A medical student walks up to the base of Yosemite’s Royal Arches with a climbing partner nursing an injured ankle, a little beer in his system, and absolutely no rope. The route rises roughly 1,500 feet above the valley, and once Noah Kaufman starts climbing, turning around quickly stops feeling like an option. At first, the climbing feels manageable. Then comes a questionable fixed rope, hundreds of feet of open air, and the creeping realization that agreeing to this may have been an extraordinarily bad decision. Eventually, Kaufman finds himself high above the valley with blood making his hand slippery inside a crack.. and his grip suddenly slips. For a fraction of a second, the entire story could have ended there. It doesn’t. What follows is one of Kaufman’s wildest stories, and a conversation about fear, recklessness, masculinity, mortality, the strange confidence of youth, and the alter ego that climbing gave a young man making his way through medical school.