When was the last time you broke the rules?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a New Englander, and rules are important to me. They got us through those first tough winters after the Mayflower dropped us off in Plymouth; they're what get us through tough times today, like when another priest from Boston comes out of the closet or the Patriots have a losing season. There are rules for everything: rules for success and failure and survival. In the puritanical church of alpine climbing, there is one rule that's sacrosanct: you need to go to the summit. It's a good rule, and one I happen to believe in.

But didn't we all start climbing because it feels good to break the rules?

At 2 p.m. on the afternoon of May 3, I was sandwiched in my EV2 between two six-foot giants: Ben Gilmore and Peter Doucette. We bivied at the base of the Fin Wall, above the Yentna Glacier south of Mount Foraker. The wall had never before been attempted, a fact that probably had something to do with the six miles of convoluted crevasses fields, seracs, and icefall that lay below. We had just spent seven hours running the gauntlet through this maze to reach this spot, a narrow ledge dug out of a 50-degree snow slope at the berschrund.