Why Do We Climb?

Today marks my seventieth birthday. While I should be back-pedaling some of my adventurous pursuits as I approach my waning years, with greater deliberation and gentleness, instead I look forward to an aggressive summer of climbing to the top of many challenging high peaks in the Rockies. Why would a guy my age continue to chase such dreams? Why would anyone pursue something that involves such a high degree of risk? Why? Why? Why?

The answer is not easy to explain to one who may not be as risk-averse. Not a climber? I cannot expect you to grasp my reason. I find the words of Geoff Powter in his work Inner Ranges on pages 24 through 28 perhaps more acceptable than anything I might dredge up as an excuse for continuing to go back to climb mountains again and again:

“Of all the questions that climbers, backcountry skiers, and other outdoor athletes are asked, it's the toughest one: “Why?” Why do what you do, when you know the consequences? When you've even seen the consequences? Why in the world would you even get back up and do it again? What is wrong with you?

“There are a million individual reasons for what we do, reasons that run far deeper than Mallory's koan “Because it's there” will ever reveal. The reasons change as we age and gain experience, but for most of us, the reasons begin in the same soil: that great, blind, silly hubris of adolescence. Death? It might happen to somebody else, but not to me.

“We convince ourselves that our skills, our experience, our will were all the magic that we need to survive. We didn't need superstition or luck, because we had knowledge that we could use like an amulet to get us out of epics or help us avoid them entirely.

“Then, at some point, with experience and skills and lessons learned, we moved past most of the fear, and the game changed. The beauty of things revealed suddenly made the risk make sense: beauty of place, the pure, graceful joy of movement, the pleasure of friendships built in shared challenge, and the victory of doing what everyone said we couldn't. Those things all became the real reason to be out there; we loved what we saw, and we loved how we felt. The fear was just a hurdle on the way to someplace new and remarkable.

“Evolutionary biologists have an answer to the puzzling “Why?” They argue that we have been sculpted by our distant, collective experience in ways that we're not the least aware of – in fact, in ways that we try to deny, in the hopes of being greater than what runs in our blood. We forget that for the vast majority of our time on Earth, our survival was determined by our capacity to stare down death. But instead of celebrating this power, we declare faith, love, and community as our salvations, and decry risk as the enemy, as though our successes in the gentle realms aren't entirely consistent upon our ability to face fear. Somewhere, deep down in the bones, there may be a need as resilient as survival, an instinct to prove that we live as a result of personal agency, and not because someone else lets us live.”