Alaska Ascents

Shot Tower, Arrigetch - David Roberts

"For me, this is what climbing has become: a question, always, of how much of myself to give to the mountain. As I get older, it becomes increasingly hard to give, to surrender to the novelty of risk and cold and tiredness. You can't really give to the mountain itself, of course, to unfeeling rock in the middle of an empty wilderness. So the giving you do, perhaps, is to your partner, and that too gets harder as you grow older.Instead you hedge with easier climbs, or talk yourself out of hard ones, or back off prudently. But now and then a mountain teases you into commitment."

"The obverse of commitment—and this, too, I always feel—is doubt. About whether the whole thing is worth it. About why I have to do something artificial and dangerous to feel content. About whether I haven't used up the impulse—can anyone really go at it year after year, climb after climb, without deadening his openness to other things? And about the danger, pure and simple—I want to stay alive. I can't understand why I must eventually not exist: that makes no sense at all. But I can easily believe that I could fall and be killed."