#climbing

Skiing is the pleasurable part of alpinism - way more pleasurable and fun than alpine climbing. ↗

— Michael Kennedy

#fun #more #part #pleasurable #skiing

It's the journey toward doing these harder climbs that really gives value to the whole activity of climbing. ↗

— Alex Lowe

#climbing #climbs #doing #gives #harder

Climbing is unadulterated hard labor. The only real pleasure is the satisfaction of going where no man has been before and where few can follow. ↗

— Annie Smith Peck

#before #climbing #few #follow #going

We are taught to consume. And that's what we do. But if we realized that there really is no reason to consume, that it's just a mind set, that it's just an addiction, then we wouldn't be out there stepping on people's hands climbing the corporate ladder of success. ↗

— River Phoenix

#climbing #consume #corporate #hands #just

I kind of entered a flow state. I've been there before while climbing. You are not thinking ahead. You are just thinking about what is in front of you each second. ↗

— Aron Ralston

#ahead #been #before #climbing #each

K2 is not some malevolent being, lurking there above the Baltoro, waiting to get us. It's just there. It's indifferent. It's an inanimate mountain made of rock, ice, and snow. The "savageness" is what we project onto it, as if we blame the peak for our own misadventures on it. ↗

— Ed Viesturs

#k #death

People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.'There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron... If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for. ↗

— George Mallory

#dreams #everest #mountaineering #mountains #dreams

Every mountain top is within reach if you just keep climbing. ↗

— Barry Finlay

#africa #clean-water #climbing #education #inspirational

This obsession is a curious thing. Sometimes wonder about the merits of devoting so much of myself to a singular climbing objective. Much of the time it beats me down, leaves me hanging my head in despair. But then there are the moments that bring me to life. When excitement wells up inside my chest in a way that doesn’t happen in every day life. Today my fingertips were cracked and bleeding. I made no progress despite great conditions. Now I am on the ground and can hardly contain my excitement to get back on the wall. It’s a crazy rollercoaster and I owe my family and partners a great deal for encouraging me through it all. ↗

— Tommy Caldwell

#encouragement #obsession #perseverance #rock-climbing #family

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us. ↗

— Robert Macfarlane

#climbing #mountains #wilderness #imagination