Happiness is Sliding Off a Cliff

A few years ago I was climbing a mountain in the Collegiate Range of Colorado with my good friend Patrick. Although the fourteeners in the area are good climbs, we wanted to trek something a little less trodden, and so chose a random peak tucked back off the state highway. The summit was probably at around 11,000 feet, and the snow was knee-deep on average, deeper in some spots. It was a beautiful day. I had never used an ice axe before, necessary here because of the steep slope, so Pat ran me through the techniques for aided climbing and self-arrest. Up we went in the cold, clear Colorado morning. Moving up a steep draw we hit a somewhat vertical rocky outcropping, and Pat attacked it first. It was probably less than a dozen feet high, and I watched him ascend and aggressively dig into the rock at the top with his axe as he pulled himself over the lip. I followed his lead, but being somewhat less physically inclined and less certain of my technique, I limped rather than powered my way over the lip. Without any momentum, I failed to clear the edge and began slipping backwards over it. I sprawled out to stop my slide, and Patrick, further up the mountain, descended towards me to help.

At this point I should note that a slip over the edge probably wouldn’t have been fatal, and the extent of any injury would have depended on what I hit on the way down, or if I starting sliding upon hitting the snow. Regardless of reality, that cliff seemed a lot higher and the fall a lot nastier as I lay sprawled on the rock with one foot hanging over the edge. As I waited for Pat, I deliberately turned my head to take in the view. Breathtaking. The sapphire sky was nearly cloudless and the mountains surrounding us were snow-covered and gleaming in the sun, with space enough between peaks to consider each on its own, this openness enhancing their enormity. The fear of falling enhanced everything: colors seemed bolder, edges and boundaries dramatically defined, and the whole scene seemed to expand and wrap around my mind the way things sometimes do when I’ve had way too much coffee. I breathed deep, exhilarated by the poignancy of it all. By that time Patrick was holding fast to a small pine tree and lowering his ice axe by the strap for me to grab, after which he hauled my sorry self away from the edge.

I miss experiences like that – not being in harm’s way, but rather the state of mind that comes from the efforts that sometimes lead us there. I have experienced similar moments while sitting firmly on solid ground and in no direct danger. For example, looking towards the distant Rockies from the rim above Salt Creek Canyon in Utah fills me with a profound peace and joy that is similarly satisfying – yet different – as the exhilaration I felt on that cliff. What is important is the struggle that brings one to a place, a wild place removed from the support of civilization. I think the solitude that these situations evoke is an important factor in all of this – an internal solitude that can be felt even in the company of others, and that purifies and isolates the essential elements of whatever one is experiencing. More intense struggles, after all, necessarily evoke more personalized reflection, as one drifts further from the bounds of common experience and therefore from common interpretations of experience. Perhaps in a similar way, scientists sometimes test extreme models of a given system to isolate and identify its properties.

Late one September my friend Julie and I climbed Pike’s Peak, a 14,000-foot mountain in Colorado’s Front Range. Along the twelve-mile hike to the summit we passed through a variety of ecosystems, including glorious stands of aspen with leaves arrayed in brilliant reds and yellows, quaking in the mild breeze, the sun shining behind them, the air brisk and pregnant with their soft and powdery perfume. The hike is fairly strenuous and took us about seven hours to complete. At the summit, we were greeted by the usual throngs of tourists who either drove up the road on the back side of the mountain or took the cog railroad, milling about a summit house complete with donut shop and souvenirs. People rightly flock to the top of this mountain for the beautiful view, and I’m glad so many appreciate it. Indeed, Katherine Lee Bates wrote America the Beautiful from that very spot!

But I saw something different than those who drove or rode to the top. I remember times past when I’ve pulled into a scenic overlook along the highway and appreciated a beautiful landscape. But that, like driving up the mountain, affords a different kind of appreciation. After ascending Pike’s Peak, I looked back and envisioned the entire trail we had just traversed: I could smell the aspen, hear the quaking leaves, feel the trail under my feet, remember Julie’s conversation, and most of all I could feel an intimacy with the mountain. Twelve miles is a good hike, especially up a slope that covers a 7,000-foot altitude gain from the trailhead. The last couple miles are especially steep and difficult in the thin air. I, trudging a few steps at a time, pausing for breath, feeling my legs and lungs burn, contemplated the exhaustion and weakness that this mountain inflicted upon me. I was humbled by it, conscious of being atop something very large that was indifferent to my well-being. This wasn’t a nice view from a car, detached, cheaply gained. This was a big damn mountain, ponderous and ancient, creaking and groaning over a fault-line, with a thin film of life clinging to its rocky mass… this was earth piled so high that the thin air and harsh environment stunted life and then choked it off, the lonely summit home only to the howling wind and to marmots scrambling among the lichen-encrusted rocks. This is what we had dared to invade with our footsteps, groping our way up its bulk. It was awesome, standing on top of this giant thing we had climbed, and feeling it. To contemplate the whole of it, to feel that awe, first required experiencing it with our feet and hands, seeing it, smelling it, tasting it, hearing it… all twelve miles and 7,000 feet of it.

For a while I didn’t really notice the car-borne people around me. Neither did I see the same scene they saw, for our frames of reference were completely different. I couldn’t relate to them, just as I couldn’t relate my thoughts at that moment to my thoughts in the past at those scenic highway overlooks. What I was experiencing was more than an appreciative gaze above the fruited plain: I had pushed myself against the mountain and it had pushed back, exposing me, and now I rejoiced at having achieved the summit. The scene I saw included a landscape that had constituted a personal trial, and that therefore had a personal dimension complimenting its innate beauty.

I miss those moments of rapture. I live in a big city now, and I am struggling to adjust. I am not a stranger to intellectual struggle, athletic struggle, even a degree of artistic struggle. These are part of the big picture, and thankfully I find them here in my urban home. But they do not satisfy the need for those profound moments that I find in the powerful and indifferent embrace of wild places. It’s all relative, I suppose: I merely dip my toe into the sea of the wild, and derive great benefit in doing so. Yet I have friends who wade much farther from shore, and know of others still who dive headlong into the deep, sometimes never resurfacing. Would my own experiences be wild enough to fulfill them? Is a hike in a local park fulfilling for those who grew up in the city?

I wonder if there is an urban equivalent of what I crave, but I have a hard time believing that there is. It’s not just the struggle, it’s the ritual act of going out there to encounter it. There is something unique about removing oneself from the support of civilization, and something primal and irreducible about the struggles and experiences in the wild that reveals primal and irreducible truths about ourselves. These experiences remind me that I’m alive and that life is precious and precarious, and that’s what I miss.