THERE ALWAYS WILL BE A TOUGH ... HILL TO CLIMB WOMAN'S FREE ASCENT OF THE NOSE AT EL CAP 10 YEARS AGO REMAINS NOTHING TO SNEEZE AT.

Byline: Bill Becher Special to the Daily News

Ten years ago Lynn Hill was wedged into a narrow vee of rock climbers call ``Changing Corners'' nearly 3,000 feet above Yosemite Valley.

She was trying to be the first person to free climb the entire route called the Nose up the sheer granite walls of El Capitan.

In rock climbing, style counts. Many others had climbed this route, but none had done it entirely free climbing, all had used some aid. Aid climbing means you use artificial means to climb, hauling yourself up a rope or standing on a piton, for example.

Free climbing means the rope is only a safety backup, you get yourself up by whatever natural cracks and bumps there are in the rock.

Changing Corners is what rock climbers call ``the crux'' of the Nose Route, the hardest part of a climb.

Hill tried climbing directly up the smooth rock wall that opens like a book in a shape that climbers call a ``dihedral,'' but she couldn't find the right moves. Exhausted, she abandoned her free-climbing attempt.

Hill finished the climb using the bolt ladder others had placed in the rock but wasn't ready to give up her goal of ``freeing the Nose.''

After her first attempt failed at Changing Corners, only a few hundred feet from the summit, Hill came back a week later and rappelled down El Cap from the top. She spent three days practicing the sequence of moves needed at the crux.

In her autobiography, ``Climbing Free,'' Hill called the moves ``a wild tango of smears with my feet, tenuous stems, back steps and cross steps, lay backs and arm bars, and pinches and palming maneuvers.''

Fear of falling was not part of her dance.

``What you have to do is recognize the fear,'' Hill said in an interview this year, ``accept it, and do what I call `mental shift,' where you go from focusing on the acknowledgment of a dangerous situation to focusing on the solution.

``Instead of resisting that fear, you launch the solution. Often it's looking at different holds above you, or changing your body position, trying different things until you get that little voice that says `yes' instead of `no.' ''

In her second attempt to free the Nose, the voice said ``yes'' as Hill twisted and contorted up the vertical granite wall at Changing Corners.

Her climbing partner, Brooke Sandahl, shouted his congratulations, then warned Hill a storm was approaching,

``We better punch it all the way to the top,'' he said.

The last section of the Nose exposes climbers to a full 3,000 feet of air beneath an overhanging wall.

Hill free climbed this section and camped with Sandahl at the top of El Cap. There was no crowd to roar its appreciation, in fact, nobody at all to congratulate Hill on the achievement. Just a campfire, laughter as they relived the climb, and views of stars and Yosemite's granite walls lit by moonlight.

Now, in a year when pro golfer Annika Sorenstam couldn't make the cut playing a tournament on the men's tour, Lynn Hill's free ascent of Yosemite's El Cap stands out as an amazing athletic achievement unmatched by any rock climber, male or female.

Do women deal with fear differently than men? Hill thinks there are more social demands on men to overcome fear.

``There is more pressure on men to not wimp out, to not be chicken,'' Hill said.

``Men tend to not focus on those negative thoughts about hurting themselves as much because they are focused more on succeeding in whatever they're trying to do. They're pushed to succeed, to take big risks, and they probably learn faster to get over those fears.''

Hill said she loves the unique challenges of rock climbing.

``You're moving using your whole body. It's like a form of ballet, but it's a spontaneous one because you're not practicing the same routine all the time.

``It's a really creative process. It's very engaging - you don't really have time to think about anything else.''

A new mother at 42, Hill doesn't always have to scale sheer granite walls thousands of feet high to enjoy climbing. Bouldering - climbing a rock where you don't get high enough to need a rope - is a form of physical and mental chess Hill relishes.

``You try 20 different methods before you find the right one. It forces you to be creative in the way that you put together a sequence of moves. Sometimes it's as simple as starting with your left foot instead of your right foot on a particular boulder or turning your thumb on a handhold.''

A year after her epic free climb up the Nose, Hill went back and did it again in a single day.

Lynn Hill not only made the cut, after 10 years she's still the leader.

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(1 -- 2) Lynn Hill calls free climbing ``a form of ballet,'' and 10 years ago she used her courage and dexterity to scale a route up the sheer granite walls of El Capitan. Today, at age 42, Hill still enjoys bouldering, where a rock - not high enough to involve the use of ropes - can be climbed in what Hill describes as a physical and mental form of chess.

Bill Becher/Daily News