Lori Butz has been hanging tough for years. An accomplished climber, she’s made her way up some slow and steady El Cap ascents. Nowadays, a lot of the biggest dirtbags, including Aaron, Ben, and Chongo, occupy her couch in the Bay Area. Lori is like a mom to the Monkeys . . . a slightly sarcastic, piss-taking mom. “You haven’t climbed Freerider?” she razzed me one day in 2007. “What’s your problem? This guy from Colorado just walked up and climbed it!” This ego bash lit a fire under my ass, and I freed the Freerider (VI 5.12d) two weeks later . . . and even came back to do it in a day.

I first met Alex and Thomas Huber in the late 1990s, after both freed the Salathé Wall (VI 5.13b), further opening people’s eyes to the possibilities revealed by Paul Piana and the late Todd Skinner in 1988. And in the Hubers’ case, while you might not guess it, these two Bavarian Fabios are wholeheartedly Monkeys, happy to grovel in the dirt with us hoi polloi. (One night, the Hubers had everyone in camp making drunken ape calls till 3 a.m.) In this photo, I’m trying to figure out why their forearms work so much better than mine.