"You'll love this next part—it's super-sick!"... The boys were taking good care of me. I'd make it to a belay station with my teeth clenched and muscles quivering and get a big slap on the back from Conrad. He'd ask, in all seriousness, "Dave, do you want to lead the next pitch?" Jimmy would see me nervously looking around, lock eyes with mine, and say, "Dude, you're doing it!" Ivo made sure I knew how to back up my systems, and each small success was greeted with "Man, that's super-sweet!"

The final day was mostly just fun and hard as hell at the same time. By then we had big views of Half Dome and the rest of the world. I spent hours gazing at the bulk of Cathedral and Sentinel rocks, across the way. I was still apologizing all the time, but I was also enjoying the heck out of the place.

We phoned legendary climber Jim Bridwell on our sixth and final night and enjoyed hearing what it had been like for him to put up the Pacific Ocean route in 1975. Bridwell said he'd never repeated the climb, preferring to hold on to his original impressions of its challenges. The four of us crowded in to hear his exact recollections.

When I topped out on day seven, I didn't spend a lot of time at the edge peering back down, nor did I do anything stupid like kiss the flat ground or curse the wall. I was happy to put things down without clipping them in, to take off my climbing harness and my grubby shirt and feel the sun on my rippling and huge muscles. Well, they weren't huge, but they felt like they were.

I slowly and carefully rappelled down the East Ledges descent route, carrying a big load. Conrad waited to make sure I was OK, just like in 1999, when he and I came down the Northeast Ridge from Everest's summit together in a snow cloud. Some things never change.

Now I'm home... And doing the reading I should've done before the climb. In the guidebook Yosemite Big Walls, I found a quote from Royal Robbins, perhaps the greatest of all big-wall pioneers. In reference to climbing a rope in 1961 on an overhanging El Cap pitch a few thousand feet in the air, Robbins said he was so scared that "I could barely suppress a shout of terror!" He went up anyway. In my own awkward fashion, so did I, and I'll treasure that barely suppressed shout forever.