IN THE FALL OF 1994, Davis was climbing the Diamond, a multipitch wall on Longs Peak, when she looked over and saw a guy in black tights and a hot-pink windbreaker. "His hair was wild, and he was hyper and couldn't find his next bolt," she says. "I yelled over to him to tell him where it was, but all I could think was, Who is this sport-climbing weenie?"

Like Davis, Dean Potter was a young climber hoping to get better. He'd dropped out of the University of New Hampshire a couple of years earlier and was driving between crags, living in his VW Jetta. Potter tracked Davis down a few weeks after they met, but she wasn't interested in a boyfriend. "I didn't want to be distracted from climbing, so I put him off, until one day I finally relented," she says. "It was fireworks and drama from then on."

Davis and Potter began an on-again, off-again relationship, living together (in the back of one of

Davis saw Dean Potter for the first time in 1993. Her future husband was on Longs Peak, looking hyper in a hot-pink windbreaker, and she remembers thinking, Who is this sport-climbing weenie?

their vehicles) and apart (in the backs of both of their vehicles). The turmoil had as much to do with the unpredictability of the climbing life as with their own volatile ambitions. By then, Davis had scored a modest sponsorship deal with climbing-shoe maker Five Ten, and was branching out into alpine expeditions to Patagonia, Pakistan, and Baffin Island. Potter was busy with his own projects, too.

"Dean ran around Hueco Tanks with his friends," Davis says. "I'd ask them to spot me on bouldering problems, but they would leave to go do harder stuff. So there I'd be, alone with my crash pad, hoping a stranger might walk by and help."

They split up in the fall of 2001, just before they were scheduled to leave for Patagonia. Davis was hoping to finally summit Fitz Roy, an 11,073-foot glaciated peak in Argentina whose wicked storms had forced her off the mountain on a previous trip. She flew down alone and found a partner at the east-side base camp; as soon as the weather cleared, they summited. The next day, Potter soloed Fitz Roy from the west side, saw "girl crampon prints in the snow," and knew Davis had made it. A month later, back in Moab, Potter proposed, and in June 2002 they got married in a meadow high in the La Sals.

From the start, nothing about their marriage was normal. They were rarely in the same place at the same time—and when they were, they fought over whose projects came first. Potter usually won, accepting Davis's help but not offering much in return. "I had this perception that I had to be all virtuous and wifely and help him with his climbs and not have any of my own goals," says Davis, who spent two months helping Potter train for his historic one-day free climb of both El Cap and Half Dome in September 2002. "But to be fair, he didn't ask that of me. It was something that I'd made up in my mind."

After Potter completed the linkup, Davis assumed he'd return the favor by helping her on a difficult ascent of Cosmic Debris, a classic 5.13b crack climb in Yosemite. But he belayed her only twice during her successful effort.

"I was pretty tweaked after that," she admits. "That's when I started keeping score."

Back in Utah, Potter wanted her to belay him on a 500-foot, three-pitch sandstone tower called the Tombstone, but Davis insisted that they climb it together, trading leads to put up the first—and, to date, only—free ascent in January 2003. Afterwards, when Davis wanted to try Pink Flamingo again—"it was festering, driving me down"—Potter took off for Yosemite, leaving her to fish around base camp for climbing partners. In March 2003, she put up the first female free climb of the route.

"I wasn't mad at Dean," Davis remembers. "He was psyched in Yosemite, and I made it work in Moab. I was climbing strong, and I realized this was how it was going to be: I had to be really self-driven. So I went back to the Valley and started working on other climbs, including Freerider."

Snaking past buttresses and long cracks, Freerider rises 38 pitches to the summit of El Cap. Davis's training program was part masochism, all discipline: Two or three times a week, she'd hike ten miles to the summit, self-belay a thousand feet down to the lower pitches, and climb up alone. "Most people don't just walk up to El Cap and say, ‘Oh, I'm going to free it,' " she says. "It's like playing piano: taking something big and breaking it down and then trying to achieve a perfect performance."

Training solo is one thing, but free-climbing the entire wall without a partner was impossible. When Davis was ready to attempt the route, in April 2004, she needed a partner. At first Potter begged off, but then he changed his mind. With Dean belaying, she became the first woman to free the route, in four days. A month later, with the help of Austrian climber Heinz Zak, she returned to Freerider and became the second woman, after Lynn Hill, to free El Cap in a day.

As it turned out, Freerider was a turning point in her relationship with Dean: The couple finally accepted that their marriage, weird though it was, actually worked. "Our roles started to materialize," says Davis. "We agreed that there are some things we'll do together and some things we'll do apart. The reality is, I wouldn't really want someone following me around, bearing my rock shoes on a pillow and saying, ‘Rah-rah, Steph!' That would get on my nerves!"