In no way is Grizzly D an interesting climb. It doesn’t even garner a unique name. Despite standing over 13,000 ft, it’s merely the biggest bump on a high ridge and has no technical sections. The best one can say about it is that it’s a good, long slog.
Yet when I awoke at 4AM this past January to climb it, I was stoked. I had been away from the high mountains for some time, and I missed them, much as one might miss a friend away on a long trip. There’s a certain way I am in the mountains that I have a hard time being anywhere else: open, deliberate, and acutely conscious of my relations with others. Musing on the interconnectedness of people aboard a whaling ship, Melville’s narrator Ishmael states that “it’s a mutual, joint-stock world.” Nowhere, for me, is this more apparent than when I am tied in on a mountain, my life dependent on the actions of my partners and vice versa.
I threw on my base layers, brewed coffee, and raced down to Golden to meet my partners. On our drive into the mountains, we chatted about recent climbs we’d done and ones we wanted to do, trading the names of peaks and gulches like baseball stats. This intricate knowledge of placenames, inscrutable to outsiders, is part of what appeals to me about climbing. Placenames not only help us identify what we’re seeing; they connect us to those who have come before. Uncompahgre Peak in the San Juans, for instance, comes from the Ute language meaning “rocks that make water red.” Denali, in Athabascan, simply means “the big one.” Through names, we tie ourselves in to this history and to each other.
The five of us arrived at Loveland Pass, from which the climb began, just before sunrise. For once, the wind was mild, and I needed only a light jacket. We closed packs and zippers, reviewed the route plan, and then began the 1000 ft trudge up to the ridge proper. Our boots crunched atop the packed snow.
After two failed attempts of Everest, a reporter asked the British climber George Mallory why he was returning for a third time, an attempt that would prove fatal for him and his partner, Andrew Irvine. “Because it’s there,” Mallory is said to have replied, his response becoming the cliche of cliches in mountaineering history.
Nowadays, many doubt whether Mallory actually said these words, but this historical dispute to me is trivial. More important is their refreshing honesty about climbing and the reasons we go into the mountains. In Mallory’s day, climbing was a nationalist pursuit. With the horizontal world already claimed, Europeans turned to the vertical to stake their countries’ flags. “BRITISH CONQUER EVEREST” declared The Herald on describing Hilary and Norgay’s ascent, and an Italian weekly showed a mountaineer driving an ice axe with the Italian flag into the top of K2 a year later. Mountaineers were depicted like the conquistadores of old, armed with weapons of a different sort and equally callous about the native communities whose labor they relied on. I like to think of Mallory’s saying as a middle finger to this era of climbing for King and country, and thank God it ended a few decades after his death.
Alpinism today seems to be going in two, almost entirely different, directions. On the one hand, you have its ever increasing commercialization, as partially chronicled in Will Cockerell’s new book Everest Inc. From 8000m peaks in the Himalayas to climbing gyms, climbing is increasingly becoming big business, the pluses and minuses of which are beyond the scope of this article. Far away from the crowds, alpinists, such as the trio that scaled the north face of Jannu last year, are pushing the limits of technical difficulty in alpine style. One might nowadays classify alpine climbing as an extreme sport alongside Red Bull-sponsored events like BASE jumping, extreme kayaking, and paragliding.
These trends have probably been positive in the aggregate insofar as climbing today is safer, cleaner, and arguably more accessible than it has ever been. But lost sometimes in the discourse today over climbing the hardest alpine grades is a concept that I think is essential to the discipline, one that merits a revision to Mallory’s response. Yes, we go into the mountains because they are there and because we want to test ourselves against them. But we also go–or at least I also go—because they are simply a lot of fun.
A few years ago, at the beginning of a long backpacking trip, I ran into a mother and daughter who were backpacking for the first time. We were only a few days in, and at a rest stop, the mother asked me how to stay motivated when the going got tough. “I tell myself that I can quit,” I said. She frowned and looked confused. This was not the answer she was looking for. “No one cares whether I finish or not,” I elaborated. “There’s no medal at the end, and a million people have done this route before.” Suffice it to say that the mother didn’t ask for my advice again.
What I should have told her is that the trip only matters insofar as it matters to me. If I’m no longer getting anything out of the hike or climb, it isn’t worth doing anymore. At best, it becomes a pointless exercise, no more valorous than collecting stamps, and at worse, it makes climbing even more dangerous than it already is, boredom breeding carelessness. I call this idea of a climb mattering only insofar as it matters to me “fun,” both to deflate the egoism of climbing and to insist on its voluntary nature. No one makes us go into the mountains, and what we do there has little impact on the world beyond. If we are conquerors, we are, as the title of the climber Lionel Terray’s memoir puts it, conquerors of the useless.
Sunrise overtook us about halfway up to the ridge. We saw it spread across the east faces of peaks to our north and above the ridge like a long-awaited dream stirring to life. Clouds swirled in the valleys beneath us, and the air grew warmer. We stopped and delayered and watched the sky turn increasingly lighter shades of blue. It was an ordinary sunrise, in truth, but so high up, even the ordinary can become spectacular. And after so much time in the midworld, I realized why I was so excited to be here: because being here makes me feel alive, simultaneously so big and so small. Because here, tiny gestures like help putting on a jacket or a shared bite of a granola bar can mean so much. Because, in short, it’s fun.
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