A hundred feet below me, the wall begins to slope away, a soft red dirt littered with debris from above. Where I am, though, every surface seems to be in a race for heaven, each angle stretching its way upward, no curve out of place. Slickrock. It's not an apt name, to be fair to my fingers. It's sandstone, a ruddy aged iron color that compliments sunsets. Russell is behind me, Weston is behind me. They're negotiating the five-strand cable bolted into the wall, bolted above a four-inch ledge that leans away from the vertical surface above it, leans at an angle I would not describe as friendly. I look down, but not far. My finger has left a spot of blood on a resting boulder, a dot of true red on a pretending surface. I shudder. Russell and Weston are engaged. They don't see me, can't know the sanguine explosion that just ran through me, the premonition of the color of my death on the rocks below. I shut it out. I'm in the crevice now, in the chimney, in the ropes. I pull. They stretch and don't return. I pull the looseness from them. I pull my feet off the ground. They don't snap, but I can see where the cords are rubbing on the rough rock above. These ropes are meant to save my life, the knots in them left by friends I'll never meet who know I need something to pull against. I'm five feet up from the safety of the larger ledge, my hand wedged into the rough grit of the fissure, and I stop. Weston is still calling back to Russell. I don't know how he's doing with the height. Twenty minutes ago, he was having trouble negotiating a ten foot scrabble up a pea-scree slope. Now he's suspended above a fatal fall. I can hear the calm in Russell's voice. He's been up this way before. I'm very glad they can't see me, because I can't move.
I've climbed unceasingly for an hour and a half now, and I've just crossed the ledge, my left arm wrapped twice around the cable even though I know my footing is sure. I've overbalanced in the wind, tipping toward the endless sloping tumble behind me. But this thirty feet of vertical wall is somehow an impossible task. I press my body into the wall, listening to the shifty sound of the grit against my breathing chest. The wind is flying around the mesa top, carrying my friends' voices just beyond hearing. I look up. I'm not sure I can actually climb this. I look down. Shit. Mistake. Blank. Blank. Blank.
I curse when I'm stressed. I curse more on this wall than on the rest of the mesa. I curse more on the mesa than I have for a year.
I pull on the rope. There's a foothold there, a handhold here, and slowly I'm gaining on the rock. I piece my way up ten feet, fifteen feet, and then I'm at the crux, a pinch in the rock that flutes out smoothly, a round hummock topping the left and a flat shelf uncomfortably high on the right. The shape of things have left my torso and arms nothing to cling to but the ropes, and my legs nowhere to go. My arms are getting tired. I can feel the fatigue I get when the kite pulls too hard for too long, and I let go and it floats lazily to the ground. I don't want to float anywhere. I jam my right leg and hip into the crack as deep as they will go, and I try something stupid. Flipping my left leg out and away, I kick back up towards my butt with my heel. I feel the toe clear the ledge, and I silently praise the wasted hours of bouldering videos for saving me in this moment. My beta is clumsy and terrified. What should take thirty seconds puts me in a panic for four minutes. I am shaking by the time I pull my body up the final foot of rope, scraping against the sandstone, afraid to leave the wall lest I overbalance and tip away, here at the cusp. On my hands and knees, water bottle and binoculars clattering against the clifftop debris, I crawl to where I can see Weston and Russell, just stepping off the tiny ledge, just shaping up the chimney for a climb, and I scream. Catharsis rips the air from my lungs in a wild pitch of high-flying echoes. And then—it occurs to me they might think it was my last sound as I fell from the wall, I follow it:
"I made it!"
I had new holes in my pantslegs, sweat seeping through my shirt, and a heart rate entirely too high, but I made it.
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