"COME, COME... SIMPLE!" Simon exclaimed, his eyes wild and crazed with enthusiasm, his gold front teeth flashing. He'd just demonstrated the craziest thing we'd seen yet: headfirst down soloing.

"Don't even think about it," Brittany said in a clipped tone. All day she'd been complaining that I was letting my enthusiasm lead me into recklessness. "This guy is crazy. You are not going with him."

For the past two days, Simon had been zipping around us on the slabs, jumping to mini-pinnacles, taking the hardest, most exposed little variants, flashing his omnipresent smile and shouting his two favorite English words: "Come! Simple!" By now we were leery of following his lead anywhere, let alone headfirst down a seventy-degree slab. It would be so easy to let myself get caught up in his grace, just as I'd been following other Stolbists up climb after climb, captivated by their nonchalant movement — but I wasn't that stupid.

"Yes, yes... come!" Simon begged, as he chalked up his hands. The smooth, seventy-degree slab abruptly ended after forty feet, lipping off into more than 350 feet of space.

"He is the only one who does this climb," Oleg said, as Simon cast off headfirst. "Many Stolbists climb this way, but not here. Simon is the only one".
Simon deftly slid his body down until he was able to engage another palm smear. He wasn't down climbing — he was down slithering. I cringed, unable to look away, waiting for gravity to pull his feet over his head and arch his body into a backward summersault. Burcham was taking pictures, and I wondered whether he was thinking about how Teplyh's photographer must have felt, capturing that final instant between climbing and falling.
At the edge of the slab, just as his head began to hang off into the abyss, Simon grabbed the lip and pendulumed his body around, and then scampered back up.
The Russians cheered.
Brittany, Burcham and I wailed.

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