“We climb onward searching for adventure, searching for ourselves, searching for situations which would call forth our total resources.”
—Royal Robbins, American climber, reflecting on the first ascent of El Capitan’s North American Wall
(Authors Note: This is the third and final installment of “What is Adventure?” It’s published on Substack and Medium and in the March edition of It Happened on Medium it was singled out for praise by a member of the Medium staff who said: “I must admit, I’m not the most outdoorsy person in the world (left skydiving and hiking Mt. Whitney back in my 20s and 30s) but I do have a soft spot for reading about the outdoor escapades of others. So be sure to give Chris Noble, photographer and author of Why We Climb: The World’s Most Inspiring Climbers, a read, as he has started sharing “how to cultivate one’s own ‘adventurous heart’” in this eponymous new publication — I really liked “What is Adventure?” So, if you’re just joining the conversation welcome. You can dive right in here, or even better, start with the earlier posts to read this story from the beginning.)
The Wickersham Wall, 1983
At the end of our first day climbing Denali’s north face, my teammates and I made camp in an enormous amphitheater with the entire wall unfurling above us. We knew it was a dangerous camp, frightfully exposed to avalanches, but the snow was a merciless bog of depth-hoar, unconsolidated snow crystals with the consistency of sugar. Moving through it was more akin to swimming than climbing, and even though half a mile away the Jeffery Ridge offered better protection, we were too exhausted to reach it.
So, as mountaineers facing such situations always do, we rationalized, telling ourselves that we were far enough out in the basin to escape all but the biggest slides.
We were outside the tents cooking when it began. First a crack, then a deep boom like the earth shifting in its sleep. Three thousand feet above there was a puff of white.
As I saw the curtains of ice and snow falling, I started running backwards. Backwards because I couldn’t take my eyes off the spectacle, even as the bile rose in my throat, and the hair stood on my head. Stumbling, gasping, then struggling to run again, eventually I fell, mired in the bottomless crystals, helpless to escape whatever fate hurtled down from above.
As it fell, the avalanche blossomed. In milliseconds, the cloud exploded out into space, filling the sky. It skimmed over hanging seracs gathering mass and speed. Everyone was yelling at the top of their lungs, but the roar of the slide drowned all other sound.
Then a miracle. Only a thousand feet above camp the primary mass of the avalanche disappeared, swallowed by a series of giant crevasses that lay unseen between us, and the upper wall.
But that didn’t stop the wind. In the next instant, the wind blast hit us. The mass of air that large avalanches push ahead of them as they fall tore through camp like a hurricane, transforming a calm sunny afternoon into a raging blizzard. Pots, pans and our half-cooked meals went flying. Tents reared and bucked against their lines. When it was over, we were left standing in our long underwear, frosted as though we had been dipped in icing.
As it slowly dawned on us that we had been spared, we began to whoop and dance about like lunatics. We had stared across the dark threshold—then in an instant the sentence was commuted and life restored.
But completely different now, luminous and magical in every way, brimming over with an unimaginable value, un-guessed seconds only seconds before. In the space of a heartbeat everything had changed, and we were suddenly drunk out of our minds on the intoxication of simply being alive.
The root of the word appreciate means to “move toward what is precious.” And a few days later high on Denali, as I stood outside my tent, and the clouds spread out below me like a smoking prairie, and the setting sun set the smoke aflame, I thought that if I could learn only one lesson from this adventure, it would be to spend the rest of my life seeking those things my heart recognizes as precious. If only I could do that, then all the sacrifice, effort, discomfort, and risk would seem a small price to pay.
Throughout the climb, it had become increasingly clear that what I thought of as my personality was as much an accident of chemistry as anything else. That the chemical changes occurring in my body as I climbed higher into the Alaskan sky, affects due to fatigue, hunger, and altitude, were constantly altering the way in which I perceived myself and the world.
So, I prayed, that just as the struggle affected me, so too would the beauty and the awe—not just intellectually, but physiologically. In some way, I hoped that Denali would remain within me always, vivid and alive. That the immense forces surrounding me would alter the very structure of my DNA, forever re-shaping me, and those I touched, in ways impossible to understand.
If, as Jose’ Ortega y Gasset once observed, “I am myself and my circumstances,” then there is something in us that, longs for circumstances that call out the hero in us, that ask us to shed our limitations like a snake shedding its skin.
There were times in the next nine days when exhaustion was a riptide pulling me farther from shore than I had ever been. There was life on this mountain—shouldering loads so heavy they made you groan just to lift them—and there was another life I had once lived, memories fast receding into a haze of snow and frost and a sky the color of amethyst.
Standing there suspended between heaven and earth, I realized that I had somehow stumbled upon the life I had dreamed about as a boy. I had wandered into a wilderness without end, and that life on an expedition, where all members dedicate themselves to a single goal, imbues life with a radiance long forgotten in our beehive cities.
On the ninth day of climbing, Kelley and I reached the north summit of Denali. After a week of good weather, the lenticular cloud had returned to crown the mountain, that bright lens of super-cooled condensation that hovers over high peaks signaling high winds aloft.
In the shelter of the lee ridge, out of the roaring wind, we crouched to read the thermometer. Twenty-five degrees below zero Fahrenheit. When I tried to tap loose the lid on my water bottle it shattered like glass. On the ridge crest, unprotected from the force of the gale, we reeled along like drunkards.
All the way up in the wind that day, Rick had carried his skis strapped to his pack, hoping for a break that would allow him to ski from the summit. But when Kelley and I reached the top, we could only glance down the north face, any more than that, and we risked freezing our eyelids shut.
Feeling herself losing the fight against the cold, Rick’s girlfriend Evelyn, stopped short of the summit, and Rick realizing he wouldn’t be able to ski that day turned around with her. Both thought they would have another chance…
Beyond the windows of the bar, I see dusk coming to Talkeetna. It’s time to order one last beer. Time to be on my way.
As Kelley and I fought our way through the storm, we had no way of knowing that during her descent, Evelyn fell. She had traded her ice axe for one of Rick’s ski poles and unable to self-arrest she fell several hundred vertical feet. When she stopped, she had a broken wrist and a fractured pelvis. She was lucky. If she had slid another thirty feet, she would have gone over the edge of the face, and from there it was 10,000 feet down to the Peters Glacier below.
Elated by our success, yet exhausted by our efforts, Kelley and I stumbled into a dark and silent camp.
When we hallooed, only Rick responded. Never bothering to unzip the tent door, in words devoid of emotion, he described the accident, informed us his attempt to ski the Wickersham was over and all that remained of the expedition was to transport Evelyn to the far side of the mountain and down the West Buttress to Kahiltna Base, where she could be flown to Anchorage.
Three days later Rick and I stood holding Evelyn between us at the medical research camp at 14,000 feet on the West Buttress. The setting was ghostly. The evening rays of the sun had faded. To the south clouds hung in an unbroken wave, a pastel backdrop slung across a cobalt sky. Out of that phosphorescence a delicate bubble of plexiglass and steel appeared, signal lights flashing.
The helicopter came in dead level. “Two victims. No baggage,” had been the instructions over the radio. All personal equipment had to be left behind.
In seconds it was over. The helicopter touched down amid a typhoon of snow. We handed up Evelyn, along with a woman from another team who was suffering from frostbite. We had not requested a rescue. Storm winds had prevented the helicopter from landing at 17,000 feet to pick up a more seriously injured climber, so as not to waste the flight the rangers had radioed down that they would pick up the two injured women at 14,000 feet instead.
Moments later the aircraft was nothing more than a blur of winking lights fleeing southwest, as insubstantial and illusory as all our hopes and dreams.
I was twenty-eight years old. It was the end of my first real expedition, my first time climbing in the one of the world’s great ranges. Our small, inexperienced team had succeeded in making the first alpine ascent of the Canadian Route on the Wickersham Wall. We had climbed one of the largest mountain-faces on earth, making the second ascent of a remote and dangerous route that had not seen a successful party in nineteen years. Yet the knowledge that without a moment’s misfortune, Rick could have skied the wall haunted me, making our success feel hollow and betrayed.
During those last days on the mountain, struggling with the double load of disappointment and effort, carrying Evelyn and all our gear, I began to understand how wide the gap between the adventures of our dreams and those we live. The story I had found on Denali was not the story I had come to tell. How could I reconcile the two?
Again and again, adventure teaches us that between our romantic ideas and reality, lies a chasm, deep and wide. The adventure we experience out in the world is not someone else’s story. It is our own, and to earn it, we may have to ransom all that we hold dear. As the storyteller Laura Simms once observed, “The most serious threshold in every story calls forth our greatest fear or attachment to the world as we know it.” (“Crossing Into the Invisible,” Parabola, Spring 2000)
So, what is adventure?
No one can answer that question in its entirety, because each of us must discover and define it for ourselves.
For me personally, adventure is both the situation and my response. It is not just daring circumstances it is the attitude I call “the adventurous heart” that is required to face them. It is a spirit that engages the world with curiosity and joyful play. It is the determination to keep going, no matter how long and dark the journey. It is the confidence that somehow, someway, I will find the strength, wisdom, and patience to prevail and flourish, regardless of what life brings.
Perhaps the greatest paradox is that once the adventure ends; once we’re bathed, rested, and well-fed; the most miserable, terrifying, sufferfest imaginable—can, in retrospect—become the most glorious, meaningful, and defining experience of our lives.
I leave the bar heading for my solitary tent at the Talkeetna airfield. Crossing the railroad tracks I pause and look north. Even though its nearly midnight, the sky still smolders. Rising out of black forests like a curtain of light stands the Alaska Range. Irresistibly, the eye is drawn to Denali, its summit glowing like a beacon 20,000 feet above where I stand. And I think, yes, adventure is all those things, but it is also a question. Perhaps the most important question we can ever ask ourselves:
“Do you want to read the story? Or do you want to be the story?”
