Perk up
Out of touch this week with my dear friends with whom I climb; one is still helping her mother recover from her husband's sudden demise, as well as recuperating from her own recent knee surgery. She sounds cheerful, and we hope to regroup next weekend. Reconnected with another one via a good little gym session, during which we concurred that not now nor possibly ever in our lives would we have wanted to endure an expedition like a summit attempt on an extremely high mountain peak. Vigorous physical exercise is fine, up to a point, beyond which lies a kind of madness. Sharing an evening beer with our young'un, to my surprise he more or less agreed, and his emphasis was on the impact on the local inhabitants of such areas. It's the old double-edged sword for the people who make more money schlepping for rich Westerners than they do subsistence farming. There has been a terrible environmental toll on the landscape as well.
3 Comments:
To me, high altitude mountaineering has always seemed too much a matter of luck, sheer endurance, and bloody-mindedness. While I might possibly have had those last two qualities, I've never been comfortable with the so-called objective dangers of avalanches, icefalls, crevasses and so on, not to mention what high altitude does (irreversibly) to one's brain. I love altitude — that feeling of the world slowly falling away beneath my feet; of being on top of all the world I can see; the horizon immensely far off and completely encircling — but that can be attained at more sane heights.
Slowly getting back into the climbing after a couple of years of drifting away, travelling, attending to other things. I finally realised how much I missed it, and it's good to be back doing it again.
Greetings! I also have found high altitude exercise to be exhilarating, at least as far as I've been, i.e., to the top of the Grand Teton. But we hired a friend who was a guide, in a service approved by the park, and left no traces at all. I love the images from the tops of those peaks in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush; but I think the mountaineers haven't kept up with caring about their impact on the environment. Some have, but not enough of them.
It is, of course, too late to stop them from tromping all over those landscapes. Perhaps global warming will take care of it...
A friend sent us a link to a video the other day of people who were "flying" off of fairly high peaks in Norway. It's a new body experience, literally leaping into the air and flying at 100 mph along cliff faces. There is something about the thrill that renders the earth a toy, a game, an inanimate thing that serves at our pleasure. The underlying consciousness of one's ascent means everything.
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