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Outside Magazine November 2003
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The Hard Way
Head Trip (cont.)

IT FEELS WONDERFUL, powerful, to wield two weapons. I am in my element. Staying left, I climb snow and rock, swiftly locating the lightning bolt I'd spotted thousands of feet below. The ice is thin but grippy, and I am utterly focused. No world exists outside each precise swing of the ax, each sure crampon kick. I am my tools, accurate, unemotional, unapologetic. Where the ice runs out, I stem, my picks hooking cracks, crampons scraping black stone.

I don't know how fast I'm moving. I don't know that I'll climb the Sheila Face in four hours or that in less than ten hours I'll traverse the entire Mount Cook massif, Empress Hut north to Plateau Hut. At this moment, all I know is movement. I'm not even thinking; I'm just climbing. I shut down the brain and let the body be what it is: an animal.

I am in my element. Not thinking, just climbing. Somewhere high on the Shelia Face, I unlatch the cage and out steps the beast.
Unbeknownst even to myself, somewhere high on the Sheila Face, I unlatch the cage. You can't do this in civil society. It scares people. They think you're a savage. And they're right: You are. But the mountain doesn't mind; that's what it's there for. The cage door swings open and out steps the beast. It moves like an agile chimpanzee up glass-sharp jugs of loose rock, then along a rail of stone as stealthily as a catamount, then with ax picks and crampon spikes up the final headwall of ice, quick as a lizard with electric reflexes.

Upward to the knife-edge crest and then, comfortable in its own skin, right to the summit, like a real alpinist.
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