Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains

Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.

Bouldering isn't really a sport. It's a climbing activity with metaphysical, mystical, and philosophical overtones." -John Gill-

Boredom presents a very real, if insidious peril. To quote Blaine Harden from the Washington post:“Boredom kills, and those it does not kill, it cripples, and those it does not cripple, it bleeds like a leech, leaving its victims pale, insipid, and brooding. Examples abound...Rats kept in comfortable isolation quickly become jumpy, irritable, and aggressive. Their bodies twitch, their tails grow scaly." The backcountry traveler, then, in addition to developing such skills as the use of a map and compass, or the prevention and treatment of blisters, must prepare mentally and materially to cope with boredom, lest his tail grow scaly.

...books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.

One of the differences between us was that Marc wanted very badly to climb the Eiger, while I wanted very badly only to have climbed the Eiger. Marc, understand, is at that age when the pituitary secretes an overabundance of those hormones that mask the subtler emotions, such as fear. He tends to confuse things like life-or-death climbing with fun.

Continually question climbing pursuits. Do they draw one back to the climbing community? Or do they lead along the [inner-directed] path? This questioning generates a tension that is heightened by disillusionment. Ultimately, one reaches an emptiness, and this is where our basic spontaneous nature leads to the beginning of the path... Thereafter one can continually stand apart from the outer world of climbing, yet at times be fiercely involved in it. Philosophical and mystical dimensions emerge when the two worlds are brought together.

Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you're hyperaware of the abyss pulling at your back. You constantly feel its call, its immense hunger. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don't dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge, it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. Bus as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control.

You'll never feel the joy of movement if you're struggling. You've got to get good enough and strong enough to reach the point where you can feel this quintessential lightness. - John Gill

The accrued guilt and clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the festering familial sores, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose, and by the seriousness of the task at hand.

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough it is your God-given right to have it.

I didn't recognize that at the time, of course, but I'm grateful for it now.

You'll never feel the joy of movement if you're struggling.

Anything that gets you out, that gets you physically active, is going to be good psychotherapy and stave off winter problems.

Boredom presents a very real, if insidious, peril.

Marc wanted very badly to climb the Eiger, while I wanted very badly only to have climbed the Eiger.

In crunching the numbers to arrive at the peak's height, for example, the surveyor must somehow take into consideration such wild cards as atmospheric refraction and plumb-line deflection. The latter, in the simplest terms, is the tendency for the immense mass of a range like the Himalaya to tug the liquid leveling bubbles in a surveyor's instruments slightly toward the mountains—in the same way that the moon tugs on the tides—and thus throw them out of whack.