At the crux, Washburn was chosen to lead the knife-like ridge, with the rationale that as the lightest climber, she would be easiest for the others to pull back up if the ridge should give way. A climber from a later expedition to Mt. Hayes would describe this section as "so narrow and the snow so soft that you could not put your feet side by side." Bradford Washburn's biographer, David Roberts, questioned the rationale for Washburn's lead, writing that "the crux pitches on a mountain such as Hayes should have been led by the best climber, which in this case was Brad. He weighed only about thirty pounds more than his wife. [...] Had Barbara slipped off the ridge, or broken loose a cornice or even a chunk of the ridge, she would have taken a long, horrific pendulum fall down the sheer precipice on either the east or the west side. Even held on belay, she might have seriously injured herself, and it would have been no easy matter to get her back up to the ridge." In Washburn's obituary, the "American Alpine Journal" singled out this section of the climb as her greatest feat of mountaineering, noting that "what was probably the hardest bit of technical climbing Brad ever performed in his long Alaskan career was a ridge traverse led by his wife." The ridge did not give way, and the climbers reached the summit that afternoon.