Here are some of my favorites – what were yours?
On the northern margin of the Alaska Range, just before the hulking ramparts of Mt. McKinley and its satellites… a series of lesser ridges, known as the Outer Range, sprawls across the flats like a rumpled blanket on an unmade bed.
“To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.” Paul Shepherd, Man in the Landscape – from the longer quote at the beginning of ch.4 (I like the rest of the quote, too – but this stood out.)
[The quote from Solitude: A Return to the Self by Anthony Storr at the beginning of ch.7 was very interesting!]
“Cornices as airy as meringue jutted over voids a mile deep. The vertical ice walls were as crumbly as a bucket of ice-cubes half-thawed, then refrozen. They led to ridges so narrow and so steep on both sides that straddling was the easiest solution. At times the pain and loneliness overwhelmed him and he broke down and cried.” Glenn Randall in Climbing magazine on John Waterman’s solo ascent of Mt. Hunter’s southeast spur.
“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.” G.K. Chesterton
As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow.
In 1977, while brooding on a Colorado barstool, picking unhappily at my existential scabs, I got it into my head to climb a mountain called the Devils Thumb.
My reasoning … was inflamed by the scattershot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzsche, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards…
To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.
Here the glacier spills abruptly over the edge of a high plateau in a phantasmagoria of shattered ice. As I stared at the tumult from a mile away, for the first time since leaving Colorado, I was truly afraid.
I came to understand that I had baffled and infuriated my father at least as much as he had baffled and infuriated me. I saw that I had been selfish and unbending and a giant pain in the a**.
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.
“henceforth will learn to accept my errors, however great they be” Chris McCandless (after the moose disaster)
