I clipped my ascender to the rope and rappelled a few more inches until the ascender held my weight.  With water dripping from my fingers, I unclipped the figure eight and reattached it below the knot joining the last two ropes. Once secured, I used my other ascender to remove the pressure from the first, then put them away and gratefully began the final twenty feet of the adventure.

Once even with the ledge, I began to swing myself toward it and ran into the first major hang up of the day. Everything else so far had gone smoothly.   I couldn't have asked for better. The thousand-foot rappel next to Basaseachic Falls in Mexico had turned out unforgettably thrilling and beautiful.

But the end of the final rope, which I tossed down from above, had caught around a sharp rock behind the falls.  I yanked at it, but it wouldn't budge. I gathered up rope in one hand, then whipped it, sending tall arcs of rope flipping from side to side, hoping to dislodge it.  No luck. I couldn’t pull the rope loose, and without the needed slack, and I couldn’t swing myself far enough over to reach the ledge. I had no choice but to rappel down and free the rope.

The wind near the falls felt like a typhoon, gusting over fifty miles per hour and packed with hard pellets of rain. I landed on a two-foot wide ledge and let the rope go slack for the first time since leaving the top. I pulled my rain slicker from my backpack, pushed my arms into the sleeves, and disappeared behind the falls. The rope now came loose easily and I tossed it down the last forty feet to the frothing pool where the river came crashing like a never-ending freight train at eighty miles per hour.

I walked back to the outside edge of my ledge and looked up at the escape ledge, now fifteen feet above my head, up a slippery, mossy slope. I could clip my ascenders to the rope and then swing back and forth in a pendulum to make my way there, but it would be awkward. Climbing behind the falls had shifted the point where the rope hung from above and I might have to swing into the falls themselves before I could swing all the way the opposite direction to the ledge. One look at the violently falling river convinced me to avoid that option.

I looked down into the frothy pool below. What force of current could be spinning through it? I had no way of knowing. I only knew that after Ben and I rappelled Cusarare Falls yesterday - a mere hundred feet with much less water - we dove into the pool at the base and never touched bottom. Basaseachic tossed twenty times as much water from more than six times as high, and I worried about what I might find below.

Even so, I pulled the rope tighter through my figure eight and leaned back to rap the last forty feet. When my weight hit the rope, all nine hundred sixty feet of rope dangling above me stretched and sent me sailing down out of control. Wild and frightening thoughts of hundred-foot depths filled with powerfully churning eddies that could suck me back under the falls and hold me in its endless cycle raced through my mind as mossy rock slipped past my helpless feet and hands. I held my breath and hit the water at full speed.

Foot-high white caps splashed past and into the rock wall and a wave of cool relief surged through me as I realized I had landed in only waist-deep water. I took a brief look back at the falls, turning away when the thick rain instantly filled my eye sockets.  I shielded my face with my hand and took one more quick glance, hoping to commit the image to memory, and started walking along the pool’s edge to safety.

Then the bottom dropped out. I had stepped off an underwater ledge. I kicked out but found nothing below me. My body dropped up to my neck and thoughts of murderous currents again filled my mind. There was nothing to do but doggie paddle frantically through the waves away from the falls. My backpack provided some flotation and I noticed that the currents were carrying me slowly down stream.

The warm water, now that I had escaped the wind, felt refreshing and comforting and I found myself grinning from ear to ear. This was the most enjoyable part of the adventure yet.  Twenty feet downstream toward the narrow neck where the water gushed from the pool and into another frothy river, my feet touched bottom again and I stood. Before me lay one more deep pool I could swim through before the slippery cliff ended, but it sat too near the river, and I didn't want to get dragged into it where the currents began again in earnest. Instead, I looked up and found enough tiny finger pockets and a shallow crack that let me climb thirty feet and then it was over and I stood on solid ground.

My first thought was to warn Ben. I looked up the cliff to try to get his attention and warn him away. But even if he could have seen me, I’d have been no more than a tiny dot in the distance. Even if he could see my arms waving, he would never guess to interpret the signal as a warning.

And then I remembered the thought that sent me over the edge in the first place: This is why you came. Ben had also come to Mexico to rappel this falls. I had shown him pictures and promised adventure. And now that we knew the rope reached the bottom, now that I had dislodged it from the bushes and the rocks behind the falls, now that I knew it could be done, what else could go wrong?