Sublime

“There’s one fellow I know from Amazonas Explorer named Efrain—he’s very, very good. Speaks Quechua and English, knows his history.

This knot tied me to the past, to experiences known, to difficulties faced and overcome. To tie it here in this lonely morning on Everest brought my venture into context with the known, with that which man might do. To weave the knot so smoothly with clumsily mittened hands was to assert my confidence, to assert some competence in the face of the w

“Beck was so hopelessly blind,” Groom reports, “that every ten meters he’d take a step into thin air and I’d have to catch him with the rope. I was worried he was going to pull me off many times.

Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable.

A 20-knot breeze raked the ridge, blowing a plume of spindrift far over the Kangshung Face, but overhead the sky was an achingly brilliant blue. Lounging in the sun at 28,700 feet inside my thick down suit, gazing across the roof of the world in a hypoxic stupor, I completely lost track of time.

We designed our own versions, called Stoppers and Hexentrics, and sold them in small quantities until the appearance of the first Chouinard Equipment catalog in 1972.

Using as little technical equipment as possible meant that Messner became the father of modern mountaineering. He’s a man of great survival skills, endowed not only with extraordinary technical proficiency, but also a sense of exactly what is happening around him and a knowledge of when something isn’t right. I learnt a lot from him about evaluatin