A Beginner’s Guide to Suffering

The 2011 documentary film Cold opens with three men shivering inside a frozen tent. One mumbles to himself, taking deep breaths, teeth chattering. Another stares intensely into the camera. “What the fuck am I doing here?” asks a voice-over. “We have to get down.” The third begins coughing in his sleep. These three sit in a moment of intense fear and discomfort, and we, the audience, sit there with them. The climbers are Cory Richards, Simone Moro and Denis Urubko, expert mountaineers in the middle of a first winter ascent of Gasherbrum II (G2), an 8034-meter peak in the Karakoram.

The overt peril and unhappiness in the scene were lost on me when I watched the film for the first time in my dingy college dorm room. There is nothing in that opening scene–not even self-aware quipping among the climbers–to lighten the mood, yet for me, that film was inspirational rather than cautionary. It seemed like a call to arms, a promise of glory in the mountains if only I had the fortitude to endure the journey to the top. Shortly thereafter, I got a group of friends together, “borrowed” some retired Chouinard ice screws from a decoration in our outdoor recreation club room, and went out into a frigid Northeast winter to have an adventure.

We hiked for several hours before we found a suitable climb. Snowmelt had dripped down a steep hillside to form a stout, translucent pillar at the entrance to a shallow cave, little more than a divot in a schist cliff. Traces of a thin crack appeared in the pillar about twenty-five feet up, extending horizontally from its attachment point to the top of the hollow. Above it, however, stretched an easy sixty-degree ice slope.

If I could get on top of the pillar, I thought, the second half of the climb would be automatic. I said as much to my friends, despite having never led a pitch of ice in my life. I knew what I was doing, I assured them: I’d practiced placing screws on the ground before; I’d be up and down in just a few minutes. With a cocky grin, I tied in, racked the screws, and started up.

It took me three attempts to lead the pillar. Each time, I fought through exhaustion to place the dull, rusty screws and find purchase with my tools. I remember my heartbeat pounding in my ears as I swung my numbed arms and drove the picks clumsily into the hard ice on my first attempt. I remember the cramps in my forearms on my second attempt as I hung off a tool that creaked back and forth in a shallow placement and I tried to turn a screw older than I was into the ice.

I don’t remember much of the third attempt, only dragging my body onto the lower-angled ice above the pillar. I laughed as I looked down at my friends nervously clustered in the snow below me. As I felt the blood rush back into my hands, sensation returned in the form of pain that seared all the way down my arms. I didn’t notice that one of my friends had turned away; he was so worried I’d fall that he couldn’t watch. Instead, I looked toward the top of the climb where I could just barely make out a bit of blue webbing slung around a tree. As I made my way up the last twenty or so feet of easy climbing, losing myself in the metronome of my swings and kicks, I thought, I’ve done it. I’ve finally done a legitimate climb.

It’s hard to look back at my decisions when I started climbing as much more than the result of an overinflated ego and way too much time to kill. I see a kid justifying his own recklessness rather than the fledgling “groundbreaker” I used to believe I was. I have since attributed my attitude to my late start as a climber and my resulting belief that I had to prove something to somebody. But that understanding doesn’t explain why I was so obsessed with suffering as a means of establishing myself.

Today, I recognize how naive I was to use the spectacle of hardship in Cold, a film about expert alpinists taking calculated risks, to justify my own climb of that pillar. I still struggle, however, to navigate the nuances of the story. In Cory Richards’ video journals–which provide the narration for much of Cold–his tone is candid and informal, giving viewers the impression of experiencing a personal diary rather than being presented with a curated story. By doing so, the film creates an emotional bond with the subjects, reminding us that these strong climbers are also fragile humans. While the possibility of trauma is visibly present, however, it isn’t explicitly interrogated or critiqued.

Near the end of Cold, the three climbers are caught in an avalanche. Snow rushes toward the camera, the film cuts to black, and for nine seconds, we believe the team to be dead. Shots of photos and family members flash across the screen until the camera is extracted by an unseen hand. We hear the climbers shout back and forth to each other, making sure they are all alive. Then Richards turns the camera on himself, his face full of horror, and he begins to cry.

In a voice-over, he discusses the numbness he feels in spite of the beauty of the mountain and in spite of his strength during the ordeal. He concludes with a sense of insecurity about what comes next. Yet the final shot in the film is simply a plain text slide listing the group’s accomplishments: the team completed their climb; Cory Richards became the first American to make a first winter ascent of an 8000-meter peak. There is no debriefing of the near-death event.

Though much of the ambiguity at the end of Cold seems deliberate, it still left me wanting answers about how the climbers might process any psychological effects from their trip. I wasn’t yet sure whether Cold was reminding us of the humanity of a climbing team or whether it was evoking our empathy to make us value the ascent more highly.

In “The Art of Suffering,” published in Mountain in 1988, Voytek Kurtyka criticized the movement away from a personal mythos of climbing toward “commercial measures of mountaineering fame”–such as the collection of summits above 8000 meters (unlike the pursuit of a cutting-edge climb such as Richards’, Moro’s and Urubko’s first winter ascent of G2). Numbers sell, but they also depersonalize and oversimplify. “If there is such a thing as spiritual materialism,” Kurtyka warned, “it is displayed in the urge to possess the mountains rather than to unravel and accept their mysteries. Adventure is thus replaced by a regimen of routine actions and emotions.”

Some of us who aren’t obsessive peakbaggers or number collectors might still use suffering as a currency to try to legitimize our efforts. When we do this, it becomes too easy to conclude that hardship is its own reward, that it represents virtue or purity of a kind. But in his article, Kurtyka implied that the mere ability to block out intense cold, hunger, exhaustion and pain doesn’t by itself necessarily bring about any kind of enlightenment. Instead, he explained, this kind of endurance, “when combined with competitive determination,” can sometimes encourage a sense of egoism, as well as an overly “narrow” view of climbing and a tendency to neglect others’ well-being. What matters, it seems, is the more active process of moving through and beyond the experience of hardship to reach a state of communion with the mountains when “mind and body seem to listen to a new voice, follow a different rhythm.” By that point, he concluded, “suffering has been replaced by composure as the long hours of night are paced away.”

The process of making meaning out of hardship has its inherent limits. Extreme versions of suffering–losing a climbing partner, for instance–are not and should not be considered necessary or beneficial to growth. There can be “psychological costs” to other kinds of suffering, too, as Kurtyka noted, and sometimes these can be long-lasting.

In a 2017 interview for Outside Magazine, Cory Richards discussed his own evolving interpretation of Cold. He said that rewatching the avalanche scene left him “vibrating.” Through therapy, he was able to examine his reaction as a post-traumatic response. He saw the avalanche as a major catalyst for beginning a more sustainable relationship with climbing, calling it “the biggest gift ever been given.” The implication is that the avalanche inspired him to begin the process of recovery to counteract its impact–and that of some other past sufferings–on him. He does not suggest that it was a source of improvement and value simply in and of itself.

The most significant catalyst for my own shift in perspective on suffering came, as it sometimes does, after an injury. In my final year of college, I went on a bouldering trip to Chattanooga. I thought it would be a casual week, especially considering the big-mountain objectives I believed myself more suited to climb. On the afternoon of my first day at Horse Pens 40, after I’d spent a morning of trying and failing not to slip off oblong blobs of sandstone, my group led me to a less-trafficked area. That was fine by me because I’d long since grown tired of strangers watching me flail on the local classics. I found a medium-sized boulder tucked off to one side. It was covered with roughly spherical holds, like a giant pile of clay haphazardly assembled, and it rose into a gently sloping dome. I strained to place my heel on one of the holds and rock my weight onto it as I had seen my friend do earlier. I took a deep breath and torqued with all my might. As my body lurched forward, I felt a pop in my knee. Startled, I slipped off the climb into a heap at the base of the boulder. When I tried to stand, I realized I was unable to weight the leg. And just like that, I had a whirlwind of doctors’ visits, follow-up appointments, surgery and physical therapy to look forward to.

At the time, the most frustrating part of recovery was the absurd dissonance between the severity of the injury and the smallness of its circumstance. (A begrudging part of me still thinks so.) Upon learning that I climbed, the medical staff seemed to expect an exciting story to explain the worst meniscus tear they’d seen in months. And at the time, more frustrating than the pain itself was the humiliation of having to explain overx2028and over that it was likely the result of a combination of poor stretching, lack of fitness and my own overzealousness. The cause of my worst injury was as pedestrian as my climbing career had been up until that point. I felt cheated, as if I deserved a better injury, a better story.

A better injury is, of course, a silly thing to wish for, and I am fortunate that I never got it. What I got instead was a lot of time to think and train as best I could. I started hangboarding, at first because it was the only climbing-specific thing I could convince my doctors to sign off on, but later as an activity in its own right. I liked being able to shut everything out and just focus on performing well on something small. Each individual hang lasted only for a few seconds, but each provided a manageable, quantifiable goal I could achieve and build on.

When I finally got the all clear from my doctors, getting back to climbing turned out to be less like riding a bike and more like stepping onto a moving treadmill. I still liked climbing, but the constant awareness of my injury prevented me from feeling as if I could do it with impunity anymore. I was stronger, but the warm illusion of familiarity I’d previously felt for the sport was gone, replaced with often-immobilizing trepidation. This discrepancy between what I thought I ought to be capable of doing and what I was actually capable of doing went beyond unfamiliarity straight into strangeness.

In his essay, Kurtyka wrote that “whenever a climber leaves the known paths, he enters an area without rules or routines to rely on…. At such moments, the mountaineer is creative, not merely a participant in sport. This creativity manifests itself in styles of climbing or in exploration of unknown areas.” It was clear to me that my earlier approach had been reckless, but I still felt as if I were stumbling in the dark, searching for my own way to a more sustainable and meaningful relationship with climbing.

A YEAR AND A HALF after my initial injury, I went on a springtime trip to Chamonix with a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. We’d been looking forward to it for months. Although we’d set out with an ambitious list of climbs, we decided to start with an easy sport route to familiarize ourselves with the area. I took the first lead, struggling my way up a muddy offwidth crack. My partner danced up the pitch and launched right into the next one: a steep face peppered in small, delicate holds. He reached an anchor and began to belay me up.

I realized immediately that something was wrong. I was climbing slowly, checking my feet too often, and gripping the holds too tightly. I was on moves well within my ability, even as newly returned as I was, but with each one, I felt as if I were climbing at my limit. Eventually I got to the crux of the face: I had to switch feet on a large ripple in the cliff and then reach up for a stone rail above my head. It was a straightforward sequence, but I would have to weight my bad leg to do it, and at that moment, I could not bring myself to do so.

Something in my knee felt wrong, and I eased my weight back against the rope, feeling my chest seize up and my breath quicken. My partner shouted encouragements down to me. I ignored him and pretended to be engrossed in the move. Nearby, a pair of climbers zoomed past us on another route with remarkable efficiency. I grabbed a quickdraw and hauled myself up to a better hold. We are so far behind our goals, I thought, and I’m the one slowing us down.

An hour or two later, I sat on a ledge higher up the route and let my feet dangle in the breeze, waiting for my turn to rappel. We hadn’t yet completed any of the routes we’d set out to do, not even the route we’d started. Yet my breath had returned to me, and I sat in silence, enjoying a moment on a cliff alone with my thoughts. I’d always been able to find these moments of pensive latency when I was climbing, and I’d missed them when I’d been injured. I wondered why I hadn’t remembered them when I was recovering.

I startled as I heard a whoosh and looked up to see a BASE jumper’s multicolored canopy drifting down from the top of the cliff. It was one of the pair of climbers who had passed us earlier that day. I heard his partner whoop and cheer while he gathered the ropes for a rappel. As my gaze followed the BASE jumper out into the valley, I squinted against the late afternoon sun. The light reflected off the patchwork of crags and caverns and saturated the greenery in the valley below me.

It occurred to me that not once during the climb had I thought to turn away from the route to take in the overwhelming beauty of the place I was in. I’d been so focused on making up lost time and performing well that I had forgotten where I was. I wondered what else I had missed in the margins of my pursuit of legitimacy.

The rope came slack beside me and I heard the distant shouting of my partner telling me he was safely anchored. I took one last look into the valley: off in the distance, the BASE jumper’s canopy still glided past rock features that extended all the way to the horizon. Within them lay a lifetime’s worth of exploration, an infinitude of experience. I watched him float through the air, past the cliffs and the caves, and finally come to a safe landing by the banks of the Arve. The waters gleamed an opalescent blue. I told myself that one day, I’d come back up here, if only to experience that amorphous feeling of possibility again. But not today. Today, I had to get down.

I set up the rappel, tugged on everything twice, and began to descend.

–Brandon Blackburn, Brooklyn, New York

[This story originally appeared in The Climbing Life section of Alpinist 76, which is now available on newsstands and in our online store. Only a small fraction of our many long-form stories from the print edition are ever uploaded to Alpinist.com. Be sure to pick up Alpinist 76 for all the goodness!–Ed.]