By the time Dade finished the pitch it was almost 10:30, and the long skirt of shadow the Tower had thrown during our approach had tucked up tight to the base of the route. Dade clipped into our anchor chains and then gave me the look—what his wife Bev calls the "Goat eye."

"I should have gotten some gear in," I said, trying to head him off at the pass.

"Yeah, you should have. I don’t know how you can freeze on that nothing route you did yesterday, and then run out something that would freak out most people—including me.” 

I nodded. I wanted to talk to him about the Climbing Brain—about whether what I'd just experienced was a piece of it—but then Dade needed to get his head together for this very hard line and I didn't want to throw him off. He untied and retied his shoes, kissing each one on the very tip, then looked over the pitch. The walls on either side started out close together and formed a kind of chute at first, but then peeled away after about forty feet to widen out. All that was left from there to the top was seventy feet of razor thin seam, which finally passed though an eight-foot bulge. That was the technical crux, where the crack didn’t change in shape, but overhung slightly. The real crux, however, was placing gear just below the bulge.  In my conversation with the ranger that morning, I'd gotten the word on gear: a point-five TCU or an Alien just below the bulge, then a small, but solid nut about 10 feet after it. The ranger had to rest on the TCU below the bulge, then pumped out trying to place the nut and took a thirty-foot whip.

Dade changed the order of his rack few times as he looked over the route, getting the tiny RPs and nuts and TCUs in just the order he thought he'd need, and then he did something odd,  something I’d only see him do with dogs. He grasped my head with both hands and pressed the crook of his nose to my forehead and held us for a moment, his prescription safety glasses pinned between us. Then, with the briefest of eye contact, he clicked his cheek with a horsy giddy-up and turned to face the rock, so that I was looking at him from the side, his shoulders square and wide.

“Watch me close," He said.

"I will."

“Not too tight. Keep the rope—”

“I got you.”

He worked the sidewalls as long as he could, spread-eagled as if he were climbing inside an elevator shaft, then he stuck to just the right side in a layback, pausing for a long, casual rest—and a couple good friend placements—about fifty feet out. That rest (I found out when I followed the route) was just a thin edge, about the width of the back of a good kitchen knife, but Dade had balanced there with an ease that those people down on the trail, who were still watching with binoculars, didn't seem to have standing on flat ground.

With his hair whipping around his head he checked over his gear and then set out on the completely vertical line, only able to stuff his first digits in by torqueing them hard.

He did this left fingers, right fingers, foot, foot; left fingers, right fingers, foot, foot, moving fast until he reached a place in the seam you can’t see from below, where it opens up and you can get your whole hand in. He punched his left into this, then bone-hanged, his body turned sideways to the rock as he slammed in a good nut and clipped the rope–all of this as if in a single movement. This was the last good rest until past the bulge–another fifty feet away–and his veins already seemed as thick as the rope in my hands. He shook out his left arm, hard, then made a few more moves to get his left foot in the slot where his hand had been.

“Aaah-oooow!” he howled, setting off again aggressively. He was climbing fast, even for him–only getting in fingertips, only able to smear his feet–and barreled right through a section where he might have gotten another piece, finally pausing on an edge where he could set his toes. It was too hard, I realized. He’d taken on too much and was so far out that if he fell he’d go fifty feet and come to a stop just above me–and that was only if the last nut held.

“You’re getting pretty run-out!” I yelled, gripping the rope too tight.

He managed to get in a big RP, then went another ten feet where it seemed he’d found an edge for his right foot, maybe eight feet below the bulge.

“This is some serious shit! I need to hang a second!”

“Can you down climb to the RP?” My stomach was so knotted up I could barely yell loud enough.

He couldn’t, though. I could feel how hard it was through the rope. It was thin and crimpy and on the other side of the spectrum from big and burly Son of Sam—as hard as the crux pitch of Seven Seas in Yosemite would be. Then he was moving again, almost at the bulge and twenty feet above that RP—its cable so thin it would surely break if he fell that far on it. I could hear his gear tinkling, the wind ripping around us, my own heart, beating not so much faster as with more depth, as if I were a great drum.

“Fucking pumped!” he yelled at the rock, not calm anymore, not in his Climbing Brain. He got an arm free for long enough to swing his rack around and pulled off a cam. His left ring and middle fingers were locked into the seam, straight above me, feet smeared and seeming stable, and just as he started to pop the cam in, he slipped sideways, barndooring out over me in a millionth of a second. In my mind's eye I saw him falling then, perhaps like he’d seen me on Son of Sam, and I locked the rope down hard and waited for the bomb-blast.