I Mean, How Can You Not Be

Alaska Has Long Been A Magnet For Dreamers And Misfits, People Who Think The Unsullied Enormity Of The Last Frontier Will Patch All The Holes In Their Loves. The Bush Is An Unforgiving Place, However, That Care Nothing For Hope Or Longing.

Having Stumbled Upon A Tolerable Career, For The First Time In My Life I Was Actually Living Above The Poverty Line. My Hunger To Climb Had Been Blunted, In Short, By A Bunch Of Small Satisfactions That Added Up To Something Like Happiness.

Straddling The Top Of The World, One Foot In China And The Other In Nepal, I Cleared The Ice From My Oxygen Mask, Hunched A Shoulder Against The Wind, And Stared Absently Down At The Vastness Of Tibet.

I Thought Climbing The Devil's Thumb Would Fix All That Was Wrong With My Life. In The End, Of Course, It Changed Almost Nothing. But I Came To Appreciate That Mountains Make Poor Receptacles For Dreams.

Unlike Most Of Life, What You Do Really Matters. Your Actions Have Real Consequences. You Have To Pay Attention And Focus, And That's Very Satisfying. It Forces You To Pay Great Attention And You Lose Yourself In The Task At Hand. Without The Risk, That Wouldn't Happen, So The Risk Is An Essential Part Of Climbing, And That's Hard For Some People To Grasp. You Can't Justify The Risk When Things Go Wrong And People Die. The Greater The Risk, The Greater The Reward In Most Aspects Of Life, And In Climbing That's Certainly True, Too. It's Very Physical, You Use Your Mind And Your Body.