[This story originally appeared in Alpinist 86 (Summer 2024), 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 the hard copies of Alpinist for all the goodness!–Ed.]
FROM TIME TO TIME, when life brings doubts and challenges, because our days cannot always be rosy-pink, I remember standing atop Pumari Chhish East with my partners in June 2022. What I see is just a blurry out-of-body image of myself with my companions, Jérôme Sullivan and Victor Saucède. It’s white, blue and silent. The three of us are floating into the thin air. This vision is altered and does not correspond to reality because the endorphins have drowned out the memory of the physical pain, the cold and the brutal exhaustion. Still, I close my eyes and I can enter this immutable space left in me: a tiny portion of infinite time …
It’s early afternoon, our fourth day on the 1600-meter south face. Jérôme is putting on the one pair of rock-climbing shoes that we brought for the three of us to share. The weather is still holding, but the strain of high altitude has taken its toll on our bodies, and the previous three bivies have further sapped our endurance. The granite we’ve been climbing is good, though it is plastered in snow and occasionally some threatening clumps fall off.
Earlier that day, confusion at the belay saw Jérôme drop his warm gloves down the wall to join the pair he’d lost on our first climbing day. Now, as he casts off barehanded up some cracks that are textured with good edges and peppered with some runout sections, he at least still has his fleece liners to wear at the belay. Victor belays attentively while I melt snow on our hanging stove. At an overhang, Jérôme suddenly lets his feet cut loose. Victor and I startle, anticipating a fall, as Jérôme screams, “Haha, look at these jugs! It’s like climbing at Riglos!”
The granite pillar, of course, does not look like the steep conglomerate rock towers in Spain, but I feel his excitement. It ends up being a memorable pitch and certainly one of the hardest sections of the whole route. In the fading light, I look out at the innumerable peaks surrounding us—including K2 and Nanga Parbat, slowly coming into view the higher we climb—and I feel for the first time since we entered Pakistan, six weeks earlier, that we can truly make it to the summit. For me, this is the most intense moment of the climb.
Victor Saucède
IN THE AUTUMN OF 2016, I was on the road in the United States for two months along the West Coast, finding climbing partners in the campgrounds where I stayed. I was twenty-five years old and this was my first climbing trip. Although I was raised in a mountaineering family, I started climbing relatively late, at nineteen years old, and this trip was a journey that would orient my life toward climbing and mountaineering.
The evening I arrived in Yosemite Valley, I ran frantically to the base of El Capitan to get a first impression. At twilight, by chance, I met Jérôme at the foot of the massive wall. He was about to ascend a system of fixed ropes leading to Heart Ledge and Mammoth Terrace. I’d heard about Jérôme and knew he was in the Valley at the time, so I recognized him easily. After chatting with me for a bit, he said he was sorry but had to go because his friends were waiting for him up on the wall and he had no headlamp. As he started jumaring, I heard the jingling sounds of some wine bottles in his backpack.
He saw my surprise. “My friends just bailed and they will sleep at Mammoth Terrace tonight,” he explained. “I thought we could party up there before they go down.”
A funny guy, I thought. At that time, El Capitan was for me like the holy grail, something I could barely dream of touching, and I hadn’t suspected you could go up there for partying.
Jérôme and I met again by chance at Indian Creek a few weeks later. We didn’t climb together then, but there is one clear memory about him that comes to my mind: when he told me he could see himself living in a sandstone cave.
“There are plenty around Moab,” he told me at the crag, waving his open hand at the desert landscape. “The weather is good; you don’t need much. I would climb and play music. That is what I would do, in a fantasy life.”
At first I thought he didn’t mean it. When we became friends a few years later, I realized that he actually meant it. With time, I discovered that Jérôme has an incredible capacity to feel at home in remote and hostile places. Once, at the end of our first trip in Patagonia, I asked him if he missed home.
“Not really,” he replied. “Actually, I feel I belong here. Or, more precisely: I don’t feel I belong anywhere.”
I was a bit choked up and saddened by his answer at first, but then I could see how he was able to use this as a force in his art of mountaineering. The art of making a remote and uncomfortable place a shelter for his soul. As Rolando Garibotti once told me, “Jérôme is the right kind of crazy. His fantasy and vision have resulted in what to me are some of the most inspiring climbs of the last decades. They pack the right mix of newness, remoteness and technical difficulty.”
I met Victor in 2017 on the Pic du Midi d’Ossau, an iconic peak in the French Pyrenees. He was climbing a line next to me, hammering pitons from time to time, leading efficiently with his two parents following. They were climbing pretty fast and I was wondering what kind of family could run up a 400-meter trad route like that. A few hours later, we crossed paths on the way down. Victor was not talkative, and I learned from his mother, who was much more talkative, that he was going to the same mountain guide exam as me. At twenty-two years old, he would be one of the youngest in the course. That evening, I wrote him an email to establish contact. I was new in the Pyrenees and didn’t know anyone I could climb with. My email never saw an answer. Not a friendly guy, I thought.
As anticipated, I met Victor again in Chamonix during the mountain guide course. He seemed more open and we regularly went climbing together when we weren’t in the guiding program. Underneath his tough carapace lay not only talent but also a comforting warmth that was touching: he was empathetic and had a listening ear.
We soon planned our first trip to Patagonia, a place that we thought would be the next step after the Alps. Maud Vanpoulle, who already had experience in Patagonia, completed our trio. But by the time we left for Argentina in December 2019, Maud was healing from an ankle injury she had suffered a few days before our flight. As if to add emotional complexity, a brecha (Spanish slang for a window of good weather) was forecasted as soon as we arrived in El Chaltén. We were not sure what to do: all these peaks shrouded in rime were quite intimidating, and I suspected Victor felt bad about the idea of leaving Maud behind. So, we hung around town without clear goals, our feet dragging on the floor.
One afternoon we met a guy who was lying in his caravan with a French beret over his head and a cigarette in his hand. Jérôme! Jérôme already had an impressive record of climbs in Patagonia, and we might have looked up to him a bit, I admit. He was without a climbing partner, and suggested nonchalantly that we should climb together.
“Not really,” he replied. “Actually, I feel I belong here. Or, more precisely: I don’t feel I belong anywhere.”
“What about Fitz Roy’s east face?” he asked.
Victor and I exchanged a shy sideways look.
“Uh … well, that’s quite a climb for us, for our first time here,” I said.
“You guys will cruise it.”
“Hmm, what about the Supercanaleta?” suggested Victor. “They say in town that the mixed conditions must be good now, after the last three weeks of snowfall.”
“The Supercanaleta? Oh no, that’s a snow slope. And it’s far. Plus, I don’t like hiking. What about the stellar cracks of the east face?”
The next day, for New Year’s Eve, the three of us were hiking to the base of Fitz Roy’s east face. That was the first time, but it wouldn’t be the last, that Victor and I experienced the charming skills of Jérôme when it comes to picking up a climbing line. We bailed after ten pitches, because we were too slow in cleaning the copious amounts of ice out of the otherwise stellar cracks. Back in town the climbers looked at us, amused. Did you guys really think the east face would be a good idea with all the ice up there? their faces seemed to ask. Our rope team was born nonetheless.
IN FEBRUARY 2022, I was sitting next to Jérôme on the plane home to Europe from El Chaltén when an email popped up on his phone. He had just received the financial support of the American Alpine Club’s Cutting Edge Grant to attempt Pumari Chhish East (ca. 6850m), a peak in the Karakoram that I had vaguely heard of before. It is part of a group of steep mountains north of the huge Hispar Glacier in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region. The main summit in the massif, Pumari Chhish (7492m), has only been climbed once, in 1979, by a Japanese team that tackled the north ridge. Over the past fifteen years, half a dozen expeditions had hoped to climb Pumari Chhish East via its south side, because of its beauty and also because it suits the rules of the modern alpine style well.
Jérôme and I had just wrapped up another amazing trip in Patagonia (the second one for me), with good attempts on both Torre Egger’s south face and the Moonwalk Traverse, but when he asked me to join him and Victor in the Karakoram, I declined. I was feeling exhausted from Patagonia, and besides, I’d already used up all my holiday time from my PhD studies in Zürich.
Two months later, in April, I was riding my bike to work, like every morning, when Jérôme and Victor called me. This time they were slightly more insistent. They know me damn well and had prepared solid arguments as to why I should join them in Pakistan.
“Chris, I was told by Mathieu Maynadier [who had made an attempt in 2021] that the face is like El Cap. We will take the portaledges and climb some stellar cracks at 6000 meters, can you imagine that?” Jérôme prodded. I’ve heard that before, I thought.
“Chris, you know how Jérôme’s legendary optimism cracks my nerves. Don’t let me be alone with him,” Victor pleaded.
“OK, I see, I’ll call you back,” I said.
Somewhat surprisingly, the next day my bosses approved my request for an eight-week vacation. In mid-May, after a particularly chaotic start, dealing with postponed visas, plane cancellations and delayed gear shipments, we landed in Islamabad and I was heading to the most challenging climb of my life so far.
IN PAKISTAN’S CAPITAL CITY, we hooked up with Hassan Jan and his son Ishaq, Sulman Ali, and Musa Aliko, our local agency contacts, whom Jérôme and Victor knew from their expedition to Dansam Peak the previous year. They had arranged transport, groceries and other logistics, and Musa and Sulman were to stay with us at base camp as cooks—they were excellent company all along. At Hispar, the last village before the eponymous glacier, we pitched our tent at the center of the village and Ishaq went about recruiting twenty-five porters to help us reach base camp, sixty kilometers away. It took four days of strenuous negotiation to settle on the price and the number.
Each morning, tens of villagers would gather around our tent, talking among themselves about who should be hired and complaining about the wages offered by Ishaq. We watched the whole scene from the back, trusting Ishaq to do and say the right things. During these days, our bags would be packed in the morning and then unpacked in the evening after the unsuccessful negotiations. Ishaq, Sulman and Musa grew worried about the potential failure of our expedition. One evening at dinner, they offered to cut their salaries to cover the extra cost. Of course we disagreed.
On the fourth day, after increasing our budget to match the workers’ request, we were still at a dead end for reasons that weren’t clear to us. We were about to leave for another place, or to go to closer mountains on our own. When the villagers became aware of that, they took all our bags and started the hike, in front of our surprised but delighted faces.
Our relationship with the porters warmed on our way to the Yutmaru Glacier. After being grumpy and choleric at Hispar, they became facetious and happy in the mountains. We could communicate with a few English words and by using our hands. I’d like to believe that we even gained a bit of respect one evening when Jérôme, Victor and I played, and won, a tug-of-war match against three of them.
The weather during the approach was perfect: clear skies and windless. The views along the Hispar Glacier were breathtaking: the mountains were shining in a spring blanket of white snow, and it was the first time I had seen peaks of 7000 meters and higher. Far in the distance, behind the Hispar Pass, the north face of Baintha Brakk emerged, bathed in the warm light of the alpenglow.
On the third hiking day, we reached the left side of the Yutmaru Glacier, at 4500 meters, where we established our base camp. The view of Pumari Chhish East’s south face was stunning. The porters asked us several times if this was our objective. I felt that each time we answered yes, we sounded less secure. I couldn’t tell what was in their eyes—was it admiration for what we were aiming for, or did they think we were just stupid? We paid them and off they went. “See you in one month!” they said.
Jérôme and Victor, slightly enhanced by the hashish they had just shared with the porters, grabbed shovels and started to build. “By deviating the proglacial water nearby, we will make an overflowing swimming pool,” Jérôme said. “And over there, the wellness center,” Victor added. That same evening, we turned on our satellite phone and saw a weather forecast indicating six days of snowfall. We never got to enjoy the pool.
During our twenty-seven-day wait at base camp, we had twenty-six days of snowfall, ranging from light showers to heavy dumps. Every morning, a local bird would wake us at exactly 7 a.m. To pass the hours, we mostly read books, made tea, ate delicious meals prepared by Musa and Sulman, and played chess (for the sake of privacy and respect, the cumulative score of all parties will not be divulged here). We also played Apush, a base camp–simplified version of cricket, a game that Musa and Sulman mastered. For one, they were much more precise than us with wooden sticks. Second, and most importantly, they were better adapted to the elevation and could play without breathing heavily like bulls, as we did.
Eventually, a cloud-free day allowed us to spend a night acclimatizing on top of Rasool Sar (5980m), an elegant summit above base camp. The peak had only been climbed a couple of times by its south face. The unclimbed west ridge beckoned to us, and we were blessed to complete its first ascent. The climb up the ridge was harder than anticipated, in part because most of our gear was already cached at the foot of Pumari Chhish East, so it was a truly lightweight ascent!
After climbing Rasool Sar, we felt acclimatized but were still doubtful about the weather. Time was running out. Then Karl Gab, our forecaster back in Europe, announced a seven-day window. We were clear to launch! We postponed the meeting with the porters by a week and let one day of clear weather pass so the wall could purge itself of all the recent snow. Conditions still looked far from optimal. They were the kind that would normally turn us around in our home ranges: snow had plastered almost all the crack systems, even on the overhanging sections, and the snowfield below was avalanching constantly during the warmest hours of the day. Still, we figured we’d at least have a look.
THE 1600-METER-HIGH SOUTH FACE of Pumari Chhish East consists of four soaring rock pillars, each draped with hanging seracs and crowned by snow mushrooms. We wanted to climb a direct line up this wall, not only because of its aesthetic appeal but also to avoid hazardous snow on the ridges and dangerous snow-loading in the couloirs. Studying the face from base camp, we thought the best option for our ascent would be the middle-left of the four pillars: we’d beeline up the biggest snowfield to reach the pillar, then climb it to where it ended at a snowy shoulder just right of a huge serac. From the shoulder, only a couple of hundred meters of easy terrain guarded the east summit. It was one of the steepest but also safest lines, we felt, offering protection from falling snow mushrooms and debris.
Advance base camp was at 5300 meters, seven kilometers from base camp. We departed at midnight under a clear, moonless sky on June 25. The steep wall was invisible in the darkness as we found our way up the snowfield by headlamp. We’d agreed to climb and descend this 700-meter stretch of snow only by night or early in the morning because of the avalanche hazard. But we reached the top of the snowfield in late morning—slightly later than we’d hoped—due to soft snow conditions at the bergschrund. Above us reared the 700-meter rock pillar.
Aside from a handful of easy mixed pitches, the rock pillar involved steep, sustained climbing. Often, we had to use aid to surmount the overhangs or to clean snow blobs, which ranged from microwave to refrigerator sized and were plastered in the cracks. We became experts at distinguishing between the two main types of blobs: the light ones that fell off in a single piece (friendly) and the heavy, dense ones (dangerous). We made slow but constant progress using big-wall techniques: free climbing what we could and aiding when the going became too difficult or too obstructed by snow. The two followers ascended ropes while the leader hauled the backpacks. Usually the leader would climb two pitches before losing efficiency, at which point we’d swap leads. On a few pitches, the ropes hanging from above didn’t even touch the wall. Frequently encountering blank terrain and having no clue where we would sleep next, we were tempted to bail after every pitch. But the weather was holding and the chemistry between us was excellent, so we kept going. Each of us knew to keep any doubts to ourselves—if any one of us had voiced his fears, it might have toppled our fragile equilibrium. Our previous adventures together had taught us this.
Ultimately, we endured three uncomfortable bivouacs. For the first night, hard against the foot of the rock pillar, we dug small, individual platforms in the snow, but constant spindrift forced us to hide deep in our sleeping bags, in awkward positions. For the second bivy, which we reached long after sunset, I sat on an icy ledge with Victor, while Jérôme draped himself over a dubious hanging snow mushroom ten meters below us. For the third, we pitched our two-person tent by excavating a platform on a snow spine just big enough for the tent’s exact footprint. This bivy was the most stunning; the wall fell away below the paper-thin rib, leaving a fathomless void filled by the last golden rays of the sun. That night, I lost a game of rock-paper-scissors and accepted what I felt was the worst spot, hanging slightly off the edge. (It’s a rule of thumb when sharing a small tent on alpine ground that your teammates are always better off.)
Success in the mountains often feels like it comes down to lighting the stove in the morning rather than hitting the snooze button on the alarm one more time. At dawn on the fourth day, after another miserable night, I declared myself incapable of leading. And although Jérôme is known to be optimistic in tricky situations, he’s also very slow to get up in the morning. Victor saved us by making breakfast and then promptly kicking Jérôme and me out of the tent to get on with the climbing.
By the afternoon, we were approaching the top of the pillar. Our pace was slowing and our spirits were slipping; we’d become more withdrawn, less sure of our abilities. Regardless of our exhaustion, there was no denying the beautiful view of all those peaks above 7000 meters fanned out around us. This is the moment I keep coming back to—Jérôme lacing up those rock shoes we’d been sharing, then swinging out around the roof with a triumphant yell. It was happening; our dream was unfolding with each handhold and foothold!
On the fifth and last climbing day, we found our way through the north side of the summit mushroom at 10 a.m. We couldn’t believe it. There was no wind, no clouds. How could such a dramatic landscape, born from massive tectonic collisions, be so silent? Would I dare use a single word to describe what we felt? Infinity, in space and time. And love. And gratitude … oops, make that three words.
As we lingered on the summit, one of us—I forget who—realized that we still had to change the dates of our flights home, which were scheduled for the next day. Fortunately, we were able to text a friend from our satellite phone and ask for his help rebooking the flights. And then, too soon, it was time to go down. Besides, Victor was about to start singing Pyrenean songs.
Back at our last bivy at around noon, we waited until shadows swallowed the wall to minimize the risk of falling objects, then started rappelling in midafternoon. We reached the snowfield by nightfall, and at midnight we crawled into advance base camp. Here I mean crawled literally. While we were grateful that the stable weather continued to hold, the warm temperatures had created awful snow conditions lower on the mountain: a thin crust overlying bottomless powder. It was June 30. The porters were anticipated to arrive that afternoon, and we would fly home four days later.
IT FELT GOOD TO SEE THE PORTERS AGAIN. I’m not sure they cared much about our success, but it was nice to bask in the afterglow of our adventure with them. They had made it possible, and I now felt a camaraderie with them, a brotherhood.
On the second day of our hike out, a few hours from Hispar, we stopped at a shepherd’s hut. We’d also stopped there a month earlier on the way in. The hut was composed of four walls made of stone with an iron stove in the middle—that was it. A circular hole in the roof let in a ray of sun, brightening the weathered faces of the Burushaski people who gathered with us. We shared yak-milk tea with the old shepherd. He’d once served in the Pakistani army and spoke broken English. He seemed happy to see us again.
“Success summit?” he asked.
“Yes, success!” I answered.
“Dangerous?”
“… A bit.”
At these words, he took me carefully in his arms and laid his head on my chest like a child, dropping a tear on my heart.
Victor Saucède
Later that evening, after eight days with almost no sleep, we stumbled into Hispar in the vanishing summer light. Jérôme was mad because Victor and I hadn’t waited for him on the path and he’d gotten lost for hours amid the mind-bending heat. Victor and I had also gotten lost since the porters were faster than us. We ended up going in circles through the gigantic rocky piles of the moraine, but at least Victor and I were together. Occasionally we’d stop at the rare boulder big enough to provide some shade, but we had to be sure to get moving again or our muscles would start cramping. At Hispar, while waiting for Jérôme, I put my legs in an irrigation stream that crossed the village, and after a couple of minutes I couldn’t move them anymore. How did I manage to make it all this way? I wondered.
Finally, Jérôme appeared, the last one to reach Hispar, and we were all reunited again. I was delighted to smell the delicious air, rich and thick, filled with the voices of the kids playing in the alleys. We were all deeply exhausted and overwhelmingly happy. Happy for what we had achieved, but also happy to head back home.
BRIANÇON, FRANCE, NOVEMBER 2023. Jérôme, Victor and I have just received a Piolet d’Or for our ascent. It is midnight, and the three of us say goodbye in the parking lot in front of the pub. It’s cold and wet, in contrast to the glitter and the overheated rooms of the last three days of celebration. This time we hug a bit longer than usual. Jérôme, who has now built a house near Briançon with his wife, Johanna, reveals that he is going to be a dad. Victor tells us that he wants to settle down a bit for the next year, to sort out the various things in his life; he hits the road in his own car, heading to the Pyrenees. I will travel by car and then by train to a research conference in Ticino, Switzerland. My mind is returning to my scientific career. Following this path will mean less time for remote expeditions, I realize, and I can’t help but wonder: Will we climb all together again?
The next day, on the way to Ticino, I share a car with a few world-class alpinists. We chat about Patagonia, the Himalaya and our winter plans. But mostly we discuss our love lives. Funnily enough, it seems that we are all struggling a bit in this regard.
My road companions drop me off at the train station in Milan, Italy. Alone with myself, I let questions circle, thinking back on what George Lowe had said while accepting the Piolets d’Or Lifetime Achievement award two days earlier.
“I very much appreciate”—and here the seventy-nine-year-old’s voice cracked, and he trailed off for a moment, overwhelmed by burgeoning tears—“what my family has meant to me.” The audience, which had become a bit sleepy by that point of the ceremony, stood up in applause.
That’s it, I think. That is the sense of all of this—the climbs are not what last in our hearts, it’s the people. The people who share the climbs with us and the loved ones we come home to, the people who support us all along.
IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED the award for our climb on Pumari Chhish East, we were presented with wider recognition and opportunities, including one that deepened the crossroads I faced in my life.
In December 2023, the Groupe Militaire de Haute Montagne (High Mountain Military Group, or GMHM) offered me a spot on the team, which is funded by the French army. This would be a full-time position as a professional climber, without a need to act in the social media circus, as many athletes must do. It was a dream job that I had applied for the previous summer. But my life had developed in another direction since then. My PhD in glaciology was coming to an end, opening up other exciting opportunities, my circle of friends had grown, and I’d moved in with my girlfriend. Do I have enough inner fire to dedicate so much more of my life to climbing? I wondered.
In an interview with Zbyszek Skierski in Alpinist 43 (2013), the great Polish alpinist Voytek Kurtyka said: “Alpinism can be the Path, meaning the road to both the inner and the physical development of a person. This marvelous tool, however, is a double-edged sword: it can elevate us, but it can also destroy us.”
If I continue to pursue cutting-edge alpinism, where might that put me in the next few years? I asked myself. On which side of the sword?
On the other hand, the great British mountaineer Mo Anthoine’s expression of “feeding the rat,” as written in the book of the same title by Al Alvarez, also resonated with me. Anthoine said:
Every year you need to flush out your system and do a bit of suffering … because there’s always a question mark about how you would perform.… If you deliberately put yourself in difficult situations, then you get a pretty good idea of how you are going. That’s why I like feeding the rat. It’s a sort of annual check-up on myself. The rat is you, really. It’s the other you, and it’s being fed by the you that you think you are. And they are often very different people.… But to snuff it without knowing who you are and what you are capable of, I can’t think of anything sadder than that.
“I need to clear my mind, give me a week,” I told the GMHM.
It was a nice coincidence that, on that very same day, Jérôme and I both happened to be in Chamonix with some free time. Jérôme had a new route in mind that he wanted to try, and before he could even begin to attempt to convince me, I surrendered: “We go wherever you like, Djé, I just want to climb with you.”
The next day we were sleeping under the west face of the Aiguille de Blaitière, together with Victor Colombie (another Victor, but still a Victor). Thanks to the wet autumn, we bet on being able to climb a line of ice that rarely forms. The Aiguille du Midi cable car was not running, so we approached by skis in a silent landscape of deep powder snow. As we got to our chosen bivy spot, we witnessed a breathtaking alpenglow on the needles, which were plastered in a thick layer of rime. I felt at home and happy. And yet, I spent a sleepless night thinking about the career choice I had to make and what it would imply. The ice and mixed conditions ended up being exceptionally good, and we opened a new route that was 500 meters long. The rat was fed (for a moment at least).
Two days later I was back at the office, sharing a coffee with my colleagues, which is something I particularly appreciate in the daily routine of my job. I called the GMHM and declined their offer for a spot on the team. I guess I chose to keep drinking coffee with scientists and to keep climbing during my free time. (The other way would be odd, wouldn’t it?) Maybe I was scared of being drawn into an unhealthy headspace by mountaineering objectives that were too ambitious; maybe I was scared to find myself on the wrong side of the blade, as Kurtyka warned. Recent life experiences had showed me the magnificent power of being surrounded by people who truly love me, and that it takes time and personal investment outside of mountaineering to build those relationships. Lowe’s words helped bring that into focus for me.
I think part of the appeal of doing committing routes in the mountains is that the choices are so much simpler and tangible than in everyday life: go up or down, but whatever you do, stick to it. This contrasts with having too many choices, which in turn increases expectations, and thus frustration too. That said, I have come to realize that there are no good decisions and there are no bad ones either. What matters, at the end of the day, is that I am making an active choice. It has been said that to choose is to renounce the possibility of something else. To me, to choose is also to be free. And I feel grateful for being free.
Overall, the Pumari Chhish East trip was only a few weeks long, with a five-day climb, for just a few minutes on top of the mountain. A waterdrop in the ocean of a lifetime. But those few minutes count for an eternity, I believe, because the tiny portion of time spent up there was infinite in the way it continues to radiate through me, and thus into the lives of the people around me. As Derek Franz commented while editing this story with me, “It was as though you had to go through a requisite journey of time and space in order to arrive at those moments and perspectives.” Those few minutes that have the power to determine life pathways—how beautiful is that?