Why Do I Climb Mountains?

  

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness 

and the greatest enjoyment from life

is to live dangerously.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is something very enlivening about climbing mountains that keeps me going back time and again. Despite its risks, there is something very vital about ascending high places and living on the edge of danger that touches me deeply. I am inexorably drawn to the stories of remarkable climbers who accomplished high feats, yet often met grisly and unfortunate deaths doing what they loved. Their lifestyle, achievements, and passion are beyond extraordinary – yet seeing through their eyes and feeling their emotions that few others would wish to experience leaves me mesmerized.

The lure of climbing mountains fills me with emotions of both excitement and hesitancy – the same way I feel when I inch closer to the precipice of some plunging chasm that would surely spell death should an unexpected gust of breeze send me off. It is hypnotic in its appeal – purely irrational – and difficult to convey to a non-climber. Call it a heady mixture of anticipation and anxious dread. Who would do such a thing?

Every climber struggles with explaining why climbers climb, and the strange paradox that climbing presents. Still, despite knowing the inevitable risks and the dire logistics of mountain mishaps, I love it fiercely.

Men fall off mountains

because they have no business being there.

That's why they go. That's why they die.

Syd Marty ~ from the poem Abbot

One of the world's most exceptional climbers ever, Alex Lowe (pictured above), one of the original driving forces of American climbing, with an extraordinary list of ascents and technical skills on both rock and ice, and an inspiration for more than one generation, once humbly proclaimed on the MountainZone website:

Thinking back... I appreciate why I come to the mountains; not to conquer them but to immerse myself in their incomprehensible immensity - so much bigger than we are; to better comprehend humility and patience balanced in harmony, with the desire to push hard; to share what the hills offer and to share it in the long term with good friends and ultimately with my own sons.

Upon the avalanche death of climbers Alex Lowe and cameraman David Bridges on October 5, 1999, on a training hike in the Tibetan Himalayas, their surviving partner Conrad Anker published the following tribute in Climbing Magazine as he attempted to find meaning in this stark and brutal loss:

The old questions we ask ourselves about climbing took on new meaning. We knew the risk. Should we have done something different? Are the risks we take worth the rewards they bring? What drives us to climb? The exploration of the unknown has led humanity to where we are today. The quest for knowledge, the willingness to accept risk for an unknown outcome, has allowed people to progress spiritually and intellectually. The thrill of discovering new reaches remains with many of us, in all walks of life. Those of us who found this calling and pursue it in the mountains are fortunate. For Alex this is what climbing was about, the exploration of the soul, the trust and learning gained from attempting something difficult and improbable.

For me, and those like me, climbing mountains is a spiritual experience. I do it for my soul. Being in high places ever reminds me of my own transience and fragile mortality and that in the scheme of All That Is, my place and efforts are ever insignificant. The mountains will always have about them an ethereal and evocative appeal that I find impossible to resist. They are at once both an infuriating and a fascinating contradiction. Climbing perhaps makes no sense, but it always feels right.