FOUR DAYS LATER, while Brittany, Burcham and Oleg began the final descent from our final climb, I sat on Stolby One's summit one last time and watched the dozen or so people milling about on top. Behind them, far off in the distance, was Krasnoyarsk, its industrial factories pouring out smoke while the Yenisei River flowed by the drab apartment blocks. In the opposite direction, a two-hour walk away, is Wild Stolby, a distant series of domes and fins, far from the crowds.

We had climbed at Wild Stolby for the previous three days. There were no crowds out there, no masses of "tourists," no boys with school backpacks. The rock was covered in lichen; the trails were small and cryptic. It was as though we were back in the mid-1800s, when townspeople first started climbing here, and I felt more than ever the mystery of that unshakeable tradition.

Every night since seeing the boy die, I had recurring nightmares of people falling. I never told anyone. I didn't tell Brittany, Burcham, or any of the Stolbists that I dreamed about them dying. I saw their falls from all points of view, sometimes with volume, sometimes eerily silent like Valeri's. I never saw their dead bodies and I never saw anyone's face after they fell; like the image of Teplyh, they became a blur.
When I fell, though, I saw my lifeless body. I saw it bent, bloodied and mangled like the young boy's. I heard my body crash into the ground. I heard myself die.

Stolby felt like a lost world, with a deeper mixture of danger and intoxicating beauty than I could remember anywhere else. But to climb every day with the specter of "one slip and it's over," as the Stolbists do, was something I still couldn't fathom. Eight days felt like more than enough — too many close calls. How long would I last, climbing here day after day? When would I have my name and date of birth and death on a plaque?

Valeri sat down next to me, putting his hand on my shoulder with a heavy sigh, as if he were sad to see us go. Back home, I'd worry about him; I'd be checking my inbox for emails that proved he was still alive.

After a moment he raised his left arm and scanned it back and forth across the vast, wild hillsides that drifted to the horizons in front of us, rock spires and domes breeching the forest's canopy.
"Stolby," he said in his labored English, "is freedom."

I thought I understood what he was saying. Those five-foot-high letters painted on the flank of Stolby Two weren't a cry for freedom; they were painted as a statement. It was here in Stolby, far from town and nestled deep within the Siberian forest, that the people of Krasnoyarsk could be completely free. No government, no police, no Gulags, no fear... only freedom — 400-foot tall domes of freedom.

He then paused, with an air of satisfaction, before concluding with a nod, "Stolby is life".

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