[This story originally appeared in Alpinist 87 (Autumn 2024), which is currently 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.]
Where the Longs Peak Trail crosses the creek and turns right toward Battle Mountain, I stopped and let him catch up. I could no longer hear him, but I could see light coming from his headlamp, shining on the rocks and on the trees.
He was thirty seconds back. Maybe a minute.
I tried to think: If it takes us six hours, we’ll be back at the car by ten and home by lunch, perhaps 1 p.m. at the latest.
Might be unrealistic.
If it’s an hour to Chasm Lake and then ninety minutes to walk around the lake—up the boulders to the Lamb’s Slide, that’s four hours. Across Broadway and up to the summit is at least another two. That’s six. Back down is probably two more. That’s eight hours. Minimum.
Once he caught up, we started walking again, in silence.
I started to wonder if we’d even talk about it. If he wanted to talk about it, or if perhaps he had questions that he wanted to ask me.
It could be that he doesn’t want my opinion, and if that’s the case, who am I to bring it up?
The whole thing is personal, anyway. Guys join for all kinds of reasons.
Even when someone tells you their reason, you never know if that’s the real reason, or if it’s just part of the reason, or if they even know the reason. Could just be a reason, one that sounds good and gets people off your back about the whole thing.
He might be looking for something; perhaps he has questions he needs answers to.
I think that’s why most people find themselves in the military—one way or another, they’re looking for something. To find answers to difficult questions, the kinds of questions you want answered in your twenties. Questions about how tough you are, and if you have what it takes.
The problem is, when you find the answers to those questions, and it’s not the outcome you were hoping for—then what?
You might be better off not knowing.
Or worse, twenty years go by, and you realize the questions you’ve been trying to answer can’t be found in the places you’ve been looking. Then you have to start over; you have to look somewhere else.
It’s really none of my business. When I was his age, in his position, I wasn’t able to articulate why I wanted to enlist.
I just said something to give people a reason. Something to do with 9/11, or service, or “being part of something bigger than myself.” The things you hear people say all the time. And some of it is true, I guess, but it’s never all of it. The whole question of why is exhausting.
Surely he wants to talk about it.
Why else would he wake up at two in the morning, drive all the way out here and spend eight hours on the side of some mountain with someone he hasn’t seen in ten years?
I’d forgotten how incredible it is up here, being above the tree line, early in the morning. How the sun appears on the horizon and the world turns from dark to light. How you can see the streetlights in Boulder, and for a few minutes, it’s as if it’s the next day for you but still yesterday for them.
Everything seems more intense up here. The wind, the cold, the size—different from other mountains.
This peak has a way of drawing you in, encouraging you to come close before reminding you of its dangers.
The first time I saw Longs Peak, I wanted to believe there was no way any person could climb to the top.
Then eventually, after enough time staring at its red walls and thousand-foot cracks, I realized it is possible, and that if I committed myself, if I was mentally and physically strong enough, I could do it.
As soon as you started to believe it, you noticed how the mountain sheds ice, and the size of the rocks that rain down in the spring. You realized, even if you did everything right, it might not matter, and you could still fall victim to this place.
I’ve realized that when a storm comes or when things go wrong, the mountain doesn’t care how hard I’ve trained or what type of person I am.
So much is out of your control.
A lot of what he’s probably thinking about is hard to explain.
But, regardless, I should tell him to do it.
It’s an adventure, and a lot of it was a good time.
Some of it was really not a good time, but I bet if you totaled the days, made a list of all the good and the bad ones, the list of good days would be longer.
Maybe that’s not the right way to think about it.
Looking back, plenty of days I thought were bad, were good. Like when we drove from Delaram to Shir Ghazi, thinking we could make it in a single day, only to find out we could not. And how we asked the Army if we could spend the night on their camp, and they said no because we hadn’t given forty-eight hours’ notice.
We were all so pissed off, staying up that whole night, waiting for the Taliban to come.
You were so convinced all of that was bad, but looking back, maybe it was good. And maybe I wouldn’t mind going back and doing it all again.
We reached where the trail splits, heading one way toward the Keyhole and another toward the Diamond. The path crosses a snowfield, which becomes steep and icy, and you wouldn’t want to fall.
It probably wouldn’t kill you if you did fall, but you wouldn’t want to risk it.
He asked if we should put on crampons, and I told him we didn’t need to—that it was easy to cross, and that stopping would take too much time.
I considered telling him about the time, in 2014, when we skied in Austria. We’d planned to stop in Ramstein to refuel, but the plane broke and we were stuck so we drove to Kappl and rented a place, skiing and drinking and trying to meet girls that didn’t speak English.
I thought about telling him about how fun that was and how big the mountains were. They were sort of like Longs Peak, but there were hundreds of them, in every direction, jagged and unorganized and with more snow. It was so unexpected, especially when we thought we’d be unloading shipping containers in the Afghan heat.
I wouldn’t want him to think that sort of thing is normal.
That’s the thing about it. You agree to join and that’s really your last true choice. Wherever it takes you from there, most of it is up to someone else, to God maybe: where you live, how you spend your days, how often you see your kids, whether you see combat, and then once you’re in combat—whether you get blown up or killed. And whether you’re going to kill someone else, someone you didn’t mean to kill. Or maybe you did mean to kill them at the time, and then later, you realize you didn’t need to.
It’s all hard to explain.
At the Lamb’s Slide, the Mills Glacier juts up toward the sky, forming a thousand-foot couloir, like a hallway as wide as a football field with thousand-foot walls on either side.
The right side was in the sun and the snow was melting and it looked plenty soft enough to kick a crampon through.
He asked if this is where people start using ropes and I told him that sometimes it is, but that it looked fine today and it would save time to continue without.
We moved slowly, one step at a time, while the sun heated what remained of winter on the east face of Longs Peak and ice fell in the distance.
Halfway up I let him pass and climbed a few paces behind, watching him kick steps and swing his axes.
We made the same movement, over and over, for nearly an hour—left foot, right foot, left axe, right axe.
I’m not sure why, but I considered bringing it up right then. Maybe it was because we’d come to climb, and now that we were climbing, it would make sense to talk about what we’d come to talk about.
It would be responsible of me to offer guidance.
I should tell him, the best part of it all, the number one reason to do it is for the people you meet.
The connections you form.
When you show up, you think you know people—people from different places, different backgrounds, and you make instant connections with some, but others you’re sure you’ll never connect with. A year later, or maybe even a few shitty days later, all of a sudden you’re willing to die for these people.
You really go through it with them. You might spend a week lying on your stomach, on the side of some mountain, staring at the darkness, watching the world while they sleep, and they do the same for you while you sleep. Back and forth like that, for days.
It’s all hard to explain.
He should know about the way those relationships fade when you get out. How ironic it is that you don’t keep up with too many of them once you leave.
It would be hard to explain how these people mean more to you than anything, and then you leave and for the most part, that’s it. You stay close with a couple and it’s no one’s fault, it’s just how it goes.
They keep going, deploy again, go on more training trips, and a lot of us start families. It’s like a never-ending train ride. You’re welcome to get off, but it keeps going.
With or without you.
At the top of the couloir, we turned right and stood on a ledge and took our packs off. It was airy and I could tell he was nervous and didn’t like the sensation of standing on rocks with crampons. I noticed how he kept his hands on the wall even though he didn’t need to.
I took the rope off my pack, and we tied ourselves to opposite ends.
If the route was impassable, we would realize it from here. But winter was over and we could see sections of moss and grass between what remained of the snow.
It all looked approachable.
I took a sling from my harness and built an anchor. I clipped a carabiner to the lowest point and then through a collection of existing slings of various colors and widths for good measure.
Fifteen minutes went by, and we didn’t speak as he belayed me across the ridge. It was exposed, but not as dangerous as it seemed.
It’s satisfying really, the exposure of it all, the risk, and the necessity to solve for it. Being subject to physical consequence.
It makes you feel alive.
Perhaps it’s not good to feel that way.
Perhaps it means I have a problem, that I’m a junkie and the real reason I even go to the mountains is so I can remember what it’s like to be scared. Perhaps it says something about me, about how I’m doing as a civilian and, that despite my claim that everything is going well, it isn’t.
Maybe it would be the right thing to tell him that, how it comes to be. To warn him.
It’s hard to explain how when you’re in, after the first few instances of getting really scared, you’ll do anything to avoid it, to never feel fear. How you hate it and how it weighs on you and how you sometimes can’t sleep on those nights. If this goes on long enough, you realize there are times when you no longer feel scared, but you should, and other times when you really shouldn’t, but you do.
You try so hard to avoid fear, and then once it’s passed, you miss it.
And what’s hard about that is, once you’re a civilian, being scared is rare.
You have to seek it out.
If you don’t, weeks will pass—weeks filled with Zoom meetings and college football and Big Green Eggs. Maybe you don’t miss feeling scared, but you do miss feeling something. Anything.
It’s hard to explain.
Maybe being scared while tied to a rope, by your own free will, in a national park, isn’t the same as being scared in a war. Not like being scared of leaving your kids behind, or getting concussed so bad you don’t know who you are anymore.
It’s not the same, but being out here, climbing—it’s enough to make you remember.
We crossed the exposed Broadway Ledge in two pitches, passing the Notch Couloir before reaching the break where you start moving up vertically.
We traveled in traditional multipitch fashion. He wasn’t sure of the route, so I led, and he would stand still, feeding me rope until it became taut, and then climb up to where I was, and we would repeat.
The closer you get to the top, the steepness of the whole thing weakens. The route opens into dozens of routes, less obvious and with many options to choose from.
At some point we began moving simultaneously, with the whole length of the rope extended, so I stopped and sat on a rock and waited.
I told him we should put the rope away, that it would allow us to move faster, which I could tell caught him off guard. But what distance we had left required more hiking than climbing.
We made the summit, high-fived and commented on how beautiful it was and that the weather had been agreeable.
I felt happy there. Content. Regardless of the fact that we still hadn’t talked about it.
Five hours, twenty-one minutes. Not far from what I’d guessed.
We descended to the north, down a route called the Cables, where steel bolts remain fixed to the rocks, relics from a hundred years earlier.
I asked him what his plans were for the rest of the day, and for the rest of the week, and he told me he had none. I asked him when he planned to drive back to Tennessee, and he said he didn’t know that either.
It would be hard to explain, but maybe that’s another good reason to do it.
It’s something to do when you don’t know what to do. A way to experience the world. To witness life in faraway places.
You get to see humans in unique ways, and witness how far people will go for one another. You see what can happen when people are starving and when they don’t have a home.
You see all the second- and third-order effects of war—when one person believes in one type of God and someone else believes in another.
You realize your own mortality and you think about it.
If you end up killing someone, you think about their mortality and you ask yourself how it came to be—why are they no longer alive and you are?
You consider what it all means and that perhaps none of it means anything.
Perhaps you just figured out a way to kill them before they figured out a way to kill you.
I can’t think of anything else like that. That allows you to see that much.
I suppose that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
Maybe you don’t want to see those things and perhaps I wish I hadn’t.
But what else are you gonna do?
We got down quickly, across the boulderfield and past the creek, walking mostly on trails, talking more than we had on the way up.
We talked about people we both knew from Chattanooga and about other mountains we’d like to climb and about trail running. He asked me about skiing, and about my kids, and if I was happy I’d moved to Colorado.
Below the tree line, with only a little ways to go, it got quiet again and neither of us spoke for nearly thirty minutes. I looked down at the dirt in front of my feet and tried not to think about the way the straps felt digging into my shoulders.
Near the switchbacks that lead you down into the parking lot, he caught up to me. I turned and I could tell he’d been moving fast to catch up.
“I have to make a decision soon,” he said. “If you had to go back, if you could go back, would you do it again?”
“It’s hard to explain,” I said.
—Fiction by Ben Davis, Golden, Colorado
[This story originally appeared in Alpinist 87 (Autumn 2024), which is currently 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.]