What is Mountain Climbing?
He is your neighbor. She is the smiling woman behind the receptionist's desk at your dentist office. He's the man who built your house. Who are these people?
On weekends they vanish down the highway, watching the cluttered cities grow small in rearview mirrors. Phone calls are answered by machines and voice mail. Several times a year, they disappear for weeks at a time.
What are they doing?
Midweek finds them sorting through an amazing collection of gadgets, checking guide books, calculating mileage, travel time, and trail head elevations. By Friday afternoon, (sometimes Thursday when they can sneak an extra day off from work) they are headed out of town. If someone is waving goodbye, the parting remark is usually "See you later -- Got a mountain to climb."
What is mountain climbing?
To people who are peripheral to the sport, it is many things -- It is the intense eyes of the man with the ice-encrusted beard and lethal-looking ice axes in his hands; it is reckless risk-taking; bold adventure; suffering; it is an industry that shouts in bright colors from outdoor magazines that if you buy THIS product or eat THIS energy bar you will be in the center, looking out at the world through those intense eyes, that you will know what it all means to go to the remote and desperate heights of the earth where humans were not meant to survive.
But those that are packing their gear on Wednesday nights are not packing the latest ice axes on the market. They are not wearing the brightest, newest high altitude nylon wind suits. Their waterproof or Goretex may have many patches. Their packs are battered, their boots worn and scuffed. Most have been quietly pursuing their passion for high places for many years, since long before media attention, superb high-tech gear, and the need for adventure in an increasingly pre-packaged society brought mountain climbing into the mainstream.
Real climbers have day jobs.
To them the activity is all-absorbing; a passion, a way of life from which they look at the world.
Their method is simple: they seek the remote, the unattainable. They are enchanted with the improbable.
To just set down on a summit via helicopter or 4wd SUV misses the point. Theirs is the journey, and the journey owns them.
What calls them? A land as alien as the surface of the moon. Look close. Closer still... There! do you see it? In the crevice, amidst a pull of gravity as lethal as a gunshot, grows a flower. Across the jumbled, creaking freight-train blocks of a tumultuous glacier's icefall, bubbles a streamlet as pure as the first day of the world. Their boot prints, sometimes the first these places have seen since the dawn of time, vanish like the whisper of a thought forgotten, in those far places where time is measured only by the pulse of the seasons, the shifting of the constellations through the
millenia.
They range from sandwich-in-a-paper-bag-toting peak baggers to hard-core wall rats festooned with ironmongery, to parka-shrouded cloudwalkers of the 8,000-meter peaks. They are the grandmothers, students, school teachers, doctors and engineers, who have discovered a reality outside of the clocks, ceilings, schedules and planning of this world.
Summit day usually begins some time on the late night side of morning, shouldering a battered pack, crunching crampons across snow or balancing catfooted across teetering granite blocks by headlamp in the darkness. For others it begins in a sleeping bag cocoon suspended above a gulf of emptiness on a nylon-and-aluminum-framed portaledge, lighting a tiny bedside hanging stove for coffee, dangling above two thousand feet of air amid an incredible tangle of ropes, gear, and supplies, before the first light of day begins to rinse the sky of stars. The same sunrise finds them all.
They seek those moments when time stands still.
The catalysts are as varied as the individuals who pursue this path: a meteor shower; a night sky so star-filled that it snatches your breath; another rise of the sun over distant mountains vast and untouchable; dodging a rock careening crazily down a gully; a desperate icy struggle through whiteout and ground blizzard down to the safety of camp after an unsuccessful summit attempt; standing atop a mountain with a friend, the whole world at your feet, a blinding sun blazing out of a flawless sky, taking the time to watch that sun dip below the horizon even though camp is still many miles and many thousands of feet distant; Stumbling over boulders and through brush in the darkness; watching the starlight and the storm wrest for posession of the night sky, seated on a narrow ledge beside your rope-mate with only the clothes on your back for shelter, shivering the night away, knowing that, sometime in a distant place you cannot now touch, the world will once again grow bright, the sun will rise, and you will look out on the infant day with new eyes.
The twinkling lights of the city grow closer as your car speeds away from the mountain. Soon, you will drop off your ropemate, the two of you will shake hands or hug, and the trip will be over. But not the journey.
Some at work may notice it, think the intense look a scar from desperate struggles in the sky. But your partner knows. It is the look of someone looking inward, remembering, savoring. And when you get home from work that first evening back on the flatlands, you will not so much unpack, as re-arrange, evaluate, inspect, and start re-packing your gear for the next trip, the next exploration of a region as vast and unknown as the star-filled sky.
Brutus of Wyde, Old Climbers' Home
September 15, 2000
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