Issue link: http://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25248
Mountaineering Dream has his or her own reasons. Andean people, back in 2500 BC, would sometimes schlep up to 14,000 feet just to throw a sacrifice victim in a volcano. Today, modern adventurers pay $70,000 to get their hands on an Everest perm1 t. It's difficult to explain even my own mot i ve for looking up and wondering, "Could Everyone who dances with the showing myself, every couple of years, that I can do anything if I set my mind to it. something deep inside and indi vidual l like sex drive. For me maybe it's abou~ I?" The fascination The fact is, more and more people are acting on the Mountaineering Dream. For anyone who likes to challenge him or herself: You can't get much higher than Nepal's Mt Everest or Denali in Alaska. But panting four miles skyward is no t a task attempted without preparation-mental and physical. With more and more climbing deaths occurring each year, it's clear that mountaineering is not s omething that everyone with an ice axe should attempt. A l o t of preparation is necessary to attempt any Big Peak- here defined as any mountain over 10 , 000 feet that requires any level of technical mountaineering skill, from roping off to crevasse rescue. There's a huge variat i on within that definition; even Denali ascents vary greatly in difficulty between the West Buttress route verses the more difficult West lUb r oute. But for a beginner like me, anything that requires crampons is a step up, so to speak. DAy ONE: Alaska Mountain Guites ant Climbin~ School Warehouse in Haines to Base Camp at Flower Mountain, 4,000 feet. As the three male c lients and two guides fumbled with equipment lists and energy bars, I could tell that we were all infected with the Up Urge. It was written on 1S our artificially grim faces. Personally, I had come to prepare for a long-time dream of c limbing Denali, the mountain with the largest b ase-to-summit rise of any peak on earth; the climbing of which entails a hike of at least 36 miles t o the top and a trek that could easily run 30 days if hit with foul weather. Before taking on that kind of punishment, you have t o know in advance if it's in your make up . While the unspoken assessment of clients by guides and vice versa unfolded, we started the course immediately, right there in the warehouse. Ass istant guide Eli Fierer asked me to flip my prussiks around a r ope strung through the rafters. "Prussik? " I asked myself. "What's a prussik? A Prussian toothpick of some kind?" I felt the sinking feeling one might experience upon, say, realizing one is about to fall at a high speed while skiing, but hasn't actually hit the snow yet. I was still at the point where I would prefer t o die rather than prove to be the wimpiest and most ignorant o f the three students on this expedition. I would soon dismiss that way of l ooking at things as counter to my own natural survival instinct. The j argon was coming fast in our first lecture . Head guide and 12-year teaching veteran Ced ar Dumont , who had been helping Tal, a soft-spoken Israeli special forces paratrooper, fit his crampons on his boots, stepped in to cle ar the misty film he saw setting in over our eyes. "The prussiks are the lines and knots you 44