| In Defiance of the Edge Article |
| In Defiance of the Edge   | the-edge.html>
| Page Type: Article Activities: Mountaineering, Trad Climbing, Sport Climbing, Ice Climbing, Big Wall, Mixed | Page By: alpinistahombre Created/Edited: Feb 27, 2008 / Feb 29, 2008 Object ID: 384113 Hits: 3943  Loading... Page Score: 89.12% - 17 Votes Loading... Vote: Log in to vote |
In Defiance of "the Edge"--by Alpinista Hombre
A mountain climber reaches an unattainable feat and either ponders or just bellows-out “Conquest at last!” A great moment of added satisfaction has been acquired, and achievement incurred. Returning back to camp, he or she descends from a great adrenal blitz, and moves to celebrate the day. The climber looks back at the mountain with new admiration, inspiration, and memory. One very small aspect of that mountain was made accessible that day, by Mother Nature—the gatekeeper, and the mystery of that specific route was removed.
In our personal pursuits of adrenal achievement, we mountaineers seek to oppose being average, disregard predictability and comfort for a spell, and aspire to attain the unattainable. To succeed on any ascent to a summit, when climbing a big wall route, or when exploring unfamiliar wilderness, an adrenal explorer seems to borrow unknown forces from their spirit and from their natural surroundings to meet those goals of surpassing the edge.
There can be no concrete explanation of this concept, the edge, unless one has actually surpassed its threshold. When we approach this fine line, in our adrenal pursuits, one seems to always sense the risk, danger, or potential of a bad ending… and then, naturally, fear arises in us. You know at that point that you cannot manage, for even a moment, on the easy-go, half-do mentality. As Mark Twight put it, this is when you must “ascend above mediocrity.” Only after being tested by the edge, after your trial of faith, are you made stronger.
When pouring-out all of your inner forces, motivation, training, and zeal, you unavoidably reach those times, in the most challenging of circumstances, when you wonder if you had come all that way only to discover that what you really were seeking was what you had so aggressively left behind. In addition, there are the moments of reality that seize us, when in the high country, wherein you become so physically or mentally offset that, for brief moments, you are not in the mood to entertain nor appreciate the inspiring natural aesthetics surrounding you. There are many names for this state of mind, one being the "death march". At that point, you have to recover your mind’s focus, chasing away doubts, replacing them with your inner tenacity, trust in your training and experience, and focus on your absolute inner drive. What takes our minds away for those short moments varies, but has much to do with the contrast of where we were just a day/week ago—our home-life routines. As opposed to mistakes made in the routine of life, one’s mistakes on the mountain, regardless of the length of time, are acutely serious… and that fact is on our minds when approaching the unattainable—the edge. It is “self-against-the self” …“one-against-none” …“you-against-you” …long before the involvement of any team dynamics. More often than not, upon our failure to reach the unattainable in a day’s attempt—when you find yourself locked-down by ailment, bad weather, or otherwise bad luck, there is nothing to do but breathe, sleep, fiddle with gear, babble, or just stare at your trail-soiled, bearded companion nearby. You either reach your soul in search of the grit and fortitude required to make a second attempt, or just terminate the idea altogether.
Our dreams are key to our adrenal adventures—the picture of one’s self on a loathsome, challenging summit, over-looking a breath-taking ridge while hanging by a cold and sharp tool, a morning after the achievement soaking in the view of a sunlit cloud floor below, or perhaps just personal glory. These dreams and motivators are all of a great variety, being that we all differ in our personal agendas and motives. To those of us who understand the allure of the dangerous, the risky, and the powers of nature, dreams are our torture when trapped in our home or office setting in everyday living. Those dreams attach themselves to experiences, of sorts. There is a particularly ironical satisfaction to be derived from the upward struggles, regardless of how long and enduring. We dream of risk, and risk “is the knife that pares away life’s trivia...” (Mark Twight). We dream of facing the unattainable, and attaining the absolute simplicity on the mountain. That's what we love. When you're climbing, your mind is clear and free from all confusions. You have focus, and suddenly vision becomes sharper, the audible things are richer and you're filled with the deep, powerful presence of life. So dreams take us to initiative, we learn by application, and rugged-individualism and spirit take us toward resoluteness… and eventually… over the threshold of the edge.
In our pursuits of the unattainable surpassing of the edge, a climber is still limited in perspective and reality. It is perhaps a common mistake of many adventurers to recount their most difficult mountain encounters, in transcending the edge, as definitive and perceivable. Does one ever truly come to know “the mountain”, when in reality it is always the gatekeeper… the sentinel? To truly comprehend its superiority and might would be to make a man tremble. Nature surrounds us, and we are its guests when on our adrenal missions. While on our undertakings to defy the edge, if we were all in a state of total reality each time we “borrowed” a summit, we would halt in penitence, in humility, before Her grandeur and power. To be in defiance of the edge means just this-- that we do recognize the mountain as unconquerable in its essence, but in our pursuits to fulfill our adrenal appetites, and our desires to advance the human spirit, we are in fact only conquering… ourselves.
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