So Why Are We Going?

Post by Bruce



Of course there is the beauty of the country, the majesty of the mountains, and the humanity of the people we will meet.

I have always maintained that you are young twice – once when you are, and once when you can afford to be. This is a chance to see how young I still may be!

I can’t really say when I first had the specific desire for this trek. Maybe it started with reading Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air, the story of death and disaster during the 1996 Everest climbing season. After that book, I read probably a dozen or so books having to do with Everest and the stories of success and failures. At a Bon Voyage party before my wife Ruth and I left for Antarctica in 2005, the host asked what my next grand adventure would be. Before I’d even thought about it, “Base Camp at Everest” slipped out of my mouth.

“Once you’re there in Base Camp, won’t you be tempted to try to go partway up the mountain?” many have asked. My response has been consistent – “Base Camp is my Everest, people who climb mountains are a different breed. I’m just choosing to walk among the mountains.”

A recently read book, Dark Summit contained a number of excellent quotations of famous mountaineers on the “why” of mountain climbing:

• From the author - … I came to think of high-altitude climbing not so much as a sport but as a kind of art, or in its purest form, rugged spirituality – a modern version of secular asceticism that purifies the soul by stripping away worldly comfort and convenience while forcing you to stare across the threshold of mortality. It is our effort to toil through these hazardous and inhospitable landscapes that culminates with such potent effect, what humanistic psychologists have described as the attainment of self-actualization, a pinnacle of personal expression that dissolves the constraints of our ordinary lives and allows us, even if fleetingly, to “become what we are capable of becoming.” This transformative power is, in a way, why summits have taken on so much symbolic importance for those who pursue them. As the reigning mythology suggests, the higher the peak, the more it fires the imagination.

• George Mallory – So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself, upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life.

• Woodrow Wilson Sayre – People grow through overcoming dangers and difficulties. They are not better off for being carefully wrapped in cotton batting. Deep within us I think we know that we need challenge and danger, and the risk and hurt that sometimes follow …Men climb mountains because they are not satisfied to exist, they want to live – climbing the heights is one way.

• David Sharpe – The summit wasn’t the end of the journey, but it was the culmination – the cure for the thing that gnawed inside him for so long. What folly to think that anyone climbs Everest for the views, or the thrills, or the bragging rights, or the vaguest of all, because it’s there. What’s there is this: the chance to be worthy of your own dreams.