I fall vaguely into that category, and soon enough I was in Jackson Hole prepping for the ascent. After two days of training (Multi-Pitch Mountaineering I and II), I had learned a lot about what it takes to make a successful summit bid and even more about the 1872 climb. For 26 years Langford and Stevenson's claim to have conquered the Grand held strong, until an amateur Wyoming climber named Billy Owen denounced them as shameless liars. In 1898 Owen made it to the top with three friends—and had a newfangled Kodak camera with him to prove it. This group found no sign of the 1872 climbers, and many features of Langford's Scribner's article seemed confused at best. Owen called it fraud, provoking a series of vicious exchanges in the top outdoor magazines of the day. He kept pressing his case until 1927, when the Wyoming state legislature passed a unique resolution declaring that Owen had indeed been the first to the top.

You'd think that would have ended the controversy, but mountaineers aren't keen on having their disputes settled for them by politicians, least of all out West. Today beer-fueled debates still tear through the bars of Jackson. In 1977 a bronze plaque that was placed on the Grand's summit to commemorate Billy Owen's ascent was stolen, evidently by a Langford fan, and in a 1992 book, The Grand Controversy, Owen's claim was condemned as "one of the most . . . masterful scams in mountaineering history" by local historian Lorraine Bonney. As for me, I couldn't help thinking that Langford and Stevenson had somehow been cheated—there is a definite romantic appeal to thinking that the plucky pair had made it to the top—but whenever I tried to follow the arguments over their account, I got lost in a morass of route details. Clearly I could never form an opinion on the story until I went up there myself.

On the approach to the Grand, it didn't take long to feel like I was plunging back into frontier-era wilds—about five minutes, in fact, as I hit the steep Garnet Canyon Trail from Lupine Meadows, about 7.5 miles from the peak, and the ponderosa pine forest closed around me. Four hours later, I was rock-hopping above tree line, following Rod past cliffs and glaciers tinged with pink algae. (The French trappers' name for the mountains, Les Tétons, or "breasts," was a bit fanciful, Langford wrote in his Scribner's article; up close, they looked more like "shark's teeth.") By late afternoon, when we reached the Lower Saddle, a notch at 11,600-feet where Exum erects its summer base camp, I had to admire the gall of the 1872 group all over again. On that July 29th, the group had set off at 4:30 a.m. and trudged up here from the Teton's utterly isolated Idaho side in hobnailed boots, with a few bacon sandwiches in their rucksacks; their only equipment was their metal-tipped walking sticks and a single length of rope. Ten of the initial 14 fell by the wayside, with only four continuing beyond the Lower Saddle.

In Jackson, admirers of Langford believe that features from his Scribner's story can be identified on today's most popular route, which to the chagrin of his fans is called the Owen-Spalding. The next morning, Rod and I would follow in their footsteps as closely as we could.

"The O-S is quite straightforward," Rod remarked, peering at the horizon. "So long as you don't get weather." Luckily, it was a perfect summer's evening: We watched the stars appear on a purple sky.