A Responce To A Friend's Email

What forces are at the core of a mountain addiction?

It starts with that first time that you reach the base of their slopes... Gazing up it seems an impossible distance to climb, reaching into the clouds that guard the heavens you once reached out for as a boy. Then you begin your ascent working and cranking through the lower growths, crossing creeks and stream. Each muscle feeling it's strain as it is stretched and worked into new form, like metal against Gimil's hammer. Soon you are tuned and your pace quickens.

Flow of the Mountain world works from lower mixed forest to hemlock stands and clearing to the gnarled alpine scrub, clinging on against the torrent of passing winds and rain. Bare rock stands witness before the lacing snows like fingers grasp you up ever climbing chutes. Hiking becomes a full body battle with the spirits that lay there. Whips of the heavens speed past as you ever climb higher. Snow become rock and boot and hand meld to them like they were always meant to climb higher... 

Soon the bottom disappears into a great void of exposure for the first time. Looking back, you feel a surging within the heart. You question not how you will descend, only that forward is where some seed inside is commanding you onward to go. Scrambling over rock and tarn, you make the exposed rock ridgeline. There like following a razors edge, an abyss descending on both sides, the staircase of granite boulders only gives you one option. Ascendance!

Soon, you reach the head wall of the great cloud bank. Winds kick up at this boundary edge, and your jacket is flapping about your arms and chest. yet in minutes you charge above it, with clouds moving so quickly, blue begins to pierce though and make up the whole of the great horizons... 

Clinging on to Black Twisted rock of, you gaze out to see towers rising from this great sea. Below as the sun begins to set, you know are the great huddled masses, moving from one place to the next, working circles again and again until they cannot see out of the trench they have etched. Yet you are among the great towers reaching up pointed towards the heavens. Catching that last fading light which few see, the electric rose of the Alpenglow with snowbanners trailing. Silence but the of the soul reached within, only the high whistle of the wind around your jacket hood.

And there on the horizon, another lures you in, with untold beauty of form and route. You wonder deep inside what this view looks like from her slopes. And there she has you, like an ice cold siren... And you know that there is nothing to stop this now, while a low voice echos solemn words

Something hidden.  Go and find it.  Go and look behind the Ranges--

Something lost behind the Ranges.  Lost and waiting for you.  Go!

-- Ridgewalker