On the Mountains
I
2008
I
Essay
True to Self
Admitting we are scared in the mountains is never easy.
Back when I started guiding, I used to joke that being a mountain guide meant I was a control-obsessed, thinly veiled masochist. It also meant I’d gotten pretty good at lying.
Some lies are part of the job. You tell a nervous client things are going to be fine. You tell yourself the same thing. You assess the weather, the rock, the ice, the person tied to the other end of the rope, and then somehow turn a landscape full of uncertainty into a decision: we go.
I wrote True to Self after years of guiding, climbing, close calls, and losing people I knew in the mountains. By then I'd had enough experience to know that being good at managing risk does not make risk disappear.
And still, I climbed.
True to Self was part of The Black Dog, a five-part Climbing series on the darker side of the climbing mind.
It was later anthologized in Vantage Point: 50 Years of the Best Climbing Stories Ever Told (Falcon Guides, 2018).
