Undeterred, I recited the mantra of my Total-Zen climbing philosophy (i.e. climbing is climbing — choss, lowballs, plastic) and ran back to the car, switching pad for harness. I returned to the Mental Block boulder, home of the Gill Pinch, where a standing-room-only crowd of boulderers had congealed, among them members of the Five Ten Team and a few dedicated volunteer belayers wearing cowboy hats and jeans (the HTH has a Wild-West theme). I tied in to the 10-foot TR. The belayer standing next to me (a guy) had braces and wore Daisy Dukes and a mesh football jersey. Another volunteer with a toy frontiersman’s rifle and overalls stood listlessly in a sandy corner, firing blanks. Time did not stand still. No one held his or her breath. I grabbed the starting pinch and looked up to the distant lip, which was obscured only by my toprope.

My first attempt was an abject failure. My belayer, a friendly fellow named Peter, informed me that the sanctioned Beta allowed jumping with one foot on the ground. “That’s a dab where I come from, pardner,” I thought to myself — but when in Rome, right? Take two: with one toe on a legit hold, the other planted on terra firma, I took flight, latching the lip. I held the swing, kicked up my foot in a contortion equivalent to putting your leg behind your neck, and did a mantel press so tenuous and terrifying that, had I not been on TR, I would have backed down without a doubt.

I stood, victorious, atop the Mental Block. Sort of. I was now faced with a strange paradox: I had done the boulder problem; I had not done the boulder problem.