Around 5pm I watched the light turn the landscape around the bench yellow, then orange, then red, and then pink. I imagined what’d it be like to sit next to someone and watch the colors saturate the horizon. I pictured romance on the pink bench.

I wondered how to escape the pain. I could be one of the 50,000 people who kill themselves annually, 70% of which are white men. I could be a statistic. With nowhere to stay except my van, I felt homeless, unemployed, and worthless. The future seemed too daunting, too overwhelming.

When my fingers and toes warm, I begin free-soloing the North Overhang. Just below the 5.9 crux, I stop to breathe and chalk. This time if I fall, I want to die -- I cannot deal with falling again.

The Hipster Handbook, the little blue Bible I kept on my truck’s dashboard, pegged us as “deck”: hipster lingo for cool. We followed its words religiously, shunning and reducing to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream tourists, thru-hikers, and regular rock climbers.

Why am I bringing an animal to the crag? I asked myself. What’s the point? While Wesley enjoyed being outside, the impact he had on myself, other climbers, and the boulders created serious concerns.

So how skinny do I—or any of us—really need to be to crush? Where do you draw the line between strategic dieting and an unhealthy eating disorder?

One sport climber lugged a 20-pound car battery half an hour up the steep trail to plug in his portable vaporizer and fuel his use of hippie lettuce. Other climbers wore i-Pods, their favorite curry-stained t-shirt, and their lucky pair of underwear. They did anything to bring themselves luck, an edge on their project.

In April, I drove my Saturn into the Valley. My car rattled with character. The driver doors only opened from the outside. A Berkeley hood rat keyed the door lock a few years ago making the vehicle accessible with a pair of scissors. The back smelled of the over 1,000 nights I slept inside of it.

If the .4 umbrella blew, I would break my feet on the ledge below. My body fought against my memory of weaker beta. I cranked my fingers as hard as I could, smeared my feet on the overhanging wall, and thrutched to a finger lock.

The Zion search for a Yosemite legend.

Anna Meika, Stanley’s seven-and-a-half months pregnant wife, sounded the alarm. She hacked his email account and found a note from the BBC crew wondering where he was: He hadn’t returned his rental car, he’d never shown up for his nine-day BBC rigging job, and he hadn’t been heard from in 10 days. The search began.