He had nearly died on the summit of that mountain the night before. A fierce blizzard had set in after he and mountain guide Jerome Fay reached it. A blinding deluge of snow obscured their route back, making a descent impossible.

They survived by lying on their backs, just below the summit, on a bank of “fumaroles,” fissures of hot gases escaping from the depths of the volcanic mountain.

As Muir later described it, the two men suffered “the pains of a Scandinavian hell, at once frozen and burned.”

But they survived, and by 4:00 the next afternoon had returned to the hotel and tavern operated by Justin Hinckley Sisson at the base of the mountain, near the present-day town of Mount Shasta.

Muir probably didn’t waste much time before collapsing in his bed. It was Sisson’s daughters who welcomed him back the next morning by spreading wildflowers on it.

I call this mountain region my home and enjoy exploring its trails—and its history of fascinating characters like Muir and Sisson, and stories of courage, near-death, and resourcefulness under extreme conditions. It is like reading one long adventure novel with a thin plot.

Justin Sisson himself was a notable figure, a native of Connecticut, a college-educated schoolteacher who reinvented himself when he came out West, becoming a proficient hunter, fisherman, and mountain guide—and successful innkeeper. “He knew more of the secrets of Mount Shasta than any living man,” said the San Francisco Chronicle in his 1893 obituary.

Sisson’s hotel is long gone, but you can follow the route Muir and Fay took up the mountain to the place, still known as Horse Camp, where they dismounted from their horses and continued on foot toward the summit. If you keep going to the top, you can see those fumaroles, but be aware that the weather up there can change drastically from one hour to the next. You don’t want to spend the night on them.

Recently, I did a walk on another historic trail, the one used by the horse-drawn freight wagons that supplied Sisson with the wines, liquors, and other items from San Francisco that kept his tourist mecca stocked and well-lubricated. (As many as 70 guests at a time could be accommodated in his dining hall.)

The route we followed is still known as the Sisson-Callahan Trail. Back in the freight-hauling days, it was a spur of the main wagon route that ran from the Bay Area to Oregon. The 55-mile spur started at a tiny outpost, a hotel and store, run by a rancher named M.B. Callahan.

I hiked the Sisson end of the trail, the last 10 miles, with a friend from Redding, Todd Holbrook, a search-and-rescue guy who has spent the last couple of decades finding lost hunters and hikers in the wilderness. As it turned out, we needed his skills to get us through a few places where the trail disappeared in the tall grasses of lush meadows.

For the most part Sisson’s trail goes through the canyon carved by the North Fork of the Sacramento River. Much of the trail runs high above the streambed, but there are also some stretches where it drops down right alongside the stream. Use your imagination, and you can picture thirsty horses straining at their reins, slurping a welcome drink after the long pull from Callahan.

Trails like this one, and the route up to the summit, offer us a fourth dimension, that of time and past human experience, whether it’s Muir’s near-death on the Mount Shasta summit or the more prosaic tradition of hauling goods along what is now a scenic hiking trail.

Muir’s account of his night on Mount Shasta, published in 1877 by Harper’s New Monthly magazine, is more than a great adventure story. By enriching his tale with the graceful touches of a poet and philosopher, Muir made it an adventure story for all time, embedded forever in the fourth dimension of our mountain region.

Those stories take us to the very beginnings of recreational tourism, still a vital engine for California’s remote regions, including ours. If you were to do more time-traveling and planted yourself in front of Sisson’s Hotel in 1870 to watch the decades pass, you would see the rough narrow road in front of you become a stagecoach route, with passengers dropped off right at the front door. A few decades later they’d be getting off at a nearby railroad station.

Today the original site of the old hotel is sandwiched between a two-lane frontage road known as “South Old Stage” and Interstate 5. Tourists nowadays flock to the half-dozen motels and many Airbnbs on the other side of the freeway, some of them grabbing ice picks and following the path of John Muir and Jerome Fey toward the summit.

On that night atop Mount Shasta, lying on a bed of hissing gases, Muir calmly drew out his magnifying glass and examined the “exquisitely perfect” rays of the snowflakes on his sleeve.

His thoughts soared beyond the pain and suffering of a “Scandinavian hell” and out into celestial regions that distracted and comforted him with their dazzling beauty. Despite the swirling snow above him, he had a good view of the night sky and marveled that “the mysterious star clouds of the Milky Way arched over with marvelous distinctness.”

“Every planet glowed with long lance rays like lilies within reach,” he noted.

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‘Little wildcat! You won’t do any more scratching when I get through with you!’

‘Let me go!’ Nancy cried, struggling harder. The man half-carried, half-dragged her across the room. Opening the closet door, he flung her roughly inside. Nancy heard a key turn in the lock. The sliding of a bolt into place followed.

‘Now you can starve for all I care!’ the man laughed harshly. Then the steady tramp of his heavy boots across the floor told Nancy Drew that he had left the house…

        –The Secret of the Old Clock (1930 edition)

As any of the generations of fans of the fictional girl detective Nancy Drew—heroine of hundreds of serial novels published from 1930 to this day—can tell you, Nancy does not stay locked in the closet for long. She tries to pick the lock with a hairpin, then uses a clothing rod to pry off the hinges, while giving one of her trademark side lectures—this time, on Archimedes and the wedge.

This teenage detective became the archetype of a kind of tough American woman: smart and fierce in the face of violence, but also well-respected by police and her doting father. Fashionable, too. Even though she was just a fictional character, she was inspirational, and none other than Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor have said she was a huge influence in their lives.

Over the course of more than 600 books, Nancy Drew’s adventures were often repetitive, and though her cars and clothes were frequently updated, she always remained the same age. Accompanied by her best friends Bess and George, she unearthed lost wills and heirlooms and found missing people. She explored hidden staircases and spooky haunted houses. Tenacious and plucky, Nancy had a boyfriend, the handsome Ned. She always fought to right wrongs, using her smarts to wriggle out of perilous situations. Nancy Drew got kidnapped. She was knocked unconscious. Foes threatened her to stay off cases (or else!).

What she offered American girls was a sense of resourcefulness. She taught us to signal SOS with a tube of lipstick, to break out of a window using spike heels, and to always keep an overnight bag in our car—a girl never knew when she’d encounter a sudden overnight sleuthing adventure. Real-life kidnapping victims have said that Nancy Drew stories inspired them to use their wits to escape; successful women in law enforcement say Nancy Drew led them to their careers.

The real mystery of Nancy Drew is how such a fictional character could inspire real women. Clues can be found in the woman who fleshed out the young detective’s personality, who was named Mildred Wirt Benson. Over the years many different writers worked on Nancy Drew’s stories, which were always published under the pen name of Carolyn Keene. But the very first books in the series, the ones that established her particular steely bravery, were written by Benson, who was just as tenacious and bold and independent as her heroine. Benson sought adventure and bucked conventions throughout her life. Once she was even locked in a room.

Mildred Augustine was born in 1905 in Ladora, Iowa, a rural farming community near Iowa City. An avid reader of children’s classics like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, children’s magazines, and serial fiction, she preferred the books written for boys over those for girls, she said, because they focused on adventure and action.

The young Benson liked to write. When she was 13, her short story “The Courtesy” appeared in St. Nicholas, a monthly children’s magazine that also published notable authors like Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story won a second-place silver badge in a monthly contest. “When I grow up I’m going to be a GREAT writer,” Benson later recalled saying.

In rural Ladora, there were few career opportunities for women outside of domestic pursuits. Most girls planned on raising families and helping run the farms. Benson was a country doctor’s daughter who often rode with her father on patient calls, and that life was never in the cards. Benson’s parents encouraged her to get a college education, and to pursue adventure and her writing career. She graduated early from high school and enrolled in the University of Iowa, excelling in her classes and as a championship diver. She graduated with a degree in English in 1925—just five years after women earned the right to vote—and soon after, in 1927, she would become the first student, man or woman, to earn a master’s degree in journalism at Iowa. She traveled to New York City, where she began pursuing her long-sought career in writing.

During her first trip to New York she met a businessman named Edward Stratemeyer whose company, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, hired ghostwriters to write popular books. For a flat fee, these writers produced manuscripts based on outlines provided by the syndicate, signing away their authorship rights. Stratemeyer then attributed the books to pseudonymous authors and farmed them out to publishers. It was a very successful business model that churned out popular series such as “The Bobbsey Twins,” “Ruth Fielding,” “Tom Swift,” and “The Hardy Boys,” the boys’ detective serial that had started in 1927. “As oil has its Rockefeller, literature has its Stratemeyer,” Fortune magazine wrote of the publishing magnate, in 1934.

Stratemeyer didn’t have work for Benson right away, but he soon hired her to work on the “Ruth Fielding” series, which she had read as a child, and then asked her to help him launch a new series, about a teenage girl detective named Nancy Drew. The three-page outline Stratemeyer wrote for the first Nancy Drew book, The Secret of the Old Clock, set a tone for his new protagonist, whom he described as “An up-to-date American girl at her best, bright, clever, resourceful, and full of energy.”

He mailed the document to Benson, who set out to breathe life into the sleuthing heroine, giving her a healthy dose of her own independence, bravery, and feistiness.

Benson’s original Nancy Drew, depicted in books such as The Hidden Staircase, The Secret at Shadow Ranch, and The Clue in the Crumbling Wall, was a brash and daring sleuth. The 1930s and 1940s, when this first Nancy Drew debuted, were a time when girls who liked to read were ready for something more than the norm—those books Benson described as “namby pamby” girls’ series of the time. Life was hard for kids during the Great Depression and World War II, and parents didn’t sugarcoat the evil in the world. Reading about an adventurous girl who faced down the dangers around her provided young readers a safe escape from the troubles of the day, while also offering a nod to difficult times. Benson’s Nancy Drew paved the way for all of the others that followed, though the character was softened in later years.

Underwood typewriter used by Mildred Wirt Benson, also known as Carolyn Keene, to write several of the “Nancy Drew” mysteries. Photo courtesy of the National Museum of American History.

Nancy Drew was independent and was not tied down by work, domestic pursuits, or a fretting mother (hers had died). She was treated as an equal by her father and by many in law enforcement, and she never gave up when the going got hard. Her spirit struck a chord. Nancy Drew personified “the dream image which exists within most teen-agers,” Benson wrote in an autobiographical essay in 1973. This teen of 1930s remained culturally relevant for more than 80 years, even as young women’s roles changed dramatically. Mothers and grandmothers passed the books down to their daughters. “Women still tell me how they identified with Nancy Drew and that Nancy Drew gave them confidence to be whatever they wanted to be,” she told an interviewer in 1999.

Benson eventually did marry, twice, and had a daughter. But her career always drove her. Between 1926 and 1959, she wrote 135 books, including 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew books. Benson published some novels under her own name, including her favorite Penny Parker Mystery Stories and books in Stratemeyer Syndicate series like “The Dana Girls” and “Honey Bunch.”

Benson also worked as a journalist for more than 50 years, mainly in Toledo, Ohio at The Toledo Times and the Toledo Blade. She worked the courthouse beat, tenaciously shaking out the facts about local crimes and city corruption. Later she wrote features, aviation columns, and a popular column for active seniors.

After all those years of writing series books adventures, Benson embarked on real-life adventures. During the 1960s, she trained to become a pilot and traveled to Central America to view ancient Maya sites before they were opened to widespread tourism. She traveled alone, braving crocodile-infested rivers and jungles she had to hack through with a machete. She was even once locked inside a room, in Guatemala in the early 1960s, by some locals who thought she knew too much about criminal activity in their town. (In that moment, Benson later said, she ruefully thought, “What would Nancy do?”) Eventually Benson, in true Nancy Drew style, overpowered one of her captors and escaped. Like any good sleuth, she later returned to Guatemala to learn more about what had happened to her.

It would be decades before most Nancy Drew fans learned that Benson was the original Carolyn Keene—the Stratemeyers always kept authors’ identities under wraps, preferring to tell fans that the family wrote all the books. The truth slowly leaked out, starting in the 1970s, thanks to researchers who discovered Benson had been Carolyn Keene. In the early 1990s, Benson donated a series of papers and her Underwood typewriter to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. And in 1993 the University of Iowa held a widely-publicized Nancy Drew Conference, after which Benson finally got the public credit and adulation she deserved. She was even named the “Person of the Week” by ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

Benson told Jennings that she’d probably still be writing when the undertaker walked through the door. She was right—she was working in semi-retirement on a column for the Toledo Blade on May 28, 2002, the day she died, at age 96.

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Soon after, in a boozy haze at a San Francisco loft party, I recruited friends to skydive with me over the Russian River. Everyone sounded brave, but the next morning I was the only one who showed up. Instead of bowing out, I signed the paperwork. My senses felt dulled by a vortex of never-ending work and play, and I wondered what my inner voice would tell me about the path ahead if I could actually hear it.

When we opened the door at 10,000 feet, the only thing I saw was blue. It was a threshold to air, to nothingness. I am scared of heights, but the blue was more abstract: the terror of the unknown. I hadn’t even told my parents I was going to jump. I dug in for a moment, heartbeat in my throat, reconsidering.

The tandem instructor nudged me toward the edge like a reluctant sheep while telling me to pull back my head. I breathed deep, looked up, and, much to my surprise, found calm. Safety was supposed to be inside the plane, with a seatbelt on. But a deeper voice stirred, and it said: Maybe the places most enclosed—by walls, by rules—are the ones that pose the greatest danger. After all, isn’t that why I had quit my job? Outside was an uninhibited place, full of possibility.

“Ready, set …” And we launched into the wind.

My senses were overwhelmed by the relative wind at terminal velocity, a feeling not of falling but of flying. The parachute deployed with a big, decelerating tug. In the quiet peacefulness under the nylon canopy, floating thousands of feet above the sparkling river and green hills, I came home to myself.

We reached the ground softly. My instructor high-fived me and said, “You could be good at this!” I was adrenalized to the gills, driving away well over the speed limit with the windows down, radio blasting, and dancing like a maniac. The following week, I started training for my first skydiving license. Sometimes I was so scared to jump that I prayed for high winds to keep me on the ground. Still, I kept showing up.

Exiting through that door became a passion, an addiction, a ritual. I woke up early to go skydiving at tiny little airstrips surrounded by artichoke fields. People I would never have encountered in the Harvard bubble changed the way I thought about friendship. The drop zone was a magical equalizer, where trust fund kids with BMWs hung out with elevator technicians. Parachute packers living on ramen noodles schooled emergency room doctors in flying skills.

The author flying over Toogoolawah, Australia

There are skydivers all over the world, but the United States has the greatest numbers—our Parachute Association has around 35,000 members. We are a big country with a relatively free market for personal risk-taking and a high enough average income to put extreme sports within popular reach. The early history of sport skydiving is filled with innovations by both members of the military and pot-smoking, barefoot hippies. This reflects a cultural and socio-economic diversity that is rare in places where skydiving is more expensive, and therefore more exclusive.

True, the sport’s pioneers were largely white and male, and skydiving remains demographically skewed that way. The culture is evolving to be more inclusive and welcoming to minorities (for whom daily life may seem to carry enough risk). No matter what they look like, the skydivers I’ve encountered in this country seem to share the core values of freedom, optimism, and exploration, all essential elements of the American character.

About a year after I started jumping, I embraced my own desire for new frontiers. I sold most of my belongings and moved to South Africa to pursue my dream of a meaningful career researching the impacts of war and violence on marginalized communities. Taking my skydiving rig with me, I fell in love with the man who first drove me to the Johannesburg Skydiving Club. Freefall became an emotional choice.

Eric, who became my life partner, was the chief instructor at the club and an early adopter of the new discipline of wingsuit flying. A wingsuit is a jumpsuit spanning nylon between arms and legs to transform the body into a human glider (think: flying squirrel). Eric taught me how to use one, igniting a shared passion.

We spent weekends at the drop zone chasing clouds and holding hands. Sometimes at the end of a day we would sit at the end of the runway, tracing its cracks, philosophizing as we took the world apart and put it back together. We knew what we did carried risk, and we talked about what would happen if one of us died.

It was a Sunday morning when I got the call. Eric had made a small mistake on a high-speed landing and the error had, as he once phrased it, “cascaded into eternity.” All of the matter in the universe is sucked into the moment when the consequences of risk become real. The impossible density of it squeezed everything alive inside of me into pulpy deadness.

As a skydiver, I had learned to handle situations most people can’t deal with. Even beyond the sport we both loved, Eric had never shied away from bearing responsibility for others, even when doing so was painful. And so I wrapped his strength and conviction around my own and refused to give up on our—now my—life.

Four months passed before I was ready to try skydiving again. I didn’t want to let fear of the unknown—how would it feel to fly again without him?—dictate whether I quit. On my first jump back, I wept in the plane and performed the ritual of exiting into the blue. When the time came, it took everything I had to pull my parachute and choose life. I saw him next to me, flying on, and understood that I could not follow. Yet there was so much joy in sharing the flight.

Eight months later, I took some of his ashes up on a wingsuit jump and set them free. Achingly, I dismantled the dream life I had built and returned to the United States, where I felt I had the greatest chance at finding another open door. I spend a lot of my life in the air now, teaching people to fly and organizing world record wingsuit formations. I survived the transitions from sensory-overloaded novice to lifelong student to teacher and leader. On this path, Eric became part of me.

Flying with high-performance canopy pilot Jessica Edgeington in a discipline the author pioneered called XRW (“Extreme Relative Work”). Advances in skill and technology have allowed a wingsuit flyer in freefall to match speeds with a pilot under a fully open parachute.

I continue to bear witness to small human errors that take my friends away. But like any other risk-embracing journey, there are trade-offs that make the seemingly perpetual loss worth it. I have become part of a family made up of people from all walks of life. We are joined by our desire to experience the space between sky and ground, using the very force that pulls us down to help us fly. My hope is that our resilience, and the triumphs of our explorations, will inspire all who dream of freedom in any form to take the first step.

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The pair had trained for more than five years and encountered serious injuries on previous attempts. In recognition of their arduous and potentially fatal quest, one of them even called this climb his Moby-Dick, after that white whale that taunted—and destroyed—Captain Ahab. When Caldwell and Jorgeson made it to the top with their bloodied, bandaged, and superglued fingers, it was such a quintessential moment of American optimism that even President Obama sent his congratulations, tweeting, “You remind us that anything is possible.”

Could anyone other than Americans have scaled this incredibly difficult granite face with so scant a safety net? Of course—but it was Americans who made the seemingly impossible climb. And many of the world’s elite rock climbers—including the one considered the world’s best, Alex Honnold—are Americans. In advance of the “What It Means to Be American” event “Are Americans Risk-Takers?”, we asked scholars and people who dabble in risk for a living: What is it about American culture that encourages risk-taking?

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I was back in the Bay Area for Easter from Orange County, where I go to school. Within an hour of arriving and barely spending any time with my family, I had already stuck the keys in the ignition and backed out of the driveway. Andres and I were going to attempt to climb one of the towers of the most iconic San Francisco monuments: the Golden Gate Bridge.

Most of my time is spent living the mundanely routine life of a college student stuck in one of America’s safest cities—attending class, avoiding trouble, contemplating what to do besides going out to eat or socializing. The humdrum suburbia known as Irvine inspires a frequent desire to search for adventure.

So I seek out abandoned buildings, sewers, and ruins to explore or historical landmarks and other man-made structures to climb—an activity known as urban exploring (Urbex, for short). This is all in hopes of getting “the shot”: a unique view only seen from the depths of the underground, from extreme heights, places usually void of human presence. There’s no fun in taking photos in a world where practically every corner has already been discovered. But there’s the thrill of exploring areas where “No Trespassing” signs are ubiquitous. The only problem, of course, is getting caught.

I first became interested in urban exploring after coming across Andrew Wonder’s documentary film Undercity, which tracks the adventures of Steve Duncan under New York City, one late night my senior year in high school. My laptop screen illuminated with images of the hidden City Hall subway station, the sewer tunnel beneath Canal Street, the underground Lincoln Tunnel network, and the view from the top of the Williamsburg Bridge. These abandoned urban environments were either neglected or restricted—behind iron gates, locked doors, manhole covers, surveillance cameras, and motion sensors.

The philosophy of urban exploring is: “take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time.” These adventures reveal a beautiful grandeur hidden from view and unlock an appreciation for the locations’ complex history most people don’t know about. Though trespassing is against the law, we like to believe what we do is a victimless crime. We leave everything as found, with barely a trace of our presence, and keep specific locations secret to prevent any vandalism.

Finding places to explore is easy with the unlimited resources of the Internet. You have plenty of websites and blogs dedicated to urban exploring. Almost anywhere, you can meet up with strangers to explore hidden parts of a city.

Urban exploring sites are filled with brags about metropolises, such as New York, London, Paris, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Berlin. But rarely did I see San Francisco mentioned. Climbing the Golden Gate Bridge seemed to be the right place to begin.

Andres and I had made our first attempt to climb the bridge last year. The only preparation we conducted was visiting the bridge once during the day, and pinpointing the exact locations of security cameras and motion detectors on the bridge’s sidewalks in order to avoid them.

By getting around fences on the Marin County side, we were able to climb along the underside of the bridge deck. Unfortunately, as we got close to the surface of the bridge deck, we heard the sounds of voices shouting over the sound of drill heads hitting concrete. We had to turn back.

This night would be our second attempt. We brought gloves to grip onto ledges, cables, and the edges of gussets (the steel inserts between the cross-sections of the steel framework). They also protected our hands from rusted metal, barbed wires, and construction debris. We dressed in black to be inconspicuous.

We almost backed out as we scouted the bridge from the Presidio side. The night was uncommonly clear—as I looked up into the clear, fogless sky, I knew the moon was brilliant enough to spotlight two shadows illicitly climbing the bridge’s infrastructure. Where was San Francisco’s infamous fog when we needed it?

We drove over the bridge as a way to embed the will to climb in our bodies. Passing through the unmanned tollbooth, the first tower grew as we approached it. I drove slow, noticing the shape of a police car enter my rearview mirror. We were reminded how closely law enforcement could be watching.

We parked at a vista point in Marin at roughly 1 a.m. and agreed 30 minutes should be enough to reach the top of one of the bridge’s towers. We got around a 6-foot-high barbed wire fence by scaling an unstable plastic pipe attached to a nearby wall.

“Shine your flashlight here!”

Andres found a crevice small enough for an average human to crawl through on his stomach. Peeking in, we found a labyrinth-like walkway at least three stories high, suspended from the bottom of the bridge and leading in a variety of directions. As we climbed down, we passed hundreds of cables, each as thick as my fist, fastened to a giant block of cement. We realized we were inside the infrastructure housing two of the four cable anchorages of the Golden Gate Bridge. We were standing right in front of the place where one of the main cables that suspends the bridge’s weight was securely tethered to the ground.

We scooted along a ledge barely a foot wide and climbed up an angled plate girder attached to the end of the platform, using nothing but the rivets for leverage and our upper body strength. At a maintenance platform right under the start of one of the bridge’s main cables, we were now about 200 feet above the water.

From there, I looked out over San Francisco Bay and saw the familiar outlines of the Bay Bridge, downtown San Francisco, and Coit Tower engrossed by flickering lights. The water reflected the intense brilliance of the moon. It was an inimitable view, unrestricted by guardrails. I could not help but feel that I discovered something miraculously wonderful. Then I photographed the scene knowing I would only be able to capture just a fragment of its elegance.

By the time I was satisfied with the pictures I’d taken, it was 2 a.m. The empty car in the viewpoint parking lot would surely spark some suspicion. We were tempted to continue because we were standing right at the start of one of the bridge’s main cables that led up to the top of a 500-foot Art Deco tower. We could have tightrope-walked right up. But it was getting late. The last thing we wanted was to increase the chances of getting caught.

The way back was faster than the journey in. The fear of getting caught overcame any fear of heights. We found our way to the anchorage’s labyrinthine stairs in the dark, with the aid of our cell phone lights. The knurled patterns on each ladder rung hurriedly climbed made impressions on my gloves.

We had made our way out of the anchorage—the home stretch—when we heard a whistle. Then, “Hey!” Then another call, closer and louder: “Hey!” We didn’t know who it was or where the voice was coming from.

We were out of breath, but we ran toward the parking lot. Andres jumped over the fence easily, but I was so exhausted, all I could muster was lifting my torso above the fence. I told Andres, “I can’t make it.” He pulled the rest of me over and in the process, ripped my pants. I fell to the ground feeling dirt enter my shoes and cold air hitting my leg. Andres was steaming with sweat and covered in dirt, cobwebs, and stains from the bridge’s characteristic international orange paint. I could only assume the same for myself. We were in the clear, but we surely did not look like we were tourists admiring the view from the lookout.

It was a relief to reach the parking lot and see the car still there, not surrounded by Bridge Patrol. Andres and I nonchalantly made our way over to the car trying to catch our breath, wiping dust from our clothes. We entered the car and couldn’t help but think how much closer we were to climbing a tower this time. I had plenty of pictures to upload on my blog to prove it. And we agreed: There is always a next time.

While climbing part of the Golden Gate Bridge isn’t the same as scaling Mt. Everest, it was a chance to explore for exploring’s sake. It was a chase that proved I existed outside of the routines of daily life. It made me realize I like living by interesting vices, not boring virtues.

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