This meadow would draw anyone off the road. Who wouldn’t lie back in the sun-baked grass and gaze up at one of the most beautiful and iconic monolithic faces on the planet?
 
I’d first come to Yosemite to climb 30 years ago, ticking off Half Dome’s NW regular route, DNB, and a host of other climbs that convinced me I had, finally, become a solid 5.10 climber. Every visit since then, dozens and dozens, always ended right here, staring up at this giant.
 
And now, thirty years later, El Cap still takes my breath away. It’s November, it’s sunny and cool and I see a steady train of teams climbing The Nose. Three cameras next to me follow one of the teams, and I wonder who’s lucky enough to get this kind of coverage.
 
“Are you Reel Rock?” I ask.
 
One of them laughs, a silver-haired man with lively, kind eyes. “We’re the anti- Reel Rock,” he says. And then tells me who they’re following.
 
Lynn Hill and Nina Caprez are free-climbing The Nose. Holy shit. I sit up.
 
Way back then…
 
Before I even knew what species of girl I was, I knew that none of the female role models around me fit. A varsity soccer player fresh out of college, recently back from an expedition to Denali, what the hell was I? I didn't see my kind of woman in movies. I wasn't in books. Then I started rock climbing. I found Lynn Hill. I found an article by Rosie Andrews in Mountain about rejecting the idea “She’s good for a woman” in favor of “She’s good, period”.
 
Badass. Ripped. Competitive. Great at things heretofore reserved for guys. That was Lynn Hill. And Arlene Blum. And, my first silver screen role model, Sarah Conner from Terminator 2. My three muses. I finally had an idea who I could be.
 
At the Gunks in 1985, I was a new climber gaping up at a 5.8 called Bonnie’s Roof. And there was Lynn Hill, walking past. She looked at me, she looked up at the climb. “That’s a great climb,” she said. “You’re going to love it.” Star-struck, I watched her continue on. My life was beginning to come alive, but I had no idea just how alive…
 
It goes, boys.
 
In 1993 Lynn Hill rocked the world by freeing The Nose. “It goes, boys.” was her femme equivalent of “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
 
Yes! I fist pumped. I happy danced.  No guy had ever climbed The Nose free. “She’s good, period!” I shouted at my male world. At Smith Rock, clinging to the 5.11’s, my climbing partners got it. A hundred times I’d invoked her name as I tried to repeat a move a taller friend had sent. I’m short. Lynn Hill is short. If I couldn’t reach the hold they did, I scoured the blank face for the smallest chink I could use. My mantra: If Lynn Hill can do it, I can do it too. But climbers were a small fraction of my male-dominated world. In my lab at grad school, among the test tubes and toluene, well... never mind. I'm sure you see how that played out.
 
And then I panicked. At 32 Lynn Hill had done this thing. Yes, I was inspired. But I also felt a strange mix of jealousy, pressure, anxiety and sudden worthlessness. A role model is the other side of a coin that includes you. At 31 what did I have to show for myself? The pressure was on. Lynn Hill had fought, she’d suffered, she’d succeeded at something huge. What about me?  
 
Makalu and motherhood
 
Lynn Hill’s cameramen Bryan and Jeff are talking with me. I’m sitting up, intent on their story. Bryan is explaining their idea for Lynn Hill’s film. It will be about climbing, yes, but also a 25-year retrospective about her life and motherhood, her kid, everything that has happened since she’d freed The Nose in ‘93. Now 59, she has a 16-year old son.  A woman’s story. The anti- Reel Rock.
 
There are the parallels again. Now at 58, I also have a 16 year-old. And suddenly a whole world of life between Lynn’s freeing The Nose and this day, watching her free-climb it again, lands in my lap. Those younger ambitions, what I set out to do after Lynn Hill rocked the world, I see from this distance. The innocence, the fucking naivety I had in daring to dream... Tears come to my eyes.
 
A career in a male-dominated field. Climbing higher and harder, an 8,000m peak. Those were my dreams. I set my sights on academic research and on the Himalaya.
 
In science I fought hard, I reveled in and overcame challenges, I did field research in Yosemite for years, I was undermined and marginalized by men and institutions, but I pushed on. I gave it so much energy, that I slammed into that glass ceiling really hard.
 
An 8,000m peak was a stretch goal. I climbed and ski-mountaineered all over the world. I was finally invited on the Polish-American Expedition to Makalu. We didn’t summit. The autumn jet-stream descended early that year and blew us off the mountain. But I came back to the Himalaya the next year and led a team up Ama Dablam, the only woman-led expedition in Nepal in the fall of 1999.
 
Motherhood was never a dream. But it’s what changed my world-view. In this small act, I became ordinary. It allowed me to be inclusive and empathetic rather than badass and elitist. I reveled in giving instead of striving. For the first time, I embraced being a woman. I mean I really saw women for the miracles they are in everyday life.
 
So, as I said, twenty-six years of life fell into my lap, there in El Cap meadow. The exhaustion from all the fighting for my dreams, the regret at the dreams I eventually gave up, but acceptance of who I am now was there too, and tears came to my eyes. 
 
The meaning of tears.
 
Bryan and Jeff see those tears and ask, “So what did it mean for you that Lynn Hill freed the Nose?”
 
I watch Nina finish the lead under the Great Roof. I see the haul bag swing free, then inch upward. I see Lynn climbing the crack up to the Roof. I see the train of teams behind them, aid-climbing in classic ponderous style, probably not even knowing that history is being repeated above their heads. I think of Lynn’s son, I wonder if – like me – she was changed by motherhood. What else has happened during the years between her 1993 ascent and this 2019 ascent? 
 
So, what did it mean for me that Lynn Hill freed the Nose? Such a simple question. Such a complicated answer. “I was inspired,” I say.
 
But now I know I have to see this film. I feel like I might know some of that story. Now, my heart sings for Lynn Hill at her return to this amazing accomplishment. I don’t feel like happy-dancing or fist-pumping. And I don’t feel inadequate either.  I feel a warmth inside, an appreciation of Lynn that is broad and inclusive, and empathy for the pain she must have endured and is… I laugh, looking up… enduring even now.

And by the way, she's in the El Cap photo above. She's that tiny badass dot under the Great Roof.

September 1984. Cocha Cashu Biological Research Station, Manu National Park, Peru

A spotlight in the midnight Peruvian jungle, my headlamp blazed a tunnel of light from my forehead. I stepped into it. The trail glowed, moist and thick with leaves. Lianas dangled. Buttresses of huge ceba trees ended abruptly, decapitated by light. Broad leaves still wet from the afternoon rain parted for me. In the night, everything was colorless. Black and light.
 
My headlamp also lit up eyeshine. Eyes reflected back to me, glowing like eerie headlights. They shone in very different ways, depending on the animal they belonged to.
 
A string of eyes like a teeny necklace in the middle of the trail belonged to a spider. There were millions of spiders here and dozens of webs across the trail, at face level. If I was lucky, I saw them and ducked under. If not...blech.
 
Unblinking eyeshine resting on the lake surface, bright red. That was caiman. The calm water reflected those eyes to double the count. If the water rippled, like when the caiman moved, the reflection danced with dozens of red undulating eyes.
 
Unblinking eyes close to the ground, almost lost in the huge-leafed ground plants, might be a horned frog, with a mouth so big it can swallow small mammals.
 
Blinking eyes always belonged to a mammal. A foot off the ground, it could be capybara. But lower could be an agouti or rat. If higher, it was probably a deer.
 
This was my nightly landscape as I made my way along the trail, following large cats—jaguar, puma and ocelot— cats we had radio-collared months earlier. I tuned my radio receiver, held the broad, branched antenna up in the air, and listened for beeps that signaled the identity of one of our radio-collared cats. Since I was the youngest field assistant at the Cocha Cashu research station (short straw and all), my shift went from 6p, when the sun set like a dropped rock, til midnight. No one else wanted a shift that was dark the entire time.
 
So, that’s the setting. This is the story.
 
At 2200 hrs, I settled in to listen to a group of ocelots sleeping. The tic-toc sound of the ping told me they were lying on their sides. I read, then checked the radio signal, wrote notes, frequencies, and directions in my field notebook, then read again. At midnight, I began packing to return to the field station, 2km away.
 
As I was zipping my pack closed, I looked up. There was eyeshine, right in the middle of the trail about 20 meters away. I sucked in my breath. What was it? Two feet off the ground, it blinked.  The eyes moved up, then dropped down. Probably afraid of me. It must be a deer, I thought. But my heart was thumping hard.
 
Then the two glowing eyes moved sideways into the caña along the trail and rushed towards me. My heart leaped. Do deer charge? Now 15 meters away. The eyes winked in and out behind the caña. I was riveted on those eyes, I couldn’t lose the eyeshine or I wouldn’t know where the animal was. What was it!? Now 10 meters away. It rushed closer and closer. My throat tightened. Now it was 5 meters away. Now it came out of the caña straight at me. Deer definitely do not do this, was all I had time to think before…
 
It swept past me. In my headlamp's beam, I saw chiseled ropy muscles under the shortest of tawny fur. A  narrow body, And then a long cat tail.
 
Puma. You might call it a mountain lion or a cougar. In Peru, they called them puma.
 
When charged by a large cat in the middle of the night in an Amazon rainforest, the next thing you do  probably says a lot about who you really are, deep down inside. Do you defend yourself with your machete? Do you turn and flee?
 
I don’t know what it says about me, but my mind went blank. Absolutely 100% empty. Nada. I’m sure if someone were there with me, they’d have said my eyes went wide and I was momentarily paralyzed. Oddly, when I did move again, I unfolded my radio antenna and turned on the receiver to check all the radio-collar channels. Maybe I was in "automatic", maybe signals had stopped coming from my brain. When I think back on what the puma looked like, I don’t remember a radio-collar, so it didn't exactly make sense.
 
Of course, once the puma swept past me, its eyes were facing away from me. I lost the eye shine and the animal disappeared into the black night. It could be anywhere. Antenna held high with adrenaline, I spun in all directions searching for a signal and looking for eyeshine. I couldn’t find either.
 
Don’t run, my instinct told me. So, I walked as quickly as I could, trying really hard not to sprint. I raked both sides of the trail with my light, looking for eyes. I swept the trail behind me with my light. Half an hour later, I got back to the research station, but I never saw the eyes or the puma again. I left a note for the rest of the team in the screen-walled kitchen hut. Then I zipped my tent door closed against mosquitoes and puma, and somehow got to sleep.
 
When I joined the team for breakfast the next morning, the veteran researchers explained that the puma probably DID follow me all the way back to camp, behind me, checking me out. That’s just apparently what puma do.
 
But why did I never see the puma’s eyeshine after it charged me?  I was looking everywhere for it - beside me, behind me, in front of me. Did it cover its eyes with its cool cat shades? Or did it simply keep going on into the depths of the rainforest because who knows what it thought I was…  a humanoid with a single glowing eye in the center of its forehead and antlers that it held on a long arm over its head. Weird. Definitely something to avoid.