Free The Wall by Jeff Long Page A

searchers to slake their thirst with his water, and empty plastic jugs stood in a neat line. His water offering to the girl was still full, though. They’d guessed its significance. It sat untouched by the head of the slab.
    Hugh and Lewis divided the remaining five gallons and continued up the slope. Their cache wasn’t far now. Things were almost familiar again.
    Climbers’ garbage began to surface in Hugh’s light. A piece of black metal glinted in the pine needles. Lewis rooted it free with his toe, a rusted, pitted piton from the iron age, back before chrome-moly steel came into use. Empty, flattened cans glittered like tin and aluminum leaves. There was a hat, and a paper bag with human feces, and a mangled Pentax camera.
    The pilgrims had been busy. Bits and pieces of sling hung in the limbs, red and green and peppermint striped. He spied an inexplicable lone ski pole, then suddenly, with a billowing huff, the torn remains of a parachute shroud. All in all, it spelled a crazy surge of events, whole generations of activity that he had missed out on since their last visit.
    Very suddenly, Hugh’s light splashed back into his eyes, blinding him.
    El Cap sprang straight from the earth.
    He slapped his palms on the hard, slippery flank with something like joy. Black mica crystals glittered in the white granite. Its touch stabilized him.
    He stepped away and craned back with his headlamp. His light faded to darkness about fifty feet up. There at the fifty-foot mark, by government decree, Yosemite’s walls officially became wilderness.
    Lewis came up from the trees behind him. In the beam of his light, Hugh cast a huge shadow. They were in the land of giants now. But as Lewis approached, the shadow quickly shrank to mortal size.
    “Oh, yeah,” said Lewis. He set down the water jugs and slapped the source, just as Hugh had, grinning. “Now tell me, heathen, dare I eat a peach?”
    More ritual. “Should I roll my trousers?” Hugh dutifully supplied. Sometimes they would keep reciting right to the ropes.
    Everything began here. They hurried along the stone root, following the trace of a path worn by countless climbers.
    Their cache of gear was waiting where they’d left it, two waist-high haul bags carefully—scientifically, one might say—packed. The bags contained their life-support system for the vertical world. They hadn’t bothered with any elaborate camouflage to conceal the bags. Thefts happened, but so did vigilante justice. Anyone with brains knew better than to pilfer a fellow climber’s haul bags. But also, anyone with brains knew better than to leave anything of real value—like good ropes and expensive hardware—in a haul bag overnight.
    Lewis checked the sailor’s knots he’d used to tie the haul bags shut. It was not a complicated knot, resembling a regular square knot except for the lay of the working end. For centuries sailors had used it in lieu of a lock, not as a security but as a seal. If a thief had tampered with the knot, you could usually tell at a glance.
    “I don’t think he got us,” he said, meaning Joshua. “Too busy stealing a bride, the sick bastard.”
    Dawn was still more than an hour away. Even when it came, direct light would take another two hours to reach the floor and heat the stone. But they acted as if the day were already slipping away. With little talk, they went to work.
    They opened the haul bags and pulled out two old “beater” ropes that were past their prime, but were still good for hauling and fixing. These, plus their two new coils, would give them six hundred feet of reach the first day, and still let them descend to sleep on the ground a final night. Not that they would be covering six hundred feet today. The bottom section was going to be consuming. And the middle section, too. And the headwall. Seven days, easily.
    While Lewis carted the rope to where their climb actually began, Hugh started the elaborate process of taping up. You could go through a