I woke up this morning in Guatape, Colombia, to the news that Swiss climber Ueli Steck had been killed in an accident on the Nepali side of Mount Everest. Guatape is as peaceful a place as they come. And yet, this event, literally three continents away, has ruined my day.
¿Que un mundo extraño, no?
Last Saturday, I found myself in Trident Booksellers, a cute coffee shop/bookstore in downtown Boulder, Colorado. Trident sits off the West End of the Pearl Street Mall, in the shadow of Boulder’s signature Flatirons—three iconic rocks that provide a slabby playground for the thousands of climbers that call the city home.
Even though the weather was beautiful, I wasn’t spending my weekend outside. I was alone, tapping away on my manuscript inside Trident. I spend a lot of days this way.
A man I know—a Bangladeshi Buddhist monk—tapped my table as he went to order a drink at the front. I smiled; happy to see him. He came back, Kombucha in hand. “We are studying out back, if you would like to join us.” I grinned a big grin, and said absolutely, I’d be out in a minute.
Out back, I found my monk with two friends who I had met once before, while rock climbing. They were all studying for their exams at Naropa University, a small Buddhist university. They asked me what I was doing. Writing my book, I responded. “Oh sweet, what’s it about?” one asked me. “Climbing?”
I laughed. “No, although you’d be forgiven for thinking that,” I said. “I am reading a book about climbing, though,” I said, brandishing a copy of Brendan Leonard’s new, bright-yellow book, Sixty Meters to Anywhere. “Have you guys been climbing since we last went?”
“No!” the woman says. “We’ve tried to get out with Meg a few times, but it hasn’t happened.”
“I’ve got a rope and draws with me,” I said. “I could take you.”
We worked for a few hours, and then skipped off at 4:30, rushing home to grab our climbing gear, reconvene, and squeeze in some evening laps before the daylight died in Boulder Canyon.
We cheers over a few post-climb ciders and a vegetarian pie at Backcountry Pizza. Glad I ran into you two, I say. That was fun.
“I just feel so good after I climb,” the woman says. “I really want to learn more!”
This sentiment is what lies at the center of Brendan Leonard’s memoir, Sixty Meters to Anywhere.
“Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains” was first published in 1990. Well before the cultural zeitgeist embraced the outdoors as the hippest, healthiest place to play, and long before #adventure became chic, Krakauer began his book with this epigraph:
“Having an adventure shows that someone is incompetent, that something has gone wrong. An adventure is interesting enough in retrospect, especially to the person who didn’t have it; at the time it happens it usually constitutes an exceedingly disagreeable experience.”
There’s something to be said here about the wisdom of your elders, but considering the name of this website, I’ll leave it hanging.
A collection of climbing and mountaineering essays and articles written for Outside Magazine and others, “Eiger Dreams” was the first book ever released by author Jon Krakauer, who would later go on to find literary fame with two heavy hitters: “Into The Wild” and “Into Thin Air.” By nature of being an essay collection, “Eiger Dreams” doesn’t demonstrate the thematic and narrative tightness of those later books; some essays are worth reading, others will likely have you skipping ahead to see how much longer until the next one.
May is almost up, and if you’re anything like me, you’ve spent the month watching high school and college graduations go by: either in-person, or on social media. Caps, gowns and sashes flashed by in a blur— and the requisite binge drinking which soothes the thought of the future from the fresh graduate’s mind sloshed a veneer of fun over the whole thing.
Under the jubilation: the common, slinking, cultural understanding that the degree is going to be more of a burden than a boon, at least for the first half-decade or so. Student loans, a lack of experience and an eminently poor job market all linger on the sides of the millennial consciousness.
“I Just Graduated, Now What?” is the question du jour.
No one I know, except the engineers, is excited about graduation. Even they are subdued, but then again: they are engineers.
Potter was well-known in the extreme sports community for his daring and seeming invulnerability to catching the wrong side of the term “calculated risk.” Alongside the likes of Alex Honnold, Potter was one of five athletes who had their Clif Bar sponsorship revoked because the brand was afraid that these athletes were going to kill themselves.
thisisyouth 