As Russ stepped into his aiders,

I swallowed about half a bottle of Tylenol and started pawing through ropes and stuff sacks. So far, our system on the Zodiac had been to start climbing and then make it up as we went. I'd gone along on Sean O'Neill's paraplegic one-day ascent of a desert tower the year before, but none of us had ever done a big wall in this style.

Mark Wellman pioneered paraplegic climbing 10 years ago when he climbed El Cap, but by no means is this a standardized type of climbing. The systems work differently for everyone; friends at Climb Moab had designed Beth's harness specifically for her. Despite her custom-built rig and many training sessions on fixed lines on ski lift towers and in Eldorado Canyon, she was still making adjustments on the wall.

But as always on a big wall, we were finally starting to fall into a routine. One person would lead and haul, while the other helped Beth into her chest and waist harness and "leg burrito." A portaledge had to be hauled and set up while she ascended her line, doing hundreds of pull-ups on a jumar bar, so that she could immediately get out of her harness when she reached the next belay. As Beth jugged, one person could clear off extra gear from the last anchor, clean the pitch, and, if necessary, hold her line out from the wall.

A major problem with Beth's jumar system was its extreme inefficiency when the wall was anything less than completely overhanging. On the lower vertical pitches of the Zodiac, unless Russ or I hefted her fixed line and manually held it out so it was free hanging, she could gain only a few inches for every pull-up she did. We were all finding this technique extremely inconvenient.

But now that we'd eaten some of the weight and the wall was steepening, Russ and I no longer had to do two-man spacehauls (a technique for hauling the team's bags) on each pitch, which was halving our workload. This was lucky as, quite frankly, the two of us were getting worked. This ascent of the Zodiac was proving to be the most technical and demanding big wall that either of us had ever done. Happily, the steepness was helping Beth, too. Instead of scraping up the side of the wall, she was bobbing up each line like a mermaid in the sky, her trademark long braid dangling behind her.