebrate together.' She said, 'I don't think so.' She had tears in her eyes.”

Patissier refused to stand on the victory podium with Hill. The French climbing federation lodged a formal protest, and the UIAA agreed to search its collective soul. Not until nearly a year later did it manage to make a definitive ruling: The UIAA again decided to call it a tie.

Lynn Hill has a reputation for being somewhat cold and distant—an image she is at pains to dispel. “The roots of climbing have to do with play,” she says. “People have forgotten how to have fun. When I climb, I get back in touch with the kid in myself. When I don't climb, I like to go to movies, have dinner with friends, or dance alone in my living room.”

Testimony to this hidden warmth comes from her climbing friends. “Lynn's great,” says Bobbi Bensman, one of the top American sport climbers. “She's not intimidating—just a really focused individual. She's super playful and jolly when she's not climbing.”

“Lynn's real. She's honest,” adds Erbesfield, who is probably Hill's closest friend. “There's no bullshit about her. That's why we get along so well. A lot of people think she's cool or reserved. They don't know her. She's the first to give you a compliment.”

Like Hill, Erbesfield has moved to France to pursue the competition circuit. The two women, who joke about being twin sisters (Erbesfield is also blond and five-foot-one) lived together for eight months. At Serre Chevalier, it was beguiling to hear them speak good idiomatic French, Erbesfield with a Georgia twang, Hill with the remnants of her flat California accent.

Hill recently bought her own house in the small French town of Grambois. Last year she made $40,000 in prize money—unheard of for an American sport climber—and that much again from her sponsors: Hind, Boreal, Petzl, Beal, and Reebok. Made-up and reclining languidly in a low-cut evening gown, she appeared in a Dare perfume ad. Timex told the story of her 1989 fall in its recent “Extraordinary People” campaign. She is becoming a regular on the motivational-talk circuit. On “Late Night with David Letterman” (“Of course I was nervous”) she evened the game by critiquing her host's performance on a small artificial wall.

And she is climbing as strongly as ever. Last spring, after nine days of working out the moves, she solved a route at Cima in southern France called Masse Critique—the hardest rock climb ever made by a woman. (The previous best was Patissier's.) But the keen edge it takes to climb at the competition level may be starting to dull. “I've done so many competitions,” Hill readily admits, “that it's not the same thrill to win anymore. I've already proved something. It's not so important to do the World Cup circuit this year. The training—having to watch every little thing you eat and drink—gets to be too much. I can't go windsurfing for two weeks.”

Despite such sentiments, and despite the swift ascent of Patissier, Hill isn't quite willing to rule out her chances of a few more great seasons, another world championship or two to crown her career. “If I really wanted to, I could get even better at climbing than I am,” she insists. “But there are other things I'm interested in doing. I'm writing a book now, and for years I've wanted to make a film. I also want to travel—Thailand, New Guinea, Borneo, wherever. I'm totally open.”

Hill's book, which she has been working on for four years, will likely be more about the no-nonsense climber than the woman who dances around her living room: a resume of Hill's climbing career, a smattering of psychology, chapters on technique with useful photos demonstrating same. She calls the book her “project.”

Hill was not happy with the Serre Chevalier course, on which she had performed poorly the year before. Because of the spacing of holds, artificial walls tend to favor taller climbers, and this was especially true at Serre Chevalier. “Maybe competition climbing will become like basketball,” she says ruefully. “If you're not tall enough, forget it.”

For the past year and a half, moreover, Hill has been sunk in deep personal turmoil. In 1988 she married Russ Raffa, a climber she had met on her first trip to New York's Shawangunk Mountains in the early eighties. Last March they divorced. “We were just two different people,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “As I matured, the differences started to be not OK. When I think of having children, I don't see it with Russ. And yes, I'd like to have kids. I identify with the kid in myself.”

Her abysmal performance at Nuremberg in 1990 coincided with the nadir of the marital conflict. “It's been a distraction,” she says. “There's no doubt that it's hurt my climbing.

“I've gone through a lot of unhappiness, a lot of questioning. It's hard to have been with someone seven years, then to be suddenly alone, living in a foreign country.” She summons a wan smile. “I'm human.”

Gossip had it that hill's relationship with Patissier, cool to begin with, had turned really nasty as a result of the World Cup imbroglio. But at Serre Chevalier it seemed that the climbing bureaucrats in each camp, still sniping at one another as though America and France had declared war, were more wrought up than the women themselves. “I don't even care anymore,” said Hill. “It's kind of spoiled everything for me.

“I climbed a lot with Isabelle two years ago,” Hill added. “It was fun. I really respect her. Since Barcelona, she's distanced herself. I'm the one who has to open the conversation. She can be nice—intelligent, fun-loving. But she comes off as cold.”

“We are not friendly,” Patissier concurred. “Maybe correct with each other.”

As she has sailed into the limelight, Patissier has carried with her the reputation of a temperamental egotist. Her aloof demeanor, juxtaposed with her beauty, suggests to some a narcissistic starlet of the crags. “All the boys love her body and her wavy hair,” says Bobbi Bensman. “It's real sexy when she talks. But she's just flamingly rude. If we're climbing at the same cliff, I have to go up and say, 'Hi, Isabelle.' Otherwise I could be there all day and she wouldn't acknowledge my presence. She thinks she's just the hottest thing that ever came into the world.”

Robyn Erbesfield, who lived with Patissier for three months in southern France, demurs. “She was always a lady, a friend. She was nothing but good to me. She drove me to the cliffs every day. But she is somewhat spoiled. If things don't go her way, she can be difficult.”

Patissier has just had her first book published. is a slick, handsome coffee-table work, utterly Gallic despite the English title, full of glossy full-page shots of Patissier in a score of different Lycra outfits, climbing in half a dozen countries. It is compared with Hill's . The text, in the first person “as told to” Jean-Michel Asselin, coeditor of the French climbing magazine , sounds suspect. Asselin is so smitten with Patissier that he babbles in his introduction, “To write really well, I ought to have been her father or her lover. Being neither, I can only serve as a witness, while I dream of being her demiurge.”

Is it really Patissier who speaks in the following passage, or Asselin's fevered fantasy of her?

Now I am going to paint myself.
Only the light of the moon, and myself nude before a mirror. The body of a climber, with all fat omitted. It is built out of long, slender muscles. I have the face of an infant. Round nose. Pouting lips. Hair that never ceases to fly away. Round breasts, a flat stomach, and long legs, and these earn me the gazes of men.

This may well be the Patissier that disaffected colleagues like Bensman know. On the other hand, Spider Woman reveals sides of its author—mischievous, respectful of mentors, even self-mocking—that are hard to discern simply by watching her climb.

“I am very shy,” says Patissier. “When people are aggressive, I back off. When journalists are aggressive, I back off. My friends are not climbers. People think I am reserved because I am not connected with climbers.”

Patissier started climbing at age five, under the tutelage of parents who still climb. In her teenage years she did some mountaineering, but she doubts that she will ever follow Catherine Destivelle's lead and return to it as a m‰tier. “It's too cold,” she says. “You have to get up early. You have to wear big clothes.”

Like Hill, Patissier has suffered a serious accident, though hers came not from climbing, but paragliding. In 1986, at age 19, as her parapente settled over a French pasture, she realized that she was likely to land on the roof of an old garden cabin. Instinctively she raised her legs, impaling herself on an iron stake. Crying and bleeding, she pulled herself free. Five operations ensued, involving the removal of part of her intestine. Patissier bears an ugly scar from the accident, which she worries is visible when she climbs in shorts.

In person, Patissier comes across not as arrogant and self-centered, but as courteous, thoughtful, and very bright. In the August/September issue of Vertical, which she had not seen, the headline of an article proclaimed, “Grande confrontation Destivelle/Patissier.” Destivelle had just put up, to widespread acclaim, a new solo route on the Petit Dru in the French Alps. Now the magazine joined Paris Match and l'Equipe in hailing her as “the madonna of the summits,” Patissier as “the gazelle of the canyons,” and implied that the two women were locked in an all-out media war.

Patissier was dumbfounded. “This means nothing. I have not seen Catherine in one, maybe two years.”

Though she will not disclose her income, climbing allows Patissier a comfortable life. Besides the prize money from competitions, she is paid by half a dozen sponsors, ranging from Rivory Joanny ropes to Oakley sunglasses. Only Destivelle and French rock climber Patrick Edlinger, she thinks, make as good a living from climbing as she does.

The gracefulness of Patissier's movement as a climber comes from a deliberate effort. “In sport, femininity is important,” she says. “I don't want to have an image de bÂŁuf” —she holds her arms curled in front, her head stooped, gorilla-style—”like a Russian swimmer.” In Spider Woman, she waxes lyrical on this theme:

The true secret is nature. To be in the sun, close to rivers, caressed by the wind, sung to by the birds. That is the first thing about climbing, and it should always remain so.
Women, who are so close to nature, have every quality that climbing requires.

In her book, Patissier discusses her gruesome accident and its aftermath straightforwardly. She also generously acknowledges the love and support of her boyfriend, a 26-year-old climber named Christophe Viros, who serves as her trainer.

Why has she suddenly leaped to the top in sport climbing? “In 1986, when I started, I was younger than most of the others,” she says. “In my mind, it was hard to compete with the older ones. Now I feel better, more confident, more quiet. I grow up in my mind.”

The finalists at Serre Chevalier had been winnowed down to six women. The first one to climb, a promising Frenchwoman named Agnˆs Brard, suddenly popped off the wall only ten feet up, provoking a shocked gasp from the crowd. An unknown Russian named Nathalia Kosmacheva, who had qualified through the backdoor in a limited open contest on Thursday, struggled gamely and reached a point 50 feet up. Then Nanette Raybaud, showing the calm precision that won her the 1989 World Cup, flashed the route, reaching the top with six of her 15 minutes left.

Patissier's performance, however, left the audience agog. With her streamlined, powerful style, she flew up the course, hesitating hardly at all. The climb looked too easy for her. As she reached the summit, she had used only five of her 15 minutes.

Hill was in trouble from the start. On a low sequence where the taller French women had reached past the blank spaces, Hill had to inch her fingers agonizingly toward the holds. After six minutes, she was only halfway up the wall. She made four dynos and then, on the fifth, grabbed a hold with her right hand, only to have her body pivot left into space. As the crowd groaned, she held on for one, two full seconds before her fingers slipped off and she fell.

Erbesfield proved that a short person could master the Serre Chevalier course. Climbing superbly, as she had so often in recent months, she finessed her way up the wall and topped out two minutes ahead of Raybaud. It would take a superfinal to decide the women's champion.

The technicians unscrewed holds and altered the route, making it considerably harder. By the time Raybaud emerged and started up the wall, dusk was gathering, with a chilly wind blowing from up valley. The disqualified climbers came out to sit in the crowd and watch their colleagues perform. Since no seats were reserved for them, they squeezed in and hunkered on the asphalt along with the tourists and kids. The men watched the women as avidly as they did other men. The French cheered for the Americans, the Americans for the French, everybody for the lone Russian.

The superfinal route was not only tricky, but fiendishly strenuous. Raybaud labored upward and grabbed a high hold, but you could see the strength ebbing from her body. She came off at 45 feet; as the belayer lowered her, she yelled, “Oh, putain!”

Patissier went at the course with her brash speed, but soon began to lose strength as well. Near the top she lunged for a hold, then lost it and fell, three feet higher than Raybaud.

Erbesfield climbed exquisitely, once more forced to find a different route to accommodate her height. Only inches below Raybaud's high point she too lunged and fell. Patissier was the champion. Hill placed fifth.

An hour earlier, Hill had embraced Erbesfield just after she made it into the superfinal. Although it was Hill who had lost out, the tears were in Erbesfield's eyes. “I'm going to tell you something special when you climb,” Hill said. “Listen for it.”

As Erbesfield reached a hold 40 feet off the ground, approaching Raybaud's high point, Hill's voice, shrill above the throng, rang out: “Allez, petite!” Go, little one!

Floodlights bathed the victory podium. Patissier's friends sprayed her with champagne. She grabbed a bottle and sprayed them back. (In December she would win her second world championship, with Erbesfield placing third and Hill a distant fifth.)

On the edge of the stage, Hill autographed a handful of kids' programs. It was obvious that the reachy wall had contributed to her so-so performance: The climb she had been forced to make was utterly different from Raybaud's and Patissier's. But Hill refused to alibi. “I grabbed the hold wrong,” she said. “I had a negative thought in my head. I'm disappointed—but not real disappointed. I didn't feel so good today—I'm not exactly sure why. There were other things on my mind.”

David Roberts's most recent book, coauthored with Bradford Washburn, is (Harry N. Abrams).

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All at once a short article claimed my attention. It dealt with a place called Mystery Canyon, into which the archeologist author and his pals had made a probe in September 1959. He described roping down sandstone slots, only to be boxed in by overhanging rims–“pourovers”–that interrupt canyons, and the deep, ominous plunge pools that form beneath them. The photos showed formidable hand-and-toe trails carved by prehistoric climbers. In dry academese, the author suggested that very few people had entered Mystery Canyon since the last Anasazi farmers packed up and left in the thirteenth century.

In the old days, in the sagas of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle, the scholar-adventurer burned his candle to a nub as he pored over quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore—a map drawn in faded ink, a cryptic document in Latin–and thus was launched a glorious excursion into terra incognita. Of course such romantic gambols, born of the savant's midnight oil, never come to pass in our day and age–if indeed they ever did outside the pages of Verne and Wells and Doyle. Still…

I carried the article to the photocopier and then sent it off to an old friend, Jon Krakauer. We had vaguely planned a trip to the Southwest together, during which we would seek out hand-and-toe trails of the Anasazi, the predecessors of the Pueblo Indians, who flourished all over the Four Corners area for more than a millennium. The Anasazi built the most sophisticated villages in prehistoric America–stone-and-mud prodigies such as Pueblo Bonito, Cliff Palace, Keet Seel, and Betatakin–and then suddenly, just before A.D. 1300, abandoned the whole of the Colorado Plateau, never to return. Despite a century of research, the abandonment remains the central Anasazi puzzle. I suggested a day or two in Mystery Canyon as part of our wide-ranging inquiry.

Jon called me as soon as he got the article. “We gotta go there this spring,” he blurted, his words colliding as they do when he gets excited.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Couple of days between…”

“Forget the toe trails. We gotta do this right. Mystery Canyon, all of it, however long it takes. Before somebody else finds out about it.”

Jon and I go way back. He was my student at Hampshire College, where I taught him a little bit about climbing and perhaps a little more about writing. The days are long gone, however, when I could dictate the shape of our forays into the wilderness. Just as he soon became the better climber, he quickly learned how to manipulate me into agreeing to any cockamamy plan he came up with. On a trip we might pause, for instance, at a fork in the trail. Jon would pretend to consult me: “Do you want to go left up over the headwall or right along the coast?”

“The coast looks good…”

“I really think we'll hit some wild stuff on the headwall. Let's go, it's getting late.”

So within hours I was committed to Mystery Canyon. And I quickly realized that Jon was right. The adventure of a decade might have just fallen into our laps. We swore each other to secrecy and blocked out ten days in May for our expedition.

Mystery Canyon snakes through the chaos of slickrock spread across the Navajo Indian Reservation between Lake Powell and Navajo Mountain in southern Utah. Sometime before 1948, the canyon was named by Norm Nevills, that cranky pioneer Colorado River rafting guide, after he tried and failed to find a way into its hidden labyrinth. From the river, Nevills confronted a nearly blank cliff wall at the canyon's outlet; up it, however, a hand-and-toe trail had been carved with a quartzite pounder by some Anasazi virtuoso perhaps a thousand years ago.

The steps seemed altogether too scary to Nevills, so he wielded a metal tool to enlarge them. (Modern eco-travelers cringe at such desecration, but many an archaeologist did the same in the early decades of the twentieth century.) Even with chiseled help, Nevills gave up low on the toe trail. Rafting guides today say it must have been a hell of a staircase, since Nevills was famed for his daring as a cowboy climber. The canyon would remain a mystery.

Jon ordered us each a set of maps. In the 1960s, the U.S. Board of Geographic Names gave Mystery Canyon a new, less soulful official title, but Jon and I agreed to stick with Nevills's usage. On the 7.5-minute quadrangles, the jumble of brown contour lines grew particularly frenzied around Mystery Canyon, as if some dipsomaniac cartographer had had a bad case of the shakes when he got down to drawing them. The charts abounded with those eloquent ambiguities where four or five lines run together, announcing OVERHANGING WALL.

The 1959 party's thrust came as part of a heroic survey by teams of archaeologists desperately reconnoitering unknown ruins all up and down the Colorado and the San Juan during the last months before the accursed bathtub of Lake Powell would swallow them. “Eighty percent of what we saw is now under water,” one of the veterans of that campaign told me ruefully. Gone beneath the lake is the toe trail that Nevills blanched at scaling. And though Powell's waters have crept miles up Mystery Canyon, another blank cliff still prohibits access from below.

The '59 party would never have found its way into Mystery Canyon without the expertise of its Paiute guides, Dan Lehi and Toby Owl. By 1959, it had been a quarter of a century since Lehi himself had been into Mystery Canyon. Eventually, however, the canny Paiutes not only got the archaeology team into the heart of the canyon, but engineered a wild horsepacking route to its shadowy depths. Thirty-five years later, Jon and I would find their horses' droppings, desiccated and preserved like artifacts under the desert sun.

Neither of the two 1959 veterans I spoke with knew of anyone who had explored Mystery Canyon after their own excursion. Moreover, they had entered only the upper canyon, leaving a long stretch downstream untouched. The team leader, Christy Turner, remembered well the pourover that had thwarted his team's probe downstream, before which even the Paiutes had turned back. “We weren't real climbers, but we had ropes,” he told me. “We probably could have gotten down the pourover, but I'm not sure we could have gotten back up.”

Through guarded and roundabout queries, I tested the knowledge of a half-dozen Southwest friends who had prowled all over Anasazi country. They drew a collective blank when it came to Mystery. My furtive glee deepened. Between the look of the place on the map and the '59 party's talk of overhangs and plunge pools, it seemed likely that if Jon and I pushed the canyon at all with ropes and hardware, we might get ourselves to places where perhaps no one–not even the Anasazi–had ever been.

In April I made a five-day reconnaissance north of Navajo Mountain. The previous winter, an Arizona archaeologist had told me he thought the slickrock plateau north of Navajo Mountain the most beautiful place in the Southwest. Except for parties hiking the Rainbow Bridge Trail, few Anglos venture into this territory, perhaps because hiking anywhere on the Navajo Indian Reservation requires a permit from the tribal office in Window Rock. That low hurdle, and the fact that, in automotive terms, Navajo Mountain is on the road to nowhere, have conspired to leave this wilderness blissfully undervisited.

For five days I wandered up and down Cha and Bald Rock and Nasja Canyons. From high vantage points, I gazed across miles and miles of sandstone witchery: soaring orange domes lapping toward the horizon like ocean waves, deep parabolic alcoves yawning out of vertical cliffs, fins and arches and knobby towers. It was impossible to head in a straight line: Instead, you wound in and out of gorges and tributary rills, stymied by sudden pourovers or ledges that blanked to nothing.

I made my way into Surprise Valley, a sheltered basin full of pi-ons and junipers that forms a serene oasis in the midst of all the stone savagery. In 1913, self-taught archaeologist and Indian trader John Wetherill guided Zane Grey here; Grey locates a secret city in this remote basin in his 1915 novel The Rainbow Trail. Four years earlier, Wetherill had spearheaded the first party of Anglos ever to see Rainbow Bridge. Nasja Begay, for whom Nasja Canyon may be named, was his Paiute guide.

All through my wandering, I kept coming upon Paiute rock carvings portraying splendidly saddled horses and solemn men with headdresses and braids. The finest were the work of Joseph Lehi—doubtless some kin to Dan Lehi, who had guided the '59 party. My favorite panel portrayed a big-nosed, hard-bitten man dangling a cigarette from his lips. Was this Joseph Lehi's self-portrait?

I had entered this country all but ignorant of the Paiute presence, assuming that because I was on the Navajo reservation, the land must always have been Navajo territory. Later I did my homework, uncovering a gloomy chronicle. For centuries, the terrain north of Navajo Mountain had been the homeland of the San Juan Paiutes. Some ethnographers believe the Paiutes may have driven the Anasazi out of the Four Corners area at the end of the thirteenth century. The San Juan band, however, was so marginal to Anglo awareness that not until 1989 was it officially recognized by the federal government. Today the San Juan Paiutes number only about 190, living in Atatsiv, near Tuba City, and Kaivyaxaru, in Paiute Canyon.

Thus the San Juan Paiutes are forced even today to live on the Navajo reservation. Relations have long been uneasy between the two tribes: Into the early 1900s, some Navajos kept Paiutes as slaves, and yet they lived in fear of Paiute ambushes north of Navajo Mountain. Nonetheless, in 1864, when Kit Carson rounded up the Navajos to deport them to a concentration camp at Bosque Redondo, on the eastern New Mexico plains, a band led by Chief Hoskininni hid out here amid the slickrock canyons and was never captured.

In 1907, in a relatively enlightened act, the federal government established a Paiute reservation along what was called the Paiute Strip–the land between the Arizona-Utah state line and the San Juan River. The reservation lasted only until 1922, when Albert B. Fall, President Harding's Secretary of the Interior–who would soon go to prison for the Teapot Dome scandal–aided an oil-exploration crony by ordering the Bureau of Indian Affairs to declare the reservation uninhabited, causing it to revert to the public domain. Eleven years later, the Navajos petitioned successfully to add the Strip to their own reservation.

Despite these vicissitudes, the San Juan Paiutes seem to have kept their culture intact. The Paiute rock art I kept stumbling upon seemed a declaration of that integrity. I was beguiled by a defiant 1986 inscription I found along the Rainbow Bridge trail:

CLYDE WHISKERS

PAIUTE INDIAN

On the fourth day I made my way into an obscure cirque beneath arching sandstone walls. By now I had discovered the trick to penetrating the labyrinth: Indeed, you could see it in the contour lines on the map. The only weakness in the jumbled landscape around Mystery Canyon lies in a series of parallel grooves or creases in the rock, almost like geologic faults, all aligned northeast-southwest. These joints, as Jon and I would call them, create chimneys, gullies, and seams in the sandstone, sometimes wide enough to squeeze through. The '59 party had followed a joint to traverse one subsidiary canyon, circled on ridgetops around the head of another, and finally entered the middle of Mystery by means of a second joint.

Rather than follow their roundabout route, Jon and I wanted to find a way in near the very head of Mystery and then descend the canyon as far as we could go. As I stood at one corner of my cirque, I was only one-third of a mile, as the crow flies, from the head of Mystery. It might as well have been 20. For six hours, I searched in vain for a way out of the cirque.

My predecessors had left traces here. On several rock panels covered with desert varnish, the Anasazi had carved haunting petroglyphs: lizard-men, their arms outstretched and rigid; abstract designs that might have been maps. Twice I found John Wetherill's neatly etched signature, from 1918 and 1922.

But I could not find a way into the canyon. All the joints I scrutinized blanked out in flared overhanging chimneys dripping with moss. With days of work and a drill, we might have bolted our way out of the cirque, but that would have been cheating.

Ready to give up, I started for camp. The afternoon sun glanced sideways on a headwall of smooth stone, and all at once I noticed a feature I had walked right past in the flat light of noon. An Anasazi hand-and-toe trail rose from behind a juniper, traversed 40 feet to the right, and then rose again to a shelf. I started up the steep, ancient ladder, but in soggy hiking boots I chickened out. What lay above the shelf, I couldn't tell, but here was a clue for Jon and me.

We were back a month later. To haul our sizable stash of gear into the distant cirque, we hired a young Navajo horsepacker named Eric Atene. Eric wielded a prickly wit that seemed to spring from an ambivalence about Anglo hikers: They gave him business, but they invaded his wilderness.

As we pushed deeper into the maze, Eric kept saying, “I know this country like the back of my hand.” But it was clear that Mystery Canyon lay outside his ken. As we turned into the cirque I had reconnoitered, he muttered, “How do you guys know about this place?”

For base camp we chose a shady shelf above a stream fed by a pellucid spring. The shelf lay beneath a gigantic cave facing north, inside which the Anasazi had lived and possibly buried their dead. In the presence of these “ancient enemies”–one rendering of the Navajo word Anasazi—Eric grew somber. “We can't go up there,” he soliloquized, indicating the cave. He held his hands apart. “If I go over there”—he touched his fingertips—”I break the bond.” Eric glanced up. “They had their power, we have our power. There's unseen spirits over there. Only a medicine man can go into those places, and he has to prepare himself.”

Eric dumped our 200 pounds of gear; he would return in six days. With no Navajo qualms to dissuade us, Jon and I prowled through the huge alcove. I recognized at once that it was a classic Basketmaker II site, dating from sometime in the first four centuries A.D. During this early phase, the Anasazi were still seminomadic, growing corn but relying heavily on hunting and gathering. They used the atlatl, or spear-thrower, in an era before the bow and arrow had been invented. They had no pottery, cooking their food instead in yucca and willow baskets woven so finely that they could hold water (whence the appellation Basketmaker).

I found sandy beds at the back of the alcove, beneath which perhaps the dead still lay, and a curious recent structure that might have been a Hopi shrine. These Pueblo Indians, living on three mesas 90 miles to the south of Jon's and my base-camp cave, are the direct descendants of the Anasazi. Their oral traditions are so vital that each clan makes a yearly visit to the distant ruins of its ancestors, where it builds shrines and leaves offerings for the long dead.

In the morning Jon and I headed straight for the ancient toe trail that I had found in April. With climbing shoes on my feet and Jon's manic confidence (“Looks good–it's gotta go somewhere”) to nudge me on, I soloed up the ancient steps. I had to admire the skill of the builder, somehow crouching on each foothold as he sculpted the next, chipping at ankle level with his handheld pounder.

Above the shelf, a new set of steps, invisible from the ground, wove a route up a steep inside corner. All at once we had gained a saddle overlooking the head of the subsidiary canyon just east of Mystery. It was a warm day, with high cirrus drifting over from the southwest, cresting the shoulder of Navajo Mountain. We felt as alone in our labyrinth as we might have felt on some remote glacier in Alaska.

Squeezing through a V-notch and wading two cold pools, we made our way into the subsidiary canyon and descended it for half a mile. The map had given us hopes of bursting across to Mystery Canyon by means of one particularly sharp-walled joint. Heading toward it, we crossed an alluvial bench. The prickly pears were in riotous bloom, waxy blossoms of magenta, cherry red, or pale yellow. In the dirt, I found worked flakes of chert and flint in half a dozen hues. Basketmakers again: Perhaps it was they, more than 16 centuries ago, who had linked our base-camp cave with the hidden canyons to the north by the remarkable hand-and-toe trail.

As our spirits soared, we followed our chosen joint southwest through an easy pass. We could see the far cliffs of Mystery Canyon. Just below the pass, I discovered a faint inscription scratched on the righthand wall: 1921 AW. Al Wetherill, I thought at once: John's brother, one of three men who rediscovered Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. But Al, I recalled, had been out of the Southwest by 1921. Could AW have been Angel Whiskers, once headman of the San Juan Paiutes, Clyde Whiskers's great-something-or-other?

Our joint seemed in danger of ending in a precipice, but at the last moment it disclosed a steep gully that led all the way down to the floor of Mystery Canyon. Later we deduced that this was the only reasonable route into the upper canyon; we could even imagine Dan Lehi and Toby Owl crafting a crazy zigzag horse trail down the gully.

By the end of the day, happily fatigued, we had made two trips back and forth to wrestle the bulk of our gear from base camp into Mystery. Our new camp was perched on a rippling shelf of red bedrock next to a tiny stream. Besides food and shelter, we had 350 feet of rope, a rack of hardware, ascenders, and a five-pound pack raft that had to be inflated like an air mattress. I had done no technical canyoneering, and Jon had done only a little, but he seemed to know what gear to bring, and in a sport so young, all its practitioners are sort of making it up as they go along.

Mystery Canyon seemed a paradise. By day the canyon wrens sang anthems; in the evening, mourning doves called from the dusk. Junipers gave us shade, and tall grasses, never grazed, billowed like pale curtains in the breeze. The canyon had an intimate scale, and yet the swooping walls, the stark towers, the sewn-shut seams of overhanging joints reverberated with the impossible.

We found a pair of rusty old soup cans, along with a camp table made of sandstone slabs, left no doubt by the '59 party. And we found several traces of the Anasazi, dating from the Pueblo II-III period, A.D. 900-1300: a bighorn sheep skull and horns–clearly an Anasazi kill–here where the animal has been extinct for centuries; scatterings of potsherds, remains of the black corrugated ware that the ancients used for cooking; and a small panel of petroglyphs mentioned in the '59ers' report. It featured an anthropomorphic stick figure etched in a style I had seen nowhere else: horned like a sheep, left hand upraised, penis striking the ground like a third leg. I also found a fine, stemless, cream-and-red arrowhead, kept it in my pocket for two days as a talisman, and then put it back where I'd found it.

There was something odd, even eccentric, about these minimalist Anasazi sites. The glorious logic of Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde was utterly absent here. One had the sense not of the proud inheritors of a bold civilization, but of furtive hermits, marginal mystics, outlaws and rebels. “Those people were really going their own way out there,” a leading southwestern archaeologist had once told me. “They were escaping the confines of normative thought.”

Jon was in his element, his frenzied impetuosity honed to a razor's edge. Having both spent the brazen years of youth climbing in the Alaska mountains, we had each developed an outdoor style based on manic efficiency. We tended to put our boots on, change the headlamp batteries, and sort carabiners while we stirred the Cream of Wheat. I prided myself on a fairly high-caliber impatience, but Jon had turned hyper into an art form. On the way in, he had squeezed off motor-drive snapshots without breaking stride and gulped down his water like a wino facing rehab. One's expedition habits leak into lazy, everyday life, too. At a restaurant with Jon, while I was still paying the bill, he would be outside, heading down the sidewalk. During slide shows of his climbs, the compulsive twitch of his “change” button would short-circuit his own narrative.

Now I wanted to hang out in Mystery Canyon and get to know the place. Jon desired only to strap on his gear and head downstream for the unknown. In the end, we compromised, spending three days in the upper canyon, wandering into every nook of its wrinkled fastness–but only after the Big Push downstream.

On the appointed day, off early, we hiked past the last Anasazi site and entered a gorge narrowing between 300-foot walls. It wound and snaked, shutting off the morning sunlight. About a mile below camp, it ended abruptly in the 40-foot pourover that had stopped the '59 party.

I wedged myself between the walls, inched near the lip, and peered into the dim void. At the bottom of the pourover loomed a black pool of indeterminate depth, 80 feet across. On all sides of it, the smooth rock walls overhung.

“This is wild,” said Jon for the first of several dozen times that day. He uncoiled one of our ropes and searched for a chockstone to tie it to. I began blowing up the dinky yellow boat. In days previous, I had silently humored Jon for being so grandiose as to think we might need it.

Bug-eyed with anticipation, Jon got on rappel, dangling the raft from his harness, and then plunged off the pourover. I heard clanking, then rubbery sounds, then splashing, then “Wild!” After half an hour he glided into sight, cranking the toy boat toward shore with our toy paddles.

I got on rappel myself and went over the edge. Halfway down, in the stygian gloom, I had to lock off the rappel with one leg and haul the boat back with my hand to a position underneath me. My giddiness was laced with the visceral awareness that, despite would-be tutors offering their services over the years, I had never learned to swim. In my time I had done some creditable flailing about on rivers, but deep, dark water retains for me a primal horror. Lodged in my neurons all day was an image of myself sinking into a pool as the rope stretched and my 40-pound pack dragged me under, the boat bobbing perkily out of reach, my fingernails clawing the rock. Jon didn't help. At the crucial moment, he yelled, “Be careful, Dave! Make sure you land in the raft!”

I did, and on the far shore, we exulted. After deflating and packing up the boat, we walked for half a mile on dry bedrock as the canyon twisted upon itself, its walls often five feet apart or less but never too tight for passage. Then we came to our second obstacle, a long, complex narrows stretching down into chimneys and pools. I shinnied down a body-jam slot into waist-deep water. Once again we had to string a rope; to wriggle unaided back up the claustrophobic fissure with wet feet might prove beyond us. The narrows went on and on, broadening here into a pothole pool, slitting down there to a crevice, which we bridged with hands on one wall and feet on the other.

Fleetingly, as we plunged downstream, I wondered how the ancients, gazing from above, must have felt about the canyon below the first pourover. Was it for them only a badlands, a place where no corn could grow and the stream could trap you? Or did it have the power of some glimpsed otherworld?

At last we came to a kind of moat–a six-foot-wide channel, water well over our heads, that bent around a far corner. We blew up the boat again and never deflated it the rest of the day, dragging it behind us through chimneys and hauling it up over pourovers. Now we rode it the length of the moat, pulling ourselves along with palms slapped against the sandstone walls.

Every boat ride required a rope left in place, for otherwise the second person had no way to haul the raft back, and the boat couldn't carry both of us and our packs in one load. It quickly became clear that the yellow toy I had scorned was our most valuable piece of gear. The sky was a perfect blue, but gusts of wind shrieked through our gorge, threatening to seize the boat like a kite and waft it up onto some shelf or wedge it in some chimney from which we might not be able to retrieve it. Without the raft, I doubted whether a wretched nonswimmer like me could have got out of the canyon.

The complex narrows convinced us that we were almost certainly in a place where no one had ever been, for it would have been fiendishly difficult to come up the canyon, there was patently no way in from the sides, and even the Anasazi had left no traces here. The first time that I had ever ventured onto ground never before trod by human feet had been on Denali's Wickersham Wall when I was 20. I remembered the acute, imperishable taste of that moment.

I did not expect to sample that same drug 31 years later, to feel so heady a rush all over again. Even in 1963, it had seemed necessary to go all the way to Alaska to find the elixir. Yet in 1994 we were tasting it in southern Utah, only a few miles from the frat boys water-skiing on Lake Powell.

And like inarticulate 20-year-olds, John and I yelled and giggled to the sky as we pushed downstream. Jon hypered us through a five-minute lunch eaten standing up. The possibility of descending the whole of Mystery to the lake began to whisper its yearnings.

The canyon turned on itself and folded, plunged and lay level, slotted down and opened into amphitheaters. Yet it never relented. Chimney succeeded pool, chockstone boulder followed slickrock chute… I began to lose track of the details, the sequence in my mind, as I seldom had on even the most complicated climbs. Jon later confessed to a like confusion, an overdose of experience. We grew tired, then tireder. And our supply of rope was dwindling.

Early in the afternoon, we came to the second pourover. Once again we set up a rappel, landed in the boat, paddled for shore. The blur of hard moves behind us accreted as a weight in my mind–what climbers call commitment. Grit in my boots had worn my feet raw, I had wet sand in my ears and teeth, and the chimneying had scraped my arms and legs. The whole wonderful day began to feel like a serious climb. Save some energy for the way back, I thought. Pay attention to the little things.

But suddenly the canyon grew easy, mere hiking. We spurted on, taking turns carrying the boat over our heads like some trophy animal. “It may just go all the way!” Jon crowed.

We turned a corner and beheld a new slot. I wedged myself in to gaze into its depths. It was a bad one, flaring and squeezing in scalloped hollows down to a green obscurity. Jon chimneyed even closer to the hole.

“That's it,” I said when he returned. “We have to turn around.”

“But Dave!” Jon wailed.

In a surprisingly rational discourse, we analyzed our options. We had only 40 feet of rope left. That might get us down the scalloped slot, but the green glimmer meant a deep pool, stretching as far as we could see. We would have to boat it, with no rope left to haul back and forth.

It was getting late. Stupidly, we had left our headlamps in camp. The first clouds of the day were darkening the sky. Within the previous week, afternoon thunderstorms had drenched the land. Mystery Canyon was no place to ride out a flash flood.

Reluctantly Jon agreed, though not before uttering one last stab of blind defiance: “We could both get in the boat! Leave our packs behind!”

“And what comes after that?” I asked, gesturing toward the slot. Jon took a final look, then spat toward the green glimmer–not in contempt, but as if to reach out for one last contact with the unknown.

Climbing up out of Mystery Canyon seemed endless and tedious. Even with help from the ropes, it was brutal bashing up the chimneys we had slithered down. We gouged our knuckles raw coming up the two pourovers, and the boat snagged and lodged behind us like an anchor we dared not cut loose.

The whole ascent felt like backing off a climb. And when I heaved up over the last lip and unclipped my harness, it was with all the relief that had once washed over me as I stepped onto level ground from a last rappel.

To our best guess, according to the progress we traced on the map, we had gone six miles, 600 vertical feet, and had given up about a third of a mile from where the map showed Lake Powell meeting the canyon. The altimeter on Jon's watch indicated that we'd turned back between 40 and 100 vertical feet above the lake level.

A week after the trip, we hired a pilot and flew over our wilderness. At first the maze of redrock dazzled us, but gradually, with the plane dipping and circling, we sorted it out. Peering from ground to map, I realized that the lake was considerably higher than it had been when the chart was made. We had turned back not a third of a mile away, but maybe only 200 yards–two short bends below the green glimmer.

“Goddamn it, Dave,” Jon shouted over the engine, “we should have pushed it!”

Decades ago, on certain climbs in Alaska, I had turned back within grasp of the summit. Those near misses had had the taste of wormwood for years. In recurring dreams I completed the ascent, and then woke to the dull ambiguity of ordinary life.

But at 51, no matter how sweet the elixir still tasted, I no longer craved the deed. To walk in a place where no one else had walked was, to be sure, a rare delight. To covet the privilege, on the other hand, was to succumb to the mad rage of the conquistadors. It was fine to leave the end of Mystery for someone else. As the Anasazi had left the canyon for us.

Decades ago, I would have kept the cream-and-red arrowhead I found, not dropped it back in the dirt. On our last night in Mystery Canyon, with the moon two days before full, the silence had spread around us like a balm. I was as happy as I have ever been, and Jon seemed happy, too.

David Roberts, a contributing editor of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, is writing a book about the Anasazi backcountry. His most recent book is Once They Moved Like the Wind: Cochise, Geronimo, and the Apache Wars, published by Simon & Schuster.

The post In the Canyon Incognita appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

When one is young, one trifles with death. –Graham Greene, at 74  

A day in early July, perfect for climbing. From the mesas above Boulder, a heatcutting breeze drove the smell of the pines up onto the great tilting slabs of the Flatirons. 

It was 1961; I was 18, had been climbing about a year, Gabe even less. We were about six hundred feet up, three-quarters of the way to the summit of the First Flatiron. There wasn’t a guidebook in those days; so we didn’t know how difficult our route was supposed to be or who had previously done it. But it had gone all right, despite the scarcity of places to bang in our Austrian Soft-iron pitons; sometimes we’d just wedge our bodies in a crack and yell “On belay!” 

It was a joy to be climbing. Climbing was one of the best things—maybe the best thing—in life, given that one would never play shortstop for the Dodgers. There was a risk, as my parents and friends kept pointing out; but I knew the risk was worth it. 

In fact, just that summer I had become ambitious. With a friend my age whom I’ll call Jock, I’d climbed the east face of Longs Peak, illegally early in the season—no great deed for experts, but pretty good for 18-year-old kids. It was Jock’s idea to train all summer and go up to the Tetons and do the route: the north face of the Grand. I’d never even seen the Tetons, but the idea of the route, hung with names like Petzoldt and Pownall and Unsoeld, sent chills through me. 
It was Gabe’s lead now, maybe the last before the going got easier a few hundred feet below the top. He angled up and left, couldn’t get any protection in, went out of sight around a corner. I waited. The rope didn’t move. “What’s going on?” I finally yelled. “Hang on,” Gabe answered irritably, “I’m looking for a belay.” 

We’d been friends since grade school. When he was young he had been very shy; he’d been raised by his father only—why, I never thought to ask. Ever since I had met him, on the playground, running up the old wooden stairs to the fourth-grade classroom, he’d moved in a jerky, impulsive way. On our high school tennis team, he slashed at the ball with lurching stabs, and skidded across the asphalt like a kid trying to catch his own shadow. He climbed the same way, especially in recent months, impulsively going for a hard move well above his protection, worrying me, but getting away with it. In our first half-year of climbing, I’d usually been a little better than Gabe, just as he was always stuck a notch below me on the tennis team. But in the last couple of months—no denying it—he’d become better on rock than I was; he took the leads that I didn’t like the looks of. He might have made a better partner for Jock on the Grand, except that Gabe’s only mountain experience had been an altitude-sick crawl up the east side of Mount of the Holy Cross with me just a week before. He’d thrown up on the summit but said he loved the climb. 

At 18 it wasn’t easy for me to see why Gabe had suddenly become good at climbing, or why it drove him as nothing else had. Just that April, three months earlier, his father had been killed in an auto accident during a blizzard in Texas. When Gabe returned to school, I mumbled my prepared condolence. He brushed it off and asked at once when we could go climbing. I was surprised. But I wanted to climb, too: The summer was approaching, Jock wasn’t always available, and Gabe would go at the drop of a phone call. 

Now, finally, came the “on belay” signal from out of sight to the left, and I started up. For the full 120 feet Gabe had been unable to get in any pitons; so as I climbed, the rope drooped in along arc to my left. It began to tug me sideways, and when I yanked back at it, I noticed that it seemed snagged about 50 feet away, caught under one of the downward-pointing flakes so characteristic of the Flatirons. I flipped the rope angrily and tugged harder on it, then yelled to Gabe to pull from his end. Our efforts only jammed it in tighter. The first trickle of fear leaked into my well-being. 

“What kind of belay do you have?” I asked the invisible Gabe. 

“Not too good. I couldn’t get anything in.” 

There were 50 feet of slab between me and the irksome flake, and those 50 feet were frighteningly smooth. I ought, I supposed, to climb over to the flake, even if it meant building up coils and coils of slack. But if I slipped, and Gabe with no anchor . . . 

I yelled to Gabe what I was going to do. He assented. 

I untied from the rope, gathered as many coils as I could, and threw the end violently down and across the slab, hoping to snap the jammed segment loose, or at least reduce Gabe’s job to hauling the thing in with all his might. Then, with my palms starting to sweat, I climbed carefully up to a little ledge and sat down. 

Gabe was now below me, out of sight, but close. ‘It’s still jammed,’ he said, and my fear surged a little notch. 

“Maybe we can set up a rappel,” I suggested. 

“No, I think I can climb back and get it.” 

“Are you sure?” Relief lowered the fear a notch. Gabe would do the dirty work, just as he was willing to lead the hard pitches. 

“It doesn’t look too bad.” 

I waited, sitting on my ledge, staring out over Boulder and the dead-straw plains that seemed to stretch all the way to Kansas. I wasn’t sure we were doing the right thing. A few months earlier I’d soloed a rock called the Fist, high on Green Mountain, in the midst of a snow storm, and 60 feet off the ground, as I was turning a slight overhang, my foot had come off, and one hand . . . but not the other. And adrenalin had carried me the rest of the way up. There was a risk, but you rose to it. 

For Gabe, it was taking a long time. It was all the worse not being able to see him. I looked to my right and saw a flurry of birds playing with a column of air over near the Second Flatiron. Then Gabe’s voice, triumphant: “I got it!” 

“Way to go!” I yelled back. The fear diminished. If he’d been able to climb down to the snag, he could climb back up. I was glad I hadn’t had to do it. Remembering his impatience, I instructed, “Coil it up.” A week before, on Holy Cross, I’d been the leader. 

“No, I’ll just drape it around me. I can climb straight up to where you are.” The decision puzzled me. Be careful, I said in my head. But that was Gabe, impulsive, playing his hunches. Again the seconds crept. I had too little information, nothing to do but look for the birds and smell the pine sap. You could see Denver, smogless as yet, a squat aggregation of downtown buildings like some modern covered-wagon circle, defended against the emptiness of the Plains. There had been climbers over on the Third Flatiron earlier, but now I couldn’t spot them. The red, gritty sandstone was warm to my palms. “How’s it going?” I yelled. A pause. Then Gabe’s voice, quick-syllabled as always, more tense than normal. “I just got past a hard place, but it’s easier now.” 

He sounded so close, only 15 feet below me, yet I hadn’t seen him since his lead had taken him around the corner out of sight. I felt I could almost reach down and touch him. 

Next, there was a soft but unmistakable sound, and my brain knew it without ever having heard it before. It was the sound of cloth rubbing against rock. Then Gabe’s cry, a single blurt of knowledge: “Dave!” 

I rose with a start to my feet, but hung on to a knob with one hand, gripping it desperately. “Gabe!” I yelled back; then, for the first time in half an hour, I saw him. He was much farther from me now, sliding and rolling, the rope wrapped in tangles about him like a badly made nest. “Grab something,” I yelled. I could hear Gabe shouting, even as he receded from me, “No! Oh, no!” I thought, there’s always a chance. But Gabe began to bounce, just like rocks I had seen bouncing down mountain slopes, a longer bounce each time. The last was conclusive, for I saw him flung far from the rock’s even surface to pirouette almost lazily in the air, then meet the unyielding slab once more, head first, before the sandstone threw him into the treetops. 

What I did next is easy to remember, but it is hard to judge just how long it took. It seemed, in the miasma of adrenalin, to last either three minutes or more than an hour. I stood and I yelled for help. After several repetitions, voices from the Mesa Trail caught the breeze back to me. “We’re coming!” someone shouted. “In the trees!” I yelled back. “Hurry!” I sat down and said to myself, now don’t go screw it up yourself, you don’t have a rope, sit here and wait for someone to come rescue you. They can come up the back and lower a rope from the top. As soon as I had given myself this good advice, I got up and started scrambling toward the summit. It wasn’t too hard. Slow down, don’t make a mistake, I lectured myself, but it felt as if I were running. From the summit I down-climbed the 80 feet on the backside; I’d been there before and had rappelled it. Forty feet up there was a hard move. Don’t blow it. Then I was on the ground. 

I ran down the scree-and-brush gully between the First and Second Flatirons, and got to the bottom a few minutes before the hikers. “Where is he?” a wild-eyed volunteer asked me. “In the trees!” I yelled back. “Somewhere right near here!” 
Searching for something is usually an orderly process; it has its methodical pleasures, its calm reconstruction of the possible steps that led to the object getting lost. We searched instead like scavenging predators, crashing through deadfall and talus; and we couldn’t find Gabe. Members of the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group began to arrive; they were calmer than the hiker I had first encountered. We searched and searched, and finally a voice called out, “Here he is.” 

Someone led me there. There were only solemn looks to confirm the obvious. I saw Gabe sprawled face down on the talus, his limbs in the wrong positions, the rope, coated with blood, still in a cocoon about him. The seat of his jeans had been ripped away, and one bare buttock was scraped raw, the way kids’ knees used to look after a bad slide on a sidewalk. I wanted to go up and touch his body, but I couldn’t. I sat down and cried.

Much later — but it was still afternoon, the sun and breeze still collaborating on a perfect July day—a policeman led me up the walk to my house. My mother came to the screen door and, grasping the situation at once, burst into tears. Gabe was late for a birthday party. Someone had called my house, mildly annoyed, to try to account for the delay. My father took on the task of calling them back. (More than a decade later he told me that it was the hardest thing he had ever done.) 

In the newspapers the next day a hiker was quoted as saying that he knew something bad was going to happen, because he’d overheard Gabe and me “bickering,” and good climbers didn’t do that. Another man had watched the fall through binoculars. At my father’s behest, I wrote down a detailed account of the accident. 

About a week later Jock came by. He spent the appropriate minutes in sympathetic silence, then said, “The thing you’ve got to do is get right back on the rock.” I didn’t want to, but I went out with him. We top-roped a moderate climb only 30 feet high. My feet and hands shook uncontrollably, my heart seemed to be screaming, and Jock had to haul me up the last 10 feet. “It’s OK, it’ll come back,” he reassured. 

I had one friend I could talk to, a touch-football buddy who thought climbing was crazy in the first place. With his support, in the presence of my parents’ anguish, I managed at last to call up Jock and ask him to come by. We sat on my front porch. “Jock,” I said, “I just can’t go to the Grand. I’m too shook up. I’d be no good if I did go.” He stared at me long and hard. Finally he stood up and walked away. 

That fall I went to Harvard. I tried out for the tennis team, but when I found that the Mountaineering Club included veterans who had just climbed Waddington in the Coast Range and Mount Logan in the Yukon, it didn’t take me long to single out my college heroes. 

But I wasn’t at all sure about climbing. On splendid fall afternoons at the Shawangunks, when the veterans dragged us neophytes up easy climbs, I sat on the belay ledges mired in ambivalence. I’d never been at a cliff where there were so many climbers, and whenever one of them on an adjoining route happened to yell—even if the message were nothing more alarming than “I think it goes up to the left there!”—I jerked with fright. 

For reasons I am still not sure of, Gabe became a secret. Attached to the memory of our day on the First Flatiron was not only fear, but guilt and embarrassment. Guilt toward Gabe, of course, because I had not been the one who went to get the jammed rope. But the humiliation, born perhaps in that moment when the cop had led me up to my front door and my mother had burst into tears, lingered with me in the shape of a crime or moral error, like getting a girl pregnant. 

Nevertheless, at Harvard I got deeply involved with the Mountaineering Club. By 20 I’d climbed McKinley with six Harvard friends via a new route, and that August I taught at Colorado Outward Bound School. With all of “Boone Patrol,” including the senior instructor, a laconic British hard man named Clough, I was camped one night above timberline. We’d crawled under the willow bushes and strung out ponchos for shelter. In the middle of the night I dreamed that Gabe was falling away from me through endless reaches of black space. He was in a metal cage, spinning headlong, and I repeatedly screamed his name. I woke with a jolt, sat shivering for ten minutes, then crawled, dragging my bag, far from the others, and lay awake the rest of the night. As we blew the morning campfire back to life from the evening’s ashes, Clough remarked, “Did you hear the screams? One of the poor lads must have had a nightmare.” 

By my senior year, though, I’d become hard myself. McKinley had seemed a lark compared to my second expedition—a 40-day failure with only one companion, Don Jensen, on the east ridge of Alaska’s Mount Deborah. All through the following winter, with Don holed up in the Sierra Nevada, me trudging through a math major at Harvard, we plotted mountaineering revenge. By January we had focused on a route: the unclimbed west face of Mount Huntington, even harder, we thought, than Deborah. By March we’d agreed that Matt Hale, a junior and my regular climbing partner, would be our third, even though Matt had been on no previous expeditions. Matt was daunted by the ambition of the project, but slowly got caught up in it. Needing a fourth, we discussed an even more inexperienced club member, Ed Bernd, a sophomore who’d been climbing little more than a year and who’d not even been in big mountains. 

Never in my life, before or since, have I found myself so committed to any project. I daydreamed about recipes for Logan bread and the number of ounces a certain piton weighed; at night I fell asleep with the seductive promises of belay ledges and crack systems whispering in my ear. School was a Platonic facade. The true Idea of my life lay in the Alaska Range. 

At one point that spring I floated free from my obsession long enough to hear a voice in my head tell me, “You know, Dave, this is the kind of climb you could get killed on.” I stopped and assessed my life, and consciously answered, “It’s worth it. Worth the risk.” I wasn’t sure what I meant by that, but I knew its truth. I wanted Matt to feel the same way. I knew Don did. 

On a March weekend Matt and I were leading an ice climbing trip in Huntington Ravine on Mount Washington. The Harvard cabin was unusually full, which meant a scramble in the morning to get out first and claim the ice gully you wanted to lead. On Saturday I skipped breakfast to beat everybody else to Pinnacle Gully, then the prize of the ravine. It was a bitter, windy day, and though the gully didn’t tax my skills unduly, twice sudden gusts almost blew me out of my steps. The second man on the rope, though a good rock climber, found the whole day unnerving and was glad to get back to the cabin. 

That night we chatted with the other climbers. The two most experienced were Craig Merrihue, a grad student in astrophysics, said to be brilliant, with first ascents in the Andes and Karakoram behind him, and Dan Doody, a quiet, thoughtful filmmaker who’d gone to college in Wyoming and had recently been on the big American Everest expedition. Both men were interested in our Huntington plans, and it flattered Matt and me that they thought we were up to something serious. The younger climbers looked on us experts in awe; it was delicious to bask in their hero worship as we nonchalanted it with Craig and Dan. Craig’s lovely wife Sandy was part of our company. All three of them were planning to link up in a relaxing trip to the Hindu Kush the coming summer. 

The next day the wind was still gusting fitfully. Matt and I were leading separate ropes of beginners up Odells Gully, putting in our teaching time after having had Saturday to do something hard. I felt lazy, a trifle vexed to be “wasting” a good day. Around noon we heard somebody calling from the ravine floor. We ignored the cries at first, but as a gust of wind came our way, I was pricked with alarm. “Somebody’s yelling for help,” I shouted to Matt. “Think they mean it?” A tiny figure far below seemed to be running up and down on the snow. My laziness burned away. 

I tied off my second to wait on a big bucket of an ice step, then zipped down a rappel off a single poorly placed ice screw. Still in crampons, I ran down into the basin that formed the runout for all five gullies. The man I met, a weekend climber in his 30s who had been strolling up the ravine for a walk, was moaning. He had seen something that looked like “a bunch of rags” slide by out of the corner of his eye. He knew all at once that it was human bodies he had seen, and he could trace the line of fall up to Pinnacle Gully. He knew that Doody and Merrihue were climbing in Pinnacle. And Craig was a close friend of his. During the five minutes or so since the accident he had been unable to approach them, unable to do anything but yell for help and run aimlessly. I was the first to reach the bodies. 

Gabe’s I had not had to touch. But I was a trip leader now, an experienced mountaineer, the closest approximation in the circumstances to a rescue squad. I’d had first-aid training. Without a second’s hesitation I knelt beside the bodies. Dan’s was the worse injured, with a big chunk of his head torn open. His blood was still warm, but I was sure he was dead. I thought I could find a faint pulse in Craig’s wrist, however, so I tried to stop the bleeding and started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Matt arrived and worked on Dan, and then others appeared and tried to help. 

For an hour, I think, I put my lips against Craig’s, held his nose shut, forced air into his lungs. His lips were going cold and blue, and there was a stagnant taste in the cavity his mouth had become, but I persisted, as did Matt and the others. Not since my father had last kissed me—was I ten?—had I put my lips to another man’s. I remembered Dad’s scratchy face, when he hadn’t shaved, like Craig’s now. We kept hoping, but I knew after five minutes that both men had been irretrievably damaged. There was too much blood. It had been a bad year for snow in the bottom of the ravine; big rocks stuck out everywhere. Three years earlier Don Jensen had been avalanched out of Damnation Gully; he fell 800 feet and only broke a shoulder blade. But that had been a good year for snow. 

Yet we kept up our efforts. The need arose as much from an inability to imagine what else we might do—stand around in shock?—as from good first aid sense. At last we gave up, exhausted. I could read in Matt’s clipped and efficient suggestions the dawning sense that a horrible thing had happened. But I also felt numb. The sense of tragedy flooded home only in one moment. I heard somebody say something like “She’s coming,” and somebody else say, “Keep her away.” I looked up and saw Sandy, Craig’s wife, arriving from the cabin, aware of something wrong, but in the instant before knowing that it was indeed Craig she was intercepted bodily by the climber who knew her best, and that was how she learned. I can picture her face in the instant of knowing, and I remember vividly my own revelation that there was a depth of personal loss that I had never really known existed, of which I was now receiving my first glimpse. 

But my memory has blocked out Sandy’s reaction. Did she immediately burst into tears, like my mother? Did she try to force her way to Craig? Did we let her? I know I saw it happen, whatever it was, but my memory cannot retrieve it. 
There followed long hours into the dark hauling the bodies with ropes back toward the cabin. There was the pacifying exhaustion and the stolid drive back to Cambridge. There was somebody telling me, “You did a fantastic job, all that anybody could have done,” and that seeming maudlin—who wouldn’t have done the same? There were, in subsequent weeks, the memorial service, long tape-recorded discussions of the puzzling circumstances of the accident (we had found Dan and Craig roped together, a bent ice screw loose on the rope between them), heated indictments of the cheap Swiss design of the screw. And even a couple of visits with Sandy and their five-year-old son. 

But my strongest concern was not to let the accident interfere with my commitment to climb Huntington, now only three months away. The deaths had deeply shaken Matt; but we never directly discussed the matter. I never wrote my parents about what had taken place. We went ahead and invited Ed, the sophomore, to join our expedition. Though he had not been in the ravine with us, he too had been shaken. But I got the three of us talking logistics and gear, and thinking about a mountain in Alaska. In some smug private recess I told myself that I was in better training than Craig and Dan had been, and that was why I wouldn’t get killed. If the wind had blown one of them out of his steps, well, I’d led Pinnacle the day before in the same wind and it hadn’t blown me off. Almost, but it hadn’t. Somehow I controlled my deepest feelings and kept the disturbance buried. I had no bad dreams about Doody and Merrihue, no sleepless nights, no sudden qualms about whether Huntington was worth the risk or not. By June I was as ready as I could be for the hardest climb of my life. 

It took a month, but we climbed our route on Huntington. Pushing through the night of July 29-30, we traversed the knife-edged summit ridge and stood on top in the still hours of dawn. Only 12 hours before, Matt and I had come as close to being killed as it is possible to get away with in the mountains. 

Matt, tugging on a loose crampon strap, had pulled himself off his steps; he landed on me, broke down the snow ledge I had kicked; under the strain our one bad anchor piton popped out. We fell, roped together and helpless, some 70 feet down a steep slope of ice above a 4,500-foot drop. Then a miracle intervened; the rope snagged on a nubbin of rock, the size of one’s knuckle, and held us both. 

Such was our commitment to the climb that, even though we were bruised and Matt had lost a crampon, we pushed upward and managed to join Ed and Don for the summit dash. 

At midnight, 19 hours later, Ed and I stood on a ledge some fifteen hundred feet below. Our tents were too small for four people; so he and I had volunteered to push on to a lower camp, leaving Matt and Don to come down on the next good day. In the dim light we set up a rappel. There was a tangle of pitons, fixed ropes, and the knots tying them off, in the midst of which Ed was attaching a carabiner. I suggested an adjustment. Ed moved the carabiner, clipped our rope in, and started to get on rappel. “Just this pitch,” I said, “and then it’s practically walking to camp.” 

Ed leaned back on rappel. There was a scrape and sparks—his crampons scratching the rock, I later guessed. Suddenly he was flying backwards through the air, down the vertical pitch. He hit hard ice 60 feet below. Just as I had on the Flatiron, I yelled. “Grab something, Ed!” But it was evident that his fall was not going to end—not soon, anyway. He slid rapidly down the ice chute, then out of sight over a cliff. I heard him bouncing once or twice, then nothing. He had not uttered a word. 

I shouted, first for Ed, then for Don and Matt above. Nothing but silence answered me. There was nothing I could do. I was as certain as I could be that Ed had fallen 4,000 feet, to the lower arm of the Tokositna Glacier, inaccessible even from our base camp. He was surely dead. 

I managed to get myself, without a rope, down the seven pitches to our empty tent. The next two days I spent alone-desperate for Matt’s and Don’s return, imagining them dead also, drugging myself with sleeping pills, trying to fathom what had gone wrong, seized one night in my sleep with a vision of Ed, broken and bloody, clawing his way up the wall to me, crying out, “Why didn’t you come look for me?” At last Don and Matt arrived, and I had to tell them. Our final descent, in the midst of a raging blizzard, was the nastiest and scariest piece of climbing I have done, before or since. 

From Talkeetna, a week later, I called Ed’s parents. His father’s stunned first words, crackly with long-distance static, were “Is this some kind of a joke?” After the call I went behind the bush pilot’s hangar and cried my heart out—the first time in years that I had given way to tears. 

A week later, with my parents’ backing, I flew to Philadelphia to spend three days with Ed’s parents. But not until the last few hours of my stay did we talk about Ed or climbing. Philadelphia was wretchedly hot and sticky. In the Bernds’ small house my presence sleeping on the living room sofa, an extra guest at meals—was a genuine intrusion. Unlike my parents, or Matt’s, or Don’s, Ed’s had absolutely no comprehension of mountain climbing. It was some esoteric thing he had gotten into at Harvard, and of course Ed had completely downplayed, for their sake, the seriousness of our Alaska project. 

At that age, given my feelings about climbing, I could hardly have been better shielded from any sense of guilt. But mixed in with my irritation and discomfort in the muggy apartment was an awareness—of a different sort from the glimpse of Sandy Merrihue—that I was in the presence of a grief so deep its features were opaque to me. It was the hope-destroying grief of parents, the grief of those who knew things could not keep going right, a grief that would, I sensed, diminish little over the years. It awed and frightened me, and disclosed to me an awareness of my own guilt. I began remembering other moments. In our first rest after the summit, as we had giddily replayed every detail of our triumph, Ed had said that yes, it had been great, but that he wasn’t sure it had been worth it. I hadn’t pressed him; his qualifying judgment had seemed the only sour note in a perfect party. It was so obvious to me that all the risks throughout the climb-even Matt’s and my near-disaster-had been worth it to make the summit. 

Now Ed’s remark haunted me. He was, in most climbers’ judgment, far too inexperienced for Huntington. We’d caught his occasional technical mistakes on the climb, a piton hammered in with the eye the wrong way, an ice axe left below a rock overhang. But he learned so well, was so naturally strong, complemented our intensity with a hearty capacity for fun and friendship. Still, at Harvard, there had been, I began to see, no way for him to turn down our invitation. Matt and I and the other veterans were his heroes, just as the Waddington seniors had been mine three years before. Now the inner circle was asking him to join. It seemed to us at the time an open invitation, free of any moral implications. Now I wondered. 

I still didn’t know what had gone wrong with the rappel, even though Ed had been standing a foot away from me. Had it been some technical error of his in clipping in? Or had the carabiner itself failed? There was no way of settling the question, especially without having been able to look for, much less find, his body. 

At last Ed’s family faced me. I gave a long, detailed account of the climb. I told them it was “the hardest thing yet done in Alaska,” a great mountaineering accomplishment. It would attract the attention of climbers the world over. They looked at me with blank faces; my way of viewing Ed’s death was incomprehensible. They were bent on finding a Christian meaning to the event. It occurred to them that maybe God had meant to save Ed from a worse death fighting in Vietnam. They were deeply stricken by our inability to retrieve his body. “My poor baby,” Mrs. Bernd wailed at one point, “he must be so cold.” 

Their grief brought me close to tears again, but when I left it was with a sigh of relief. I went back to Denver, where I was starting graduate school. For the second time in my life I thought seriously about quitting climbing. At 22 I had been the first hand witness of three fatal accidents, costing four lives. Mr. Bernd’s laborious letters, edged with the leaden despair I had seen in his face, continued to remind me that the question “Is it worth the risk?” was not one any person could answer by consulting only himself. 

Torn by my own ambivalence, studying Restoration comedy in a city where I had few friends, no longer part of a gang heading off each weekend to the Shawangunks, I laid off climbing most of the winter of 1965-66. By February I had made a private resolve to quit the business, at least for a few years. One day a fellow showed up at my basement apartment, all the way down from Alaska. I’d never met him, but the name Art Davidson was familiar. He looked straight off skid row, with his tattered clothes and unmatched socks and tennis shoes with holes in them; and his wild red beard and white eyebrows lent a kind of rundown Irish aristocracy to his face. He lived, apparently, like a vagrant, subsisting on cottage cheese in the back of his old pickup truck (named Bucephalus after Alexander’s horse), which he hid in parking lots each night on the outskirts of Anchorage. Art was crazy about Alaskan climbing. In the next year and a half he would go on five major expeditions—still the most intense spate of big-range mountaineering I know of. In my apartment he kept talking in his soft, enthusiastic voice about the Cathedral Spires, a place he knew Don and I had had our eyes on. I humored him. I let him talk on, and then we went out for a few beers, and Art started reminding me about the pink granite and the trackless glaciers, and by the evening’s end the charismatic bastard had me signed up. 

We went to the Cathedral Spires in 1966, with three others. Art was at the zenith of his climbing career. Self taught, technically erratic, he made up in compulsive zeal what he lacked in finesse. His drive alone got himself and Rick Millikan up the highest peak in the range, which we named Kichatna Spire. As for me, I wasn’t the climber I’d been the year before, which had much to do with why I wasn’t along with Art on the summit push. That year I’d fallen in love with the woman who would become my wife, and suddenly the old question about risk seemed vastly more complicated. In the blizzard-swept dusk, with two of the other guys up on the climb, I found myself worrying about their safety instead of mere logistics. I was as glad nothing had gone wrong by the end of the trip as I was that we’d collaborated on a fine first ascent. 

Summer after summer I went back to Alaska, climbing hard, but not with the all-out commitment of 1965. Over the years quite a few of my climbing acquaintances were killed in the mountains, including five close friends. Each death was deeply unsettling, tempting me to doubt all over again the worth of the enterprise. For nine years I taught climbing to college students, and worrying about their safety became an occupational hazard. Ironically, the closest I came during those years to getting killed was not on some Alaskan wall, but on a beginner’s climb at the Shawangunks, when I nearly fell head-first backwards out of a rappel—the result of a carabiner jamming in a crack, my own impatience, and the blasĂ© glaze with which teaching a dangerous skill at a trivial level coats the risk. Had that botched rappel been my demise, no friends would have seen my end as meaningful: instead, a “stupid,” “pointless,” “who-would-have-thought?” kind of death. 

Yet in the long run, trying to answer my own question “Is it worth it?,” torn between thinking the question itself ridiculous and grasping for a formulaic answer, I come back to gut-level affirmation, however sentimental, however selfish. When I image my early 20s, it is not in terms of the hours spent in a quiet library studying Melville, or my first nervous pontifications before a freshman English class. I want to see Art Davidson again, shambling into my apartment in his threadbare trousers, spooning great dollops of cottage cheese past his flaming beard, filling the air with his baroque hypotheses, convincing me that the Cathedral Spires needed our visit. I want to remember what brand of beer I was drinking when that crazy vagabond in one stroke turned the cautious resolves of a lonely winter into one more summer’s plot against the Alaskan wilderness. 

Some of the worst moments of my life have taken place in the mountains. Not only the days alone in the tent on Huntington after Ed had vanished—quieter moments as well, embedded in uneventful expeditions. Trying to sleep the last few hours before a predawn start on a big climb, my mind stiff with dread, as I hugged my all-too-obviously fragile self with my own arms—until the scared kid inside my sleeping bag began to pray for bad weather and another day’s reprieve. But nowhere else on earth, not even in the harbors of reciprocal love, have I felt pure happiness take hold of me and shake me like a puppy, compelling me, and the conspirators I had arrived there with, to stand on some perch of rock or snow, the uncertain struggle below us, and bawl our pagan vaunts to the very sky. It was worth it then. 

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