TEAM FREE
Through a spotting scope, I watch the boys try the route that first week, then head home to Colorado in late April. On May 5, one week before Caldwell and Sjong are to attempt their final push, Caldwell sends me an update.

"Since I last e-mailed, we spent four more days on the route," he writes. "We figured out the gear, hammering in the required pins, and led most of the hard pitches. It is coming together nicely. I feel like our stamina is increasing and our bodies are adapting to the vertical world. We end the days with more energy, and even our hands are swelling less." Still, Caldwell says he's worn down his fingernails until they bleed, and Sjong has bruised his coccyx and buttocks shuffling up the bombays.

Caldwell continues: "I was thinking about how the article is about the science of climbing and how we have had to analyze every ripple, every spot of texture. This climb really seems to be about …finding the places on the faces that tilt one degree in the right direction and therefore are more solid to stand on. Deciding on the exact position to switch from chimneying to stemming to laybacking… ." He winds up by writing that he feels lucky to be climbing at a time when so many El Cap routes remain to be freed.

The next day, Sjong e-mails the gear list. It's three pages, detailing the rack for each block of leads and then giving a pitch-by-pitch breakdown—all in all, hundreds of placements. The climbers will head up with this rack, one 9.2-millimeter lead line, and a 5mm "tag" line—a thinner auxiliary cord used to pull up a heavier worker line, for any heavy hauling. They've cached food, water, and provisions in a few key spots.

From May 12 through May 16, Sjong and Caldwell live on the wall. On day one, the climbers move smoothly through the first 13 pitches—nearly half the route—stalling slightly six pitches up, on a 5.13b/c traverse that they haven't practiced enough. They spend the night on Grey Ledges, a small, two-tiered, sleeping-pad-width platform roughly 1,500 feet up. The second day starts with a harsh warm-up: a pitch of 5.13b, where both climbers fall. But they sort it out and make it to the fixed portaledge at pitch 18, below the yawning chimneys. Here they pick up three days' worth of fresh supplies—a gallon of water per climber per day, food, Neosporin, sleeping equipment, and warm clothes.

On day three, their pace slows—they do only three pitches. Sjong falls four times on his hardest lead, a 5.13d chimney to a rounded layback, before succeeding, and Caldwell falls once on the hardest pitch, a 5.14a, before he makes it. Sjong tries this one for two solid hours, to no avail. (He'll call the pitch his "asterisk," since he never climbed it continuously without falling, doing it instead in two sections.) He says he and Caldwell didn't get emotional about the hold­up—it was simply a case of what Sjong calls "the strong getting stronger and the weak getting weaker."

That afternoon, the climbers set up their sleeping bags as sunscreens over their portaledge, using Sjong's iPod Shuffle to listen to what Caldwell, who's naive about such things, calls "death metal" (Guns N' Roses, Led Zeppelin, Metallica). The next day, they rest, a boring proposition with only the Shuffle for entertainment.

On the fifth day, May 16, the climbers top out, moving surprisingly quickly through the final crux, a 120-foot, 5.13d finger crack called the Seven Seas, which cuts through a double-overhanging apex to a slightly overhanging headwall crack.

And with that they've completed the hardest overall big-wall free climb in the world, tougher even than Dihedral Wall, an El Cap 5.14a a few hundred feet left of Magic Mushroom that Caldwell freed in 2004.

Back at the Caldwells' house later the next day, Sjong jumps into his EuroVan, bound for Boulder. The moment he's gone, Caldwell heads downstairs to train. The two-person climb left him feeling exhilarated, wanting more. It's an energy surge partially explained by what Caldwell calls "the flywheel effect."

"As you start to really learn El Cap's friction," he says, "you can climb knowing exactly how much weight to put on your feet without tiring your arms." Now he knows he can free the entire route in under 24 hours. Magic Mushroom has fresh chalk marks to help point the way, and he knows all the sequences and gear. Still, the line has 11 pitches of 5.12 and 10 of 5.13 to 5.14. Failure is a real possibility.