“I don’t know if I have this in me anymore.” For the length of my professional climbing career, I shunned these words. I have always taken the theory that I cannot back down even an inch or I will never reach my true potential. But here I was, 1800 feet up El Cap, feeling like I might finally be at the end of my rope. My arms were seizing every time I lifted them above my head. Blood was seeping from holes in my fingers, knees, elbows, shins, and forehead. I had been abusing my body on this climb for over two months and I was tired. Deeply tired, in both body and mind. Several times over the past two days I had spent more than an hour on a redpoint burn, only to pump out or have a foothold crumble, sending me down to repeat the abuse. I had fallen over a dozen times, having to re-climb pitches each time, and it had taken its toll. Now I was only one pitch from sure success, feeling like I could go no further.

The pain and suffering started in October of 2003 when I decided that I needed the experience of soloing a wall. I chose the Dihedral Wall of El Capitan because it was one of the most obvious lines on El Cap, the third route accomplished on the wall after the Nose and the Salathé, and I wanted to recon something that might go free.
I was not the first climber to think of freeing the Dihedral. Alan Lester and Pete Takeda free climbed fifty percent of the route in the early 1990s. Todd Skinner and Paul Piana worked on it extensively in 2001 and 2002, pioneering the variations that would eventually allow a complete free ascent.
When I soloed it last fall, it looked nearly impossible. Steep, flaring dihedrals stretched on for hundreds of feet without break. The cracks were thin throughout the bottom half, only occasionally big enough to accept more than a willing fingertip, and up higher they became bottomless and flaring. Often the cracks petered out completely. Face holds seemed to appear, just big enough and close enough together to make me think the moves might go free, but I had serious doubts. If the Dihedral Wall could somehow be climbed, it would be one of the most extraordinary free routes I had ever laid eyes on.