BACK AT THE BASE, an old woman had just started to climb. She was clad in a heavily worn pair of knickers and a wool sweater, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. On her feet were the same odd rubber shoes that Teplyh was wearing, tied on using a cloth wrapping system very much like a ballerina slipper.
Oleg explained that her shoes were the tra¬ditional footwear of the Stolbists and that the soft rubber smears exceptionally well on the rock's crystals, polished slick by a century and a half of climbers' hands and feet. Valeri wore them until a few years ago, when Oleg bought him a pair of "real" climbing shoes: nuclear green, first-generation Mad Rock Hookers.

The old woman flowed smoothly up the rock, years of tradition guiding each move¬ment. There was a beauty to her toughness, one weathered by sun and rock. I couldn't imagine her life.

Nearby a horizontal crack ran 200 feet up Stolby One's sheer western flank, then traversed off a broad ledge for forty feet before curving upward to a small summit. I asked Valeri whether it had a name. He wiggled his fingers as if playing a piano.
"The Piano!" I said, mimicking Valeri's pantomime, and he nodded in agreement.
"We climb?" I asked, drawn to the singularity of the crack.

Valeri scrunched up his brow and called Oleg over for a quick, private discussion.
"Yes, this climb is very good," Oleg explained, "but my father doesn't think we should climb it. It is dangerous. Years ago a young boy who does not have good experience falls here. He was not wearing good shoes. The crack was wet and he slipped to his death."

Valeri walked me over to the base of the wall and showed me the boy's memorial plaque, a smaller version of Teplyh's, with his date of birth and death — it happened seven years ago. The boy was fourteen.

Valeri then spread his fingers wide and dragged them downward as though scratching his nails on a chalkboard. He made a teeth-baring grimace through his white beard.
Huh? I didn't get it.
Valeri pointed up to the crack. From this angle I could see strange, eighty-foot streaks down the wall. I realized what Valeri was trying to tell me: the boy's sliding fingers had scraped off the lichen.

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