The storm dropped a foot of snow on the rim of El Cap (in July!), and three teams of climbers had to be rescued from El Cap during those three days.

As the storm cleared, we had just matched the world record for the longest time anybody had ever lived continuously on a rock wall (28 days), and we were not even halfway up!  We felt beaten and pathetic at this point.

However, in the words of Morpheus from the Matrix, "Fate, it seems, is not without its sense of irony."  A team of climbers from Aquarian Wall had been berating us for a couple of days prior to the storm.  They weathered the storm on Timbuktu Tower, which was directly across the slab from our eighth anchor.  As we all emerged from our various protections, they yelled over, "So, Mad Bolters... had enough?  You going to go up Horse Chute now, or are you going down?"

I was immediately filled with fury and resolve, and shouted back, "No, we're going up our route.  We're going up into those overhangs."

The chiding from that team of critics was perfectly timed to make our decision.  We had vowed from the start to never even begin talking about quitting, but both Mark and I were sick and tired of the thing by the end of that storm.  But that Aquarian Wall team, who thought to dig at us just a bit more, actually cemented our resolve to not be beaten.  We headed up into the Overseer.