From: Brutus of Wyde 
Newsgroups: rec.climbing
Subject: Re: The Mindset of Motion
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 19:16:10 GMT

Wrote this a while back in response to that guy who
asked folks to write "what is mountain climbing?"

[boy did he get some flaming and sarcastic replies:]

Don't remember
if I posted the finished product or not, but somehow
(not sure exactly how... I'll leave that to yall to
decide) it seemed like it might be relevant to the
current topic.

Brutus

[ps Dingus, it looked like you forgot to double-space
one of your paragraphs   :D   ]


***********************************************

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.


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