I had a small breakthrough on day three... To follow Ivo's Latitudes pitch, I needed to go sideways on the wall, something I'd come to dread. The preferred method was for me to rappel from the belay station, descending to a V on the rope, well below the station I'd left and the one I wanted to get to. As usual, I was worried that my Grigri (the lowering device) would fail, if the rope didn't break first or pull out the anchors it was attached to. I was doing the best I could to climb out of the V when I learned to jug—finally. I got it.

I was encouraged when I clambered onto a rock ledge to join Ivo, whom Conrad had begun calling the Bulgarian Wheelbarrow Artist, in reference to how he might consider carting his truly massive balls from one place to another.

After a largely sleepless, shivering night on the portaledge, better weather arrived on day four, and it was a little easier to watch the peregrine falcons flying about the face and to peer from side to side to see how the other humans on the wall were doing.

There were more breakthrough moments, like that sunny morning on day four when I finally decided to trust the rope, stepped off the ledge, swung 20 feet straight out from the cliff, and enjoyed it. I twirled out there in space, took pictures of my partners, and let out a big stone-monkey yell (as everybody else had been doing for days).

The loads became lighter eventually, too, and I reached a point where I was able to help with the hauling. I began laughing more—at Ivo's stories of learning to skydive and BASE-jump, both of which, he said, are "better than sex." I rolled my eyes at Jimmy's romantic quandaries. (People once ranked him as one of the most eligible bachelors, and he's done slightly more stuff than Indiana Jones, yet he still worries he might get shut down asking someone out for a coffee.) I laughed at Conrad's talent for devising novel climbing strategies and inventing phrases. Team Wheelbarrow was getting the job done.

There was no shortage of drama playing out around us. Some distance east of us, Ivo's friend Ammon McNeely had taken a big whipper on the route he was rope-soloing. "He must have botched the sequence," Ivo said. For a few moments, Ammon seemed to be unconscious and was hanging from his ropes. A rescue operation got going, and a helicopter flew into the meadow to stand by. Ammon managed, through yells and arm signals, to indicate that he didn't need a rescue. Meanwhile, climbers Alex and Thomas Huber busted the speed record on the classic and well-traveled Nose route—twice—while we were on the wall, watching. They climbed it in two hours, 45 minutes, 45 seconds.