Fly on the Wall

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'I know people, really good climbers, who've never climbed on rock before. Almost all of the training is done indoors.'

It was at the dawn of this new, plasticized era that Lynn Hill began to reevaluate her goals. But a near-death experience actually may have kept her in competition longer than she'd planned-a proverbial get-back-on-the-horse scenario. In 1989, while climbing with her then-husband Russ Raffa, Hill free-fell 80 feet. And lived.

The couple was climbing on Styx Wall in France. With typical aplomb, she made a perfect ascent, never putting tension on the rope and never noticing that her harness, covered by her jacket, was unbuckled. After topping out, with Raffa waiting just overhead, Hill sat back in her harness, ready to rappel down; she encountered no friction and plunged backward while Raffa looked on helplessly. Miraculously, a tree slowed her fall, and Hill landed between two boulders. Her only injury was a dislocated elbow.

No one had to tell Hill how lucky she was. 'I guess it just wasn't my time to go,' she says. 'I still had things to do.'

It's not that Hill takes the dangers of vertical sport lightly; she knows the possibilities all too well, having lost her earliest mentor, her brother-in-law Chuck Bludworth-and, 20 years later, her good friend Hugues Beauzile-to South America's 22,834-foot Aconcagua.

Hill speaks of the deaths with obvious sadness. 'That's why I've never been motivated to do alpine climbing. My brother-in-law and Hugues pretty much died in the same spot. Hugues died of exhaustion. He'd been up there without food and water for several days, and he was trying to go solo.' She pauses, then resumes. 'I actually had a premonition about Hugues. I had a dream, I felt him going away. In the dream, I was lying down on top of a snow-covered mountain, and I saw a cross glowing in light, then I felt this release. I realized the next day what it meant, and . . . it turned out he died that same day.'

It has occurred to Hill that she, too, could die with a wrong move. She's known as a methodical climber who shuns unnecessary risk. But the deaths, and her own close call in '89, did not dampen Hill's passion for the feel of skin on rock, for the thrill of suspended animation as she labors upward, the world reduced to tiny specks of color below.

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