Yosemite Fall. Scott Graham

       PROLOGUE

      Dawn.

      A good time to cheat death.

      He faced north in his wingsuit, his feet planted on the lip of Glacier Point, half a vertical mile above the shadowed Yosemite Valley floor.

      The sun edged above the serrated peaks of the High Sierra to the east. Its slanted rays stirred the first of the morning’s updrafts, precursors of the blustery, hot summer day to come.

      He flexed his toes in his padded landing shoes, his arms pressed to his sides. The fabric airfoils of his flying suit flapped at his elbows and between his legs.

      He was a small man at five foot six and a hundred and fifty pounds, still heavily muscled as he neared fifty, abs six-packed, biceps and forearms honed from decades of scaling El Capitan, Half Dome, and the dozens of other sheer granite faces walling the valley before him.

      He took a steadying breath and focused inward. Even as he sought calm and the supreme confidence required to leap into the abyss below, his heart, hammering against his ribcage, betrayed him.

      How many flights would this make for him this year? The number shouldn’t matter, but it did.

      Eight.

      Far fewer than past summers, though more than any of the young fliers who’d jockeyed around him in the Wawona campground since May, asking what they could do for him, anything, anything at all, he had only to name it.

      And he, ever magnanimous, telling them thanks, but, really, no, there was nothing they could do—unless the offer came from one of the few female fliers, they with their lithe, supple bodies. As long as his girlfriend didn’t find out, there was always something they could do for him in his camper van, after the campfire burned to coals and the tangy scent of pine replaced the fog of woodsmoke in the air.

      He sensed Ponch’s presence behind him, providing silent, necessary peer pressure—not that he ever would admit he needed it. He assured himself Ponch was on hand simply to film the initiation of his flight off the point, nothing more.

      He glanced down between his feet at the floor of the valley below. Through breaks in trees, the concrete huts of Housekeeping Camp shone with silvery fluorescent light, while Majestic Yosemite Hotel radiated its luxuriant, electric-yellow glow on the opposite side of the river.

      He looked left, focusing on the dark gap in Sentinel Ridge. He hadn’t yet determined if he would enter the narrow slot, a flying dart threading the rock-walled breach at 120 miles an hour. He couldn’t decide, in fact, until he dropped into the yawning void and the first of the day’s rising thermals gathered in his wings. Still, having curled away from the notch his previous three flights, the need to rocket through it sometime soon, as the end of summer drew near, was growing impossible to ignore.

      Half Dome skylined the eastern horizon. The morning sun silhouetted the hulking granite dome’s sheer north wall. Movement rippled along the wall’s few narrow shelves—climbers, outside their portaledge tents, their headlamps winking in the early morning shadows as they prepared breakfast and sorted gear in anticipation of the day’s upward push.

      The sun rested just above the hunchbacked dome of granite in the dusty, brown-streaked sky, bathing the topmost reaches of El Capitan, opposite him, in orange and red. His eyes tracked to the shadowed base of El Cap’s three-thousand-foot face, where the gravel Camp 4 parking lot, his triumphal landing spot, formed a smoky gray rectangle on the flat valley floor.

      His stomach fluttered at the notion of his surprise landing in the Camp 4 lot. His appearance there in a minute or two from out of the dawn sky would be that of a spirit, a specter, an apparition from beyond.

      The flecks of quartz at his feet glimmered in the slanted rays of the low sun, as if he stood not on stone but on stardust, poised to fly up and away into the morning light, unencumbered by the bonds of gravity. The setting was perfect—the shimmering lip of stone, his Superman-red wingsuit aflame in the day’s initial burst of sunlight, his body still and erect, high above the valley floor. He took quick breaths, boosting the oxygen level in his brain as he sought the mental fortitude required to initiate his flight.

      He began his silent countdown from five. On three, the pounding of his heart rose from his chest into his throat. On two, he didn’t so much lean forward as simply begin the process of falling, his weight shifting out and over the edge of the cliff.

      On one, he lifted his arms, raising his wings into place. On zero, he bent his knees and leapt off the point of rock.

      He plummeted straight down, a hundred feet, two hundred, the stone face scant meters away, his arms and legs spread, until the air rushing past him filled his airfoils and he soared away from the wall, a human missile slicing through the sky.

      He lowered one wrist, then the other, angling left, right, the roar of the wind loud as a jet engine in his ears as he shot across the canyon. No gusts of wind buffeted him. The gap? Yes, a go, the need to increase his viewership numbers announcing itself from deep in his cerebral cortex.

      Bending his spine, his arms and legs fanned wide, he described a sweeping arc and lined up with Sentinel Ridge. He focused through his goggles on the dark notch in front of him, aiming for the narrow break in the forested ridge. The slot, sixty feet wide, angled downward and to his left, requiring a dead-center entry and a continued, precise leftward turn its entire length. At a hundred-plus miles per hour, the slightest deviation would send him rocketing into one or the other of the gap’s granite walls.

      Judging himself too low as he sped toward the notch, he lowered his legs, angling his body upward to catch more air and moderate his gliding descent. The added blast of wind from the maneuver ripped at a loose thread dangling from the airfoil between his legs at the bottom of his suit. The thread popped free from needle hole after needle hole beside his right ankle, lengthening up the seam of his lower airfoil.

      He bowed his body to initiate his turn as he neared the slot. The force of the maneuver caused the thread to lengthen further, separating the airfoil at its seam and exposing one of the foil’s stiff plastic stays. The exposed stay flapped next to his foot like the blurred wing of a hummingbird, setting off an undulating vibration along the bottom hem of the airfoil. The buzzing plastic rod slashed through his sock and bit deep into the skin of his ankle. At the same instant, the vibration along the hem of his wingsuit progressed to his right leg, which bucked violently from ankle to hip and back again.

      Fear flared white hot in his brain. He tightened his right quadriceps, attempting to still his rocking leg, but it continued its fierce shimmy. As he entered the gap, the intense bucking of his leg caused him to veer wildly out of control.