Mexico’s Volcanoes: Luedtke & Team Summit Izta, Dispatch from Climber Hannah
People have asked me why I climb mountains. My answer has changed over the years. The short answer is I climb mountains so I can escape the mountains of my mind.
I like Robert McFarland’s quote on the subject too.
“The true blessing of the mountains is not that they provide a challenge or a contest, something to be overcome and dominated (although this is how many people have approached them). It is that they offer something gentler and infinitely more powerful: they make us ready to credit marvels - whether it is the dark swirl which water makes beneath a plate of ice, or the feel of the soft pelts of moss which form on the lee sides of boulders and trees. Being in the mountains reignites our astonishment at the simplest transactions of the physical world: a snowflake a millionth of an ounce in weight falling on to one's outstretched palm, water patiently carving a runnel in a face of granite, the apparently motiveless shift of a stone in a scree-filled gully. To put a hand down and feel the ridges and score in a rock where a glaciers has passed, to hear how a hillside comes alive with moving water after a rain shower, to see late summer light filling miles of landscape like an inexhaustible liquid - none of these is a trivial experience. Mountains returns to us priceless capacity for wonder which can so insensibly be leached away by modern existence, and they urge us to apply that wonder to our own everyday lives.”
Mountains of the Mind, Robert McFarland
To wrap up how I’m feeling right now, laying in a tent, at 13,000 ft, when I dream, when I attempt to define happiness, this is it. To be with new and old friends outdoors, doing things that allow us to walk the line of comfort and risk. A guide helps control this risk and allows for this exploration of growth. Thanks Ben.
Sometimes I climb mountains just to say I did.
RMI Climber Hannah McEntire
Ps: Congratulations to the team today for our summit on Izta!
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