"If you insist!" he said with that same irrepressible happiness. James got himself tied onto the rope, showed me the knots for verification, and checked my belay setup. "On belay?" he asked, as prim and proper as if we were in a climbing gym.

"Belay on," I replied, flashing him a smile.

James got onto the granite wall and unhooked from the anchor. "Climbing!"

"Climb on!" I said back, settling into my belay stance as he started up the climb.

I fed the rope out to James as he made his way up our fourth pitch of the climb. This would be the final ascent up the gorgeous gendarme, I thought, glancing at the remaining rope and back up at the distance James had left to lead. He pulled out a piece of gear as I watched, the cam catching the sunlight. He wiggled it into the crack he was following up the spire of granite, testing it before clipping it to the rope and moving higher. I kept feeding him rope, keeping the slack the way he liked it, with enough space to move but not to fall.

I glanced out across our view, looking out across the rolling shapes of the granite mountains, their bald tops wrinkled with little lines of green from the creeping forest that lay in deep evergreen all around us. A red-tailed hawk circled above us, the sunlight shining russet through its spread tail as it rode the afternoon thermals. Gorgeous, I thought again. There's nowhere better on Earth.

"Take!" he called.

I pulled the rope down to lock my belay device, and resettled my feet against the wall, leaning back to look up at him, sixty feet above me.

"You good?" I yelled back.

"Yeah!" James said. "Just need to think about the approach!"

I squinted up at the granite. The crack he'd been on faded to almost nothing, with a bulge of smooth granite presenting an imposing overhang above it. There was another skinny crack to the left, though, not an easy switch from where he was, but not an impossible traverse. But he was peering to the right; there had to be something around the side of the gendarme I couldn't see.

"Okay, climbing!"

"Climb on!" I replied again, and started feeding him rope.

James worked his way to the right, and then up, only the side of him visible. I kept an eye on the tension, feeding rope out with precise care.

I heard him whoop, and looked up to see him standing on the top of the gendarme, arms flung out. I started laughing as he did a little victory dance, waggling his hips.

"I'm king of the woooorld!" he crowed, howling the words out into the uncaring wilderness. "Leah, you're going to love it up here! You can see for miles! Let me just—"

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