So the sandbagging began... Conrad picked the Pacific Ocean Wall, a line up the right flank of El Cap. In person, on a sunny day, El Capitan is a bright, massive, 3,000-foot-tall sheet of granite, completely dominating, as its name implies. One can have a difficult time getting used to the scale of it, but I had total trust in Conrad, 45, and Jimmy, 34, when it came to Big Wallery, where both of them had earned their reputations. I also had total trust in Ivo Ninov, whom Jimmy brought into the game. Ivo, 32, came to Yosemite from Bulgaria nine years ago, has been up El Cap more than 50 times, and is one of the best climbers in the area. He learned to speak English in Yosemite and says things like "The moon is sick" and "Life is bitching." Our plan was to go in October and climb the wall over the course of seven days.

"Just so we're clear, I'm not secretly good at rock climbing," I told them all when we met in August at the Outdoor Retailer show, in Salt Lake City. "I will be a novice. Will that be OK?" They smirked and nodded. Ivo then mentioned a film idea he and his stone-monkey buddies had been tossing around, something about dragging a corpse up an El Cap route to fulfill the last wishes of a guy who'd wanted to do the climb alive. I was encouraged.

On October 2, we drove into the valley and met up with Ivo, who'd been preparing for "launch." We pressed our noses against the car windows to see the flashes of rock soaring all around us. Ivo had stockpiled 20 gallons of water and a fair amount of hardware and rope at the base of the route. We spent some time with the climbers hanging out in El Cap Meadow, where I basked in Conrad's reflected celebrity glow. We looked at the tiny climbers on various routes on the wall, and I reminisced about my family history in the valley. My dad, Ron Hahn, was a Yosemite rock climber in the 1940s and '50s. These walls were the scene of some of my earliest childhood memories.