Out in the night, I feel the Stronghold waiting.

The next morning, Becca and I tromp up the hikers’ trail, and then veer across water-polished slabs and into scrubby creekbeds.

Two rugged canyons — the East and West strongholds — slice east to west across the Dragoon Mountains and are wonderlands of brilliant green and golden granite domes. The majority of the Stronghold’s climbing lies within a 2.5-mile radius, the exception being the 1,000-foot Sheepshead Dome seven miles south. Another seven-plus miles south of that, tourists gather in Tombstone to watch reenactments of the Shootout at the Okay Corral.

In the Stronghold’s center, 300- to 500-foot Rockfellow Domes tower above the other formations. We follow the creekbed, fight through spindly creosote, and traverse the domes’ feet, heading for Forest Lawn(5.9) and Pair A Grins (5.10), a two-pitch intro to the Stronghold’s notoriously thin climbing.

“You just got to believe the holds will appear,” the Arizona climber Eric Fazio-Rhicard told me days earlier as I whimpered up routes on the Out of Towners Dome, in the East Stronghold. I was freshly back from Thailand, forearms swollen and ego bulging. Watching the 50-year-old Fazio-Rhicard’s decisive foot movements through holdless 5.11 terrain, I realized my sport-climber toolkit was just so much baggage.

While Fazio-Rhicard is best known for his prodigious first-ascenting on Tucson’s Mount Lemmon, he’s also established Stronghold ultra-classics like War Paint (5.10), Sheep Thrills (5.11+), and the unrepeated slab Soul on Ice (5.12). Slab climbing is a cold science of patient movement, emotional detachment, and friction. On the hardest routes, Fazio-Rhicard will often wear larger, comfortable climbing shoes with thin socks. Larger shoes mean more rubber; more rubber means maximum friction. Skilled friction climbers might also place their palms against rock rather than reach for mediocre crimps in a variation on this surface-area hypothesis.