Wispy, cotton-candy clouds move briskly across the mid-February sky. My girlfriend, Thea Hutchinson, and I take turns climbing the mottled brown basaltic rocks of the cliff band just outside of White Rock. Thea gives me a hanging belay—making sure that, if I fall, she can catch me with the other end of the rope from her position 25 feet off the ground—as I climb. The sky doesn’t seem to be falling, but that changes in an instant.