This is the Sharp end.

The Sharp End, a podcast, by accident and North American climbing.

I'm Ashley Sapi, your hostess for the show. So today I talk with a couple who

went out for a casual day of climbing in Yosemite National Park. This casual day of climbing resulted in an injury that will have

lifelong effects on both of their lives. Welcome to the show, Elena.

Go ahead and jump right into the story.

Great.

Yeah, so I'm a graduate student at Stanford.

I've been here about seven years now.

The reason I came to California was because I was in love

with climbing and I took a little side trip to Yosemite and really wanted to be here and

climb as much as possible.

And so I've been climbing for about 10 years, mostly tried.

I really loved the Yosemite, and I actually really enjoyed taking

beginners out, and I was part of the Stanford Alpine Club,

and we had an amazing thing going.

We were teaching classes, we were taking new people out all the time and Ben was a new

boyfriend of mine and I decided that I absolutely had to introduce him to a really key part of my identity which was rock climbing outside.

So after our first date, which was at the rock gym, fast forward to a couple months later, I decided to go with him and a group of friends to Yosemite for a trip on Halloween. So we had about 10 people in the group, we had costumes,

and we were going to do some climbing casually during the day, and then during the night we were going to all get together

put on our crazy costumes with LEDs and take pictures of night climbing. So I

picked her out that I'd done a couple of times before, it's called Braillebook, it's 5-8 eight and it has a little bit of a reputation in Yosemite. I mean people get spooked on it

...