I Do Not Offer the Old Smooth Prizes, But Offer Rough New Prizes

Climbing is hard.  Often, it downright sucks.  At high elevations, you don't feel like yourself.  Your body doesn't really respond properly to your brain's commands.  This even though you are decently acclimatized from living in Quito at 2,800 m/9,500 ft, and find yourself on mountains regularly.  The weather almost never cooperates, and still in the best of conditions you consistently find yourself too hot and yet freezing cold at the same time.  Comfort does not, as a concept or a reality, exist here.  So, a very natural and very difficult question that I have both heard from others and asked myself many times is 'why on earth do you do this?'

On Imbarura, our idealism would soon be shattered.
Photo courtesy of Jamie Bacigalupo.

First of all, I am not a masochist; there is no pleasure in my pain.  The pleasure comes when the pain ends at the summit.  The summit comes after having cursed for hours, loudly and frequently, about my life choices that brought me to that mountain. Due to low oxygen levels, it's possible that the cursing is only in my head, and all that escapes my mouth is an exaggerated, communicative pant.  This is how I climb.  Based on this very unromantic reality of dragging my ass straight up an unrelenting slope of a mountain for hours on end, I can only conclude that one of the primary reasons I continue to climb has to do with the limitations of memory.  We are simply not capable of remembering pain, be it physical, emotional, or both.  We of course remember THAT something hurt, but we cannot conjure the actual feeling that we experienced.  We can imagine it a bit, but we do not really remember.  And this is a good thing; otherwise, think of what cowering and panicky creatures we would all become after a few decades on this planet.  Anyone who could remember these things too vividly would almost certainly remain always at home as a vegetative, fetal lump, and therefore unlikely to pass on their genetic material.  Because this is not the case for most of us, we are the beneficiaries of our imperfect memory.  We continue to do irrational and probably harmful things, like living in Kazakhstan during the winter, or cooking bacon in our underwear.  Or falling in love.  Or climbing mountains.  

Stopping on the slope to take in a view

But this alone cannot explain my motivation to climb mountains.  What is the appeal?  There are two reasons I have been able to come up with:  the challenge and the discovery of it.  I am not convinced that this is a comprehensive description, but hey, we all live with uncertainty.  Deal with it.  

The obvious physical challenge of climbing is appealing as someone who has always played sports, enjoys the outdoors, and likes to stay in shape.  The psychological element, however, is less understood.  Am I conquering nature by reaching the top of this ancient and savage pile of rocks?  I don't think so.  The knowledge that at any point I can just stop, turn around, and walk home can become seductive.  I think that conquering this impulse to stop when things get hard is a more accurate view.  I also feel it is a way to both create and address a problem that can be solved.  Just get to the top.  In normal life, the solutions to our problems tend to be more complex.  Or perhaps we cannot find a good solution at all.  The mountain becomes a simplified effigy of these problems, and one that can be overcome with the single-minded, straightforward method of putting one foot in front of the other, and throwing all of our energy into the task at hand.  It's a little like making a list of the things we have to do, and including 'eat pancakes' along with more formidable tasks, such as 'find a job.'  Even though it is a small act, there is great satisfaction that comes when you can cross it off of your list and say 'Hey, I'm halfway done!'  Come to think of it, maybe I should stop climbing mountains and eat more pancakes.  

Cloudy days offer their own beauty

These mountains are also about discovery.  You know, in the Christopher Columbus sense; you discover them for yourself (unlike Columbus, please do not try to rename landmarks in your honor, claim the mountain for Spain, or participate in genocide).  There is no replacement for experience.  Reading about places and listening to stories have given me countless hours of enjoyment, but it is just not the same as going somewhere.  If it were, there would be no difference between travel blogs and traveling.  This impulse to discover things for myself has had both positive and negative manifestations, and the jury is still out on its overall utility.  Regardless, I am living in South America because of it, and by extension, climbing mountains because of it.  Pushing myself to my physical and mental limits has resulted in a good amount of self-knowledge as well, when I can reflect honestly on the experience.  There is also something else...something more basic that comes with going out to a mountain in the middle of nowhere.  I've always failed at putting this part into words, but this may be what Walt Whitman was talking about in Song of the Open Road:

Walt Whitman Photo Credit

"The earth never tires,

the earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first,

Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,

Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well-envelop'd,

I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell"

I wouldn't say that I am looking for spirituality on mountains.  But when I can pause and look around and see the world below mixed in with the clouds, when I can smell the earth and hear only my own two feet shuffling through the knee-high grass in an otherwise silent world, when I find that my constantly racing mind has for a moment stopped trying to figure everything out, I feel very much at peace.  

The reflections from this blog post were brought to you by Imbabura, a giant, extinct volcano near Otavalo in the very north of Ecuador.  If you are in Quito and want to start exploring the surrounding mountains a bit, I highly recommend booking with Paypahausi.  They provide guides, transportation, and some high-energy snacks (though you will probably want to pack something more to eat) for $45.  The schedule they follow resets every couple of months, and is designed to prepare climbers for Cotopaxi.  However, you can join for as few or as many trips as you want.  It is also a great way to practice Spanish and to meet fellow climbers!  

Photo Credit