July 5, 1978. Mike Thornhill, Andrea Dakoski and I packed our personal gear and the day’s group gear into Boy Scout Yucca packs, including two aluminum-rung etriers given me by famed climber Woody Stover after his return from Annapurna, a drill kit, a rack of pitons, and one hundred feet of purple, actually a tiny checkerboard of bright red and deep blue, Mammut Dynaflex. To my eye, the most beautiful rope ever made. People stared at it. Got lost in it. To my hand, perfect. Supple, no kinks, the ideal spring rate.

It would be our second trip to the only significant infeeder to the 7600-foot-long Highway in Gumboot Coward Cave. On our first trip we’d gotten up a little nuisance climb where a small stream drops into the Highway at Station B51. Two hundred feet beyond it was an unclimbable waterfall twenty feet high, the first of what, forty-four years later, became known as the Dilation Domes. We wanted to know what was up there.

On this trip I’d do the climb. I traversed around a deep pool on ledges and climbed six feet on small, downward-sloping ridges. They would have been impossible to climb except for the slight curvature of the dome, which gave me opposing surfaces to bridge against. It was the limit of what I could straddle. That, plus the spray, made hand-drilling a bolt twelve feet off the floor awkward. I came down to rest several times.

I hung one of Woody’s etriers from the bolt and climbed to the second rung, where I could see cracks that might take a piton.

I had learned that anything but Chouinard Knifeblades and the shorter Bugaboos were the only pitons that fit the cracks I encountered in West Virginia. Still, I’d been plagued by college poverty, so I carried other stuff I’d bought along the way.

The taper of the crack in front of me was slightly odd, in my experience. I tested the crack depth with my shortest Knifeblade. It was the right piton. I’d been carrying this Cassin “malleable” piton on my rack for five years. Malleable was what Cassin sold it as. And, sunk cost fallacy, I needed to use it.

I remember thinking about this climb, that if I were ever to take a fall because a pin popped out on me, this would be the place to do it: overhung, no ledges or spires, clean fall. I did the math. If it popped, my next piece, four feet below, meant an eight-foot fall onto a bolt twelve feet off the floor. I might hit the ground, but not with significant force. The ground was a pool two or three feet deep, with a smooth gravel bottom.

The malleable piton fit the crack perfectly. The theory, or rather the belief, was that a malleable piton was good because it deformed into the peculiar shape of the crack. And it did. That was the problem. The grip came from the strain energy stored in the deformed metal, and soft steel stored less of it. Malleability was not magic. I knew that, at least on paper. But it fit snugly into the crack, taking a good bit of hammering to set.

I hung the second etrier. One mantle move and I was done. Except that the piece of junk popped out as I fully loaded it.

Mike Thornhill, God bless him, saw the fall in progress and performed the body belay perfectly. Thought on his feet, to be precise. It was a short but consequential fall, and the risk of hitting the ground was real. Mike understood that the problem wasn’t the force in the rope. It was the total distance I had to fall before I hit. He jumped backward and leaned way back, his body almost perpendicular to the rope as it went tight.

I stopped with my feet skimming the water. My carbide lamp flew off into the pool. Mike’s skid marks led right to the edge of it.

“Did ya fall?” Mike asked.

We dredged the lamp up with a bight of belay rope.

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