why we climb

From his thoughts after leaving camp 4 on Everest’s West Ridge:

For almost the first time during the entire expedition I was completely alone. I sat atop the ridge with my mittens off, soaking up the windless warmth of the afternoon sun. I looked across brown hills, deep glacial valleys, snow peaks ranging westward into haze. My thoughts knew only the restriction imposed by limits of my ability to feel and comprehend. A vertical mile above, at the far end of the West Ridge, was the highest point on earth. The day after tomorrow? The dream of childhood, not to be lost? My gaze climbed lightly up each detail of our route, to the base of the Couloir at 26,000 feet. The rest was unknown, partly hidden grossly foreshortened, but all there.

Like pain, a mountain can be a subjective sensation; for all its solidity and fixity of form, it is more than what one sees. It is awe, pleasure, respect, love, fear, and much, much more. It is an ever-changing, maturing feeling. Over the weeks since we had first stood on the Shoulder to see the black rock of the last four thousand feet, my feelings toward the climb had steadily ripened. That rock couldn’t be divorced from the summit to which it led. Yet each time we looked, the slope seemed a few degrees gentler, the vertical distance not quite so unreasonable. After all, we had climbed steeper faces and longer distance, and on more rotten rock. But all together? And above 27,000 feet instead of half that high? However, you can’t see altitude. Might as well ignore it. We chose not to dwell on problems like what happens if you run out of oxygen below the summit. And what it’s like to climb on rotten rock at 27,000 feet, ballasted by a forty-pound pack.

Everest came down off Everest. It became, in a climbing sense, just another mountain to be approached and attempted within the context of our past experience in the Rockies, Tetons, or on Mount Rainier. Not quite, really. But much of the battle lay inside. That battle was nearly won.

~Thomas F. Hornbein, 1963, “Everest, the West Ridge”

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