On Escaping

When you don’t know them, the depths of the mountains are intimidating. I need to have my shit together to go there, you think. And sure, that’s true! It’s probably the message worth publicizing, as some beleaguered EMT packs for their 10th search-and-rescue of the month. But they aren’t impossible. With time and dedication and luck, you can learn and talk and read about how to interact with the mountains. And that’s fun. You figured out something complicated and hard. It’s nice to get better at things. 

That’s not why people fall in love with mountains, though. That doesn’t take over a life. You fall in love with the mountains because they are simple and pure. One day you walk into the woods, just like before, and you leave permanently altered. I remember that moment vividly: the first time I stood in a place where there was nothing more to life beyond the cliff that could end it. It’s that first time you are overwhelmed, really just undone by the beauty and the danger and the sheer intensity of the experience. What a gift it is, if only for a second, much less a day or a trip or a summer, to not know or need anything else. To escape. When you are up high, the life you left behind feels so simple, so supremely conquerable. You found a moment without nuance.

And you go back to normal life and it just isn’t. You try to hold on to that simplicity. You can’t— you have a new measure of how intense life can feel, and the rest of the world is just a bit pale by comparison. But it’s still worth it, really, because in the drawn-out days of ordinariness, you walk through the world with a secret. And that secret is the knowledge of what lies beyond, and the fact that you’ve been there before and you will again. And that truth is so important that you absolutely need to tell someone. So you mention (super casually, of course) that you like to climb, that you just got back from the park, and how was your weekend? Maybe you pull up a photo. But you know from experience that it isn’t all that worthwhile to try to convey how radical it felt, how consuming. How even the best days in normalcy can feel like mere aftershocks. 

But then you chance upon someone who is walking through life with that same secret, and you look at each other with that glint in the corner of your eyes, as if to say, We know. We know. And they talk about those places with the same unfettered quality. That’s really all you need to hear. So you go to the mountains with them. And you learn quickly that it’s the people that sustain you between those moments of singularity, in the bleary-eyed dawn patrols, the death marches, the neverending bushwhacks, the long road back to the real world on a Sunday night. Often, it’s just suffering, but you’re suffering together, and you can look at them and chuckle and say, “Isn’t this terrible?”

And it turns out that the secret is not just a bit of knowledge but an entire series of traits that selects for people who are intoxicatingly interesting, who challenge and delight you, who carry themselves with quiet grace and kindness and intentionality. 

And then you realize that you can share that secret. You have to– someone shared it with you. And you watch with pride as you jump-start someone else’s obsession; when they lay eyes on a view that scrambles their brain just as thoroughly as it scrambles yours, and you can turn to them and say, See?  Do you get it now? And you feel so seen and so understood.

And now these excursions, these experiences, become routine. Or more precisely, they become habitual. Routine implies a passivity, a supreme agency. Spend enough time outdoors, and the days can feel easy, sure. But don’t for a second deceive yourself into thinking you are in control. The mountains have chewed up and spit out intrepid adventurers with drier palms, quieter minds, surer feet. For every shot of ego that the mountains provide, they demand twice as much vulnerability. I was vulnerable in the mountains, out of necessity, long before I learned to be anywhere else.

And so you begin to pour more and more of yourself into that secret. And for a while, it’s so easy. The unknown of every day is not what? but which? and how? and with whom? And you learn to find that state of singularity over and over again. And sure, it’s complex. There’s much to buy, to learn, to see. You borrow gear and borrow beta and you borrow from the past. It’s complicated, but it doesn’t feel that way. You’re learning the language of simplicity. 

Until one day you go to the mountains to escape, just as you have so many times before, and you can’t. That simplicity has evaporated. That peak, which so easily dwarfed all the trials of existence, now contains them. And that’s really terrifying. You realize you oriented your life around the mountains so successfully that they are your life. In some existential sense, sure, but very practically. Hang around long enough, you’ll see death. You’ll find that people and professions and heartbreak and pain and sickness and disappointment and money and possessions that tax the mind are now all exist up there. Maybe it’s that once-in-a-lifetime climb with someone you don’t talk to anymore. It’s a dream job in the mountains, now inextricably linked to your shitty day at work. And the intensity of memories forged in mountains now only deepens the capacity for pain. The unforgiving jagged razors of the ridge and the world are one.

Cesare Maestri describes the moment he and Torre Egger topped the first ascent of the impossible Cerro Torre on January 31, 1959. “It seems impossible. I’m not happy, this is a top like the others. How much effort, how much risk, many factors unrelated to climbing gave me the strength to climb. No! I’m not happy.” Three days later, Maestri stumbled back to the Torre Glacier without its namesake, left dead on the mountain above. That passage, so resonant for many mountaineers, was a lie of course. Maestri and Egger never made the summit, and over the next decade more and more started to question his account. The ensuing controversy destroyed Maestri. He returned 11 years later, the baggage of death and deceit made manifest by the 150-pound gas compressor that he drug up the perfect granite wall, drilling in a perfect line of bolts up the east face to a summit obtained without style or grace. The ugly scar of bolts remained long after Maestri retreated, now a pariah.

“If I could have a magic wand” Maestri lamented later in life, “I would erase Cerro Torre from my life.” In some ways, Maestri got his wish. In 2012, Hayden Kennedy and Jason Kruk removed the bolts from the wall after a clean-means ascent of the same route. Cerro Torre’s savage wildness was restored, but Maestri and Kennedy were still tragically linked across time. Maestri would never return to the mountain that made him infamous. Hayden Kennedy would die less than 5 years later by suicide, hours after his girlfriend, Inge Perkins, died in an avalanche outside Bozeman, Montana. 

Mountains are pure, you say? How cute. Is falling in love with the mountains for their “simplicity” merely the height of naiveté? What do those scars leave other than equivocation where there was once peace? 

I think that if grief is love with nowhere to go, if pain is just a lack of understanding, then siting those fundamentally human trials in a place of such obvious savage beauty cannot be a waste. It’s a struggle, sure. It’s type II fun, to say the least. But It’s worth it, really, because it’s a life lived with intensity and intention.

Mountains demand perseverance, connection, hope. They highlight the value of a friend, a quiet mind, a long walk in the fresh air, a good meal, a song. Sneakily, they build a framework for processing. What is known to those 10 feet above a tipped-out #2 cam, or contemplating that first jump turn in an icy couloir, or suspended between the ground and sky in an endless thicket of alder? The only way out is through.