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In January of this year I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air which documents the tragedy on Mount Everest in May, 1996. Krakauer happened to be part of a doomed expedition and recorded the disaster, wherein eight climbers died on the mountain over the span of 24 hours, in excruciating detail. I realize now that seeking out mountaineering challenges in the wake of that reading is probably a strange reaction, but most of the book is not about the tragedy itself, but the context and lead-up to it. A good chunk of Into Thin Air investigates why people become obsessed with mountain climbing. For many, including Krakauer, it’s about achievement in a very pure and physical sense. You either get the summit or you don’t. That stark line between success and failure, and the terrible beauty of big, deadly mountains has an allure that I cannot deny.  I’m not going to pretend that this expedition was anything akin to the rigor or peril of something like Everest, but it was my first, proper mountaineering expedition, and fraught with many of the same dangers one finds in any significant alpine endeavor. Nearly half of our party of twelve clients did not summit for one reason or another, though everyone returned to the trailhead safely.   

I set out on this adventure with my dad and my flight-instructor-turned-great-friend, Jason.   

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Photo Credits for Grand Teton stills (in videocast version): Fiona Foster David Herring (Unsplash) Toan Chu (Unsplash)