AS FOR THE SALATHÉ CLIMB, it doesn't get any easier. As the days wear on, Davis grows increasingly miserable. Her muscles are fried, she's almost out of food, and the whole enterprise begins to seem ridiculous. Early on day nine, her belayer, Cybele Blood, hauls herself to the top on fixed lines to go for supplies, leaving Davis alone on her ledge.

All things considered, there are worse places to be: The day is sunny and still, and the entire Yosemite Valley spreads out below her. She can see riffly white rapids on the Merced River and, later in the afternoon, her own blue truck pulling out of the parking lot, heading west toward the grocery store.

If it weren't for Blood, an itinerant climber from L.A. whom Davis met a couple of weeks ago, she wouldn't be up here at all. She'd still be tacking up WANTED: BELAYER signs on the Camp 4 bulletin board and leaving half-pleading, half-cheerleading messages to get me to do it—even though I'd climbed a total of ten times in my life. Dean had agreed to help her on the Salathé's first 14 pitches, but she needed a partner for the rest.

By dawn on day 12, just 50 feet of nasty, overhanging granite stand between Davis and an easy 300-foot finish. She eats three aspirins. "I feel great," she lies to Cybele, then starts climbing.

The sun rises onto the face, heating the rock and making her fingers sweaty. She falls. She thinks about failure. Then she hears a whoosh of bird wings, and suddenly all the doubt and struggle dissipate, and she knows what to do. Lunging through the final holds, feeling perfect at last, Steph Davis becomes the first woman to free the Salathé.

In the days that follow, she swings between elation and fatigue and her usual lingering insecurity. "I never once had that wonderful ‘Ahh, I'm a badass' feeling," she tells me. "Everything that could have gone wrong did. I should have gone down." Mostly, though, she's relieved to be off El Cap. "I'm not doing a big Valley season anytime soon," she says. "I'm just going to do what I feel like doing."

Which means packing her truck, collecting her dog and husband, and going home to Moab. She needs to install a new woodstove and visit her parents, who are just back from a Hawaiian cruise. As it happens, there was a climbing wall on the ship, and one day Connie decided to try it. "They had these pretty little colored handholds, and I got two-thirds of the way up," she tells me. "Then I looked down and thought, What's this senior citizen doing way up here?"

A few months later, I call Davis in Moab. She's about to leave for Patagonia and is already scheming her summer 2006 project: free climbing in the Italian Alps with Dean. Right off, I can tell something is different. The Salathé climb has finally sunk in; she seems almost relaxed.

"I don't have to prove anything to myself anymore, or to anyone else," she says. "For once, I have no expectations and no pressure. I just feel free."