The bouncer went back inside confused. Sparks immediately got back on the wall and in thirty seconds reached the nearly horizontal roof. This move was the crux, the most difficult buildering sequence that had been attempted all night. In a sober state it would be very hard, and Sparks’ mind might have not been able to break through and conceive the move, but fueled with an adrenaline cocktail, he didn’t think, he just acted. Like a karate master he swung his foot above his head off to his right and planted it into the snow on the roof. As he dug his foot into the snow a couple, arm in arm stumbled out of the bar. Their expression quickly turned from intoxicated lust to amazement and terror as they looked up to see Sparks rocking his foot onto the snow-covered roof, pushing his hands down and moving onto the roof.

He had conquered the Ajax.

In the time when that winter melted and turned to spring there was another group of builderers on the scene. When summer came around they were extremely confident in their skills.

This summertime session occurred during the typical hours, just after the bar closed, two thirty in the morning. This group: P-Real, B-Boy Roy, T-Drizz and Lucy. The stars shined brilliantly, the moon lit the town up as bright as the streetlight. The air was cool as it always is in a mountain town at night. This light lit up one side of an old church, which this crew wanted to climb. From what I’d seen and heard nothing was off limits that particular summer: banks, government buildings, rumor had it one night these guys even climbed the police station. We arrived at the church, a forty foot tall yellow bricked building, which appeared that it was from the early nineteen hundreds that narrowed as it went higher, slender at the top, with a four foot tall cross on the roof.

We followed P-Real, who was the reason behind the partying that evening. It was his birthday. P-Real saw the lit up side of the church and found it to be to his liking.

Now, P-Real is a southern boy. In our climbing community this made him stand apart from nearly everyone else. A remarkable and unique character, that everyone in the climbing community knew, or knew of. So all four of us listened, when in his distinct southern drawl he looked up at the arête on the side of the church and uttered slowly in a rather monotone way, “I’m go-nna climb this fu-cker.”

So off he went up the church. P-Real climbed in the trademark warrior way, with no hesitation, no hint of nervousness. Just fluid movement from brick to brick that protruded from the side of the church generously and at equal increments. In this manner he quickly entered a zone, thirty feet off the ground where a fall would be disastrous. Though he had four of us spotting him, we could do little to protect him from the six step concrete stairway that lay directly in his fall path. A metal railing eight feet long to the left of the stairs ensured that if P-Real fell things would be bad, real bad. The stairway and railing was an emergency exit for church patrons, but for P-Real if he were to fall down on this, it would spell disaster, and possibly a chance to meet his maker.