Yosemite Fall. Scott Graham

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      Caught off guard by Carmelita Ortega’s speedy ascent, Chuck Bender didn’t react until his twelve-year-old stepdaughter was fifteen feet off the ground and climbing higher, her yellow T-shirt incandescent in the morning sun.

      Chuck retrieved the growing slack in Carmelita’s climbing rope, sliding the line past his brake hand and through the belay device attached to his waist harness. The rope’s braided sheath warmed his skin as it slipped through his cupped palm.

      Thin as a whiffle bat, her navy tights hanging in loose folds from her tiny thighs and calves, Carmelita balanced the rubber soles of her climbing shoes on the resin holds bolted to the climbing tower and grasped additional holds above her head with chalked fingers, hoisting herself up the wall.

      “Take it easy,” Chuck called to her, pride edging his voice, as he took up the last of the slack in the rope. “Give me a chance to keep up, would you?”

      She hesitated for only a heartbeat, then shinnied skyward, her helmeted head back, her moves smooth and fluid as she moved from hold to hold up the vertical tower.

      Chuck shot a grin at Janelle, who stood beside him in a form-fitting fleece top, black yoga pants, and white sneakers. “You sure she hasn’t snuck off and done this before without our knowing it?”

      His grin widened as he looked back up at Carmelita. A sweet spot, that’s where he found himself, three years into parenthood, on a working vacation with his family in beautiful Yosemite Valley in the heart of California’s Yosemite National Park. Everything was right in his world on this sunny mid-August morning. Perfect.

      A loner turned sudden husband to Janelle and stepdad to Carmelita and Rosie three years ago, Chuck was well settled in his new life by now, taking off for morning runs with Janelle before the girls awoke, working at his computer in his small study in the back of the house during school hours, helping Janelle with household chores and the girls with their homework in the evenings. He mostly bid nowadays for archaeological work close to Durango, in the mountains of southern Colorado, assuring he made it home on weekends while he conducted the fieldwork portion of his contracts.

      His morning runs kept him fit at forty-five, fifteen years Janelle’s senior, even as gray spread from his sideburns through the rest of his scalp, and new wrinkles pleated the edges of his mouth, mimicking the crow’s feet that for years had creased the sun-scorched corners of his eyes.

      Carmelita continued her smooth ascent up the portable, forty-foot climbing tower, which was raised on hydraulic arms from the bed of a flatbed trailer attached to a parked semitruck at the edge of the Camp 4 parking lot. Her bravura climb in front of the couple dozen onlookers at the foot of the tower, so out of character for her, took Chuck aback. Such brash public displays weren’t like her. Rather, they were the province of her openly exuberant ten-year-old sister, Rosie.

      Chuck took in an arm’s length of rope. Another sidelong glance revealed a happy smile splashed across Janelle’s face as she watched her older daughter’s confident moves up the tower.

      Janelle’s smile reinforced what she’d told Chuck in their crew-cab pickup truck late last night, after the girls had fallen asleep in back as they’d driven from Colorado. She’d spoken softly, so as not to awaken the girls, of her pride at having passed the last of her paramedic training courses and the national certification test, her application now pending with the Durango Fire and Rescue Authority. Since moving north from Albuquerque to join Chuck in Durango three years ago, she’d taken fully to the outdoor lifestyle of the Colorado mountain town, hiking and camping with him and the girls, shopping at the local farmers’ market, and participating in the many group trail runs hosted by the Durango Running Club in the forested hills above town.

      “She must have gotten this from you,” Janelle said at Chuck’s side, her olive face turned to the sky. Her dark hair, long and silky, hung free down her back, and a tiny, pink gemstone winked in the side of her small, pointed nose.

      “Not me.” Chuck took up more slack, maintaining slight tension on the climbing rope to assure it would catch Carmelita the instant she fell—if she fell. “I was always a grunter. I climbed by force of will. But look at her. She’s defying gravity, and she’s doing it with pure grace.”

      Carmelita passed the tower’s halfway point, moving higher despite the decreasing size and number of holds on the top portion of the structure. She grasped the undersized resin grips, dyed a rainbow of colors, with the tips of her fingers while keeping most of her weight on her toes. The climbing rope extended from her harness to a pulley at the top of the wall and back down to Chuck in the parking lot below. Her chestnut hair, gathered in a ponytail, gleamed in the sunlight beneath the back of her helmet. She showed no hint of fear as she passed thirty feet off the ground, nearing the top of the tower.

      “You go, girl!” Janelle’s brother and Chuck’s assistant, Clarence, called to Carmelita from where he stood forty feet back from the base of the tower with the other onlookers, several of whom waited their turn to climb when Carmelita finished.

      Clarence tucked his shoulder-length black hair behind his silver-earring-studded ears and raised his hands in a two-fisted salute, the sleeves of his black T-shirt climbing his pudgy upper arms, his jeans riding low on his hips beneath his sizable gut.

      “Yeah! You go, girl!” Rosie echoed from where she stood at her uncle’s side.

      Rosie’s stocky frame contrasted sharply with that of her slight sister. She could have been her uncle’s twin, however, with his squat physique and potbelly, if not for the difference in their ages.

      “No way am I going up that thing,” Rosie declared. She hooked her thumbs through the belt loops of her shorts. “No frickin’ way.”

      “Rosie!” Janelle admonished. Her reprimand was halfhearted, however, focused as she was on Carmelita three stories overhead. Janelle put her hand to her brow, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Isn’t that high enough?” she asked Chuck.

      “She might send it,” Chuck replied, agog. “She might actually top out.”

      Carmelita continued her ascent, the widely spaced holds at the top of the tower presenting her no discernible difficulty until, as if by levitation alone, she was forty feet off the ground and there was no more climbing to be done. After giving the top of the fiberglass tower a tap, she leaned back in her harness as Chuck had instructed, her feet spread wide on the wall. She shook out her hands at her sides while he held her in place, his brake hand gripping the rope.

      “How’s the view from up there, sweetness?” he called up to her.

      She looked at the granite cliffs lining the valley thousands of feet above the tower. “I’ve got a ways to go.”

      At Chuck’s side, Janelle shivered. “Don’t get any big ideas, niña.”

      Chuck relaxed his grip and lowered Carmelita, the rope running through his palm. “I’m glad I belayed her,” he said to Janelle as Carmelita walked backward down the wall while he played the rope past his brake hand. “As light as she is, I wouldn’t have wanted to trust the auto-belay to kick in and catch her.”

      When Carmelita reached the ground, the tower attendant, blond haired, thickly bearded, and in his mid-twenties, approached from where he’d been talking with a female climber his age. The attendant’s broad shoulders extended from his tank top straight as a crossbeam. His powerful quads filled the legs of his shorts. The woman climber, waiting her turn on the tower beyond the line of waist-high boulders between the parking lot and campground, wore a magenta bikini top and shiny black climbing tights cut low across her hips. Her bare stomach was tanned and flat. A gold ring sparkled where it pierced the skin above her navel.

      At the foot of the tower, the heavily muscled attendant untied the rope from Carmelita’s waist. “Good going,” he praised her, offering his meaty palm for a high-five.

      Carmelita slapped his hand and pranced over to Janelle and Chuck,