PHILOSOPHY OF MOUNTAINS

"For two and a half years, my only view was an old fence and a mountain of white rock. There was no uncertainty there, not even close. It was a concrete mountain, bare, no vegetation, and a cold wind blew off it during the winter. You understand? A wind that shook the fence with a sound I have in my head and can't blot out. The sound of a frozen, unyielding landscape ..."

Arturo Perez-Reverte, 2009, The Painter of Battles

Te most shameless displays of naked rock occur on the haunches of mountains. In outright defiance of gravity, these stony rumps are squeezed tightly and lifted skyward by colliding continents, raising crustal 'tsunamis' with crest lines that crisscross Earth. Fearing these stone waves, we baptize them with names – the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, the Rockies. These upsweeps of bruised stone are wild places that excite the two-dimensional drabness of our maps and the flatness of our imagination.

Appearances, however, deceive. Despite their rock-hard shoulders, mountains are ephemeral when viewed against the slow creep of deep time. Under the incessant blur of wind, rain, and ice, rock slabs crumble bit by bit until high peaks are denuded of their elevation. This recognition propels the mind's eye to see beyond itself, which may be the reason why so many people are drawn to the wildness of mountains.

But why risk life and limb climbing icy rock walls, you might wonder? It's because they are mysterious, bewildering, and perilous. Although their vertical exaggerations provoke foreboding and horror, large mountains are dangerous more so for their weather than for their height. Sky-scraping mountains are about the deep secrets of winter, the punishing logic of cold air, avalanches, and glaciers. The serrated rock ridges that step up to the peaks of tall mountains are chiseled into statuary by icy whorls of violent wind, the freeze-and-thaw cycles of night and day, the avalanching of heavy snow pack, and the downward glide of glacial ice, all of these mere afterthoughts of severe and unremitting alpine weather. Strong winds and sub-zero temperatures at altitude are particularly punishing for mountaineers, able to freeze skin and render ice impenetrable to the blow of an axe and the bite of crampons.

Long ago in the remote Dry Valleys of Antarctica something special happened to me. It was mid December, the apogee of summer when temperatures hover between cold and very cold. There is no night at that time of year. Two of us were camped high in a misfit boulder valley that had melted out from under the ice cap, now several kilometers away. We were geologists at the bottom of the world, a peculiar place where south is squeezed down to a point and north is everywhere else.

This frozen place is desert where old snow is perpetually blown about. The month before on the messy rubble of a till plain not far from here, the two of us had traipsed up and down tall desert dunes, exquisite bedforms shaped like crescent moons resting on their sides. Incredibly, gravel, not grains of sand, held up their steep angles of repose. Near our tent, the tops of stones protruding above the frozen ground were shaped into irregular polygons by the searing power of wind-blown sand.

As we feared, the narrow valley where we were encamped turned out to be a luckless place. There, we endured a windstorm for two days, pinned down shoulder to shoulder in down sleeping bags, hardly moving as if mummified in death. Torrents of heavy air coursed off the ice sheet and slammed against the canvas walls of our green tent. The cold and desperate conditions alternately sharpened and dulled my uneasy mind.

At one point, my weathered thoughts conjured an aerial view. Wind packed with cold and snow swirled about in billowing eddies, moving over the ground so fast it seemed as if the daydream was caught in fast-forward mode. Every so often a lonely pinprick of green flickered through the whiteout of the ground. I tried to see myself down there in that canvas tent but couldn't. I opened my eyes and could.

Somehow, each blast of wind was rebuffed, thousands of them. How? I cannot say other than we did nothing special to deserve that outcome. What was it like? W. H. Hudson described a madhouse of a windstorm in Idle Days in Patagonia. "And the winds are hissing, whimpering, whistling, muttering and murmuring, whining, wailing, howling, shrieking – all the inarticulate sounds uttered by man and beast in states of intense excitement, grief, terror, rage, and what not."

After the maelstrom, I wanted fresh air, lots of it, and space to breathe it in. My feelings needed sorting out. We both had to cry, but not together.

I shouldered my rucksack and left, trudging upslope on lonely wind-packed snow. My destination some two kilometers away was a minor ridge in sharp shadow. I needed quiet time watching the polar icecap.

In no time at all, I reached a scree band at the foot of a sandstone ridge. The true and easy feel of my body's weight in motion exhilarated me. The air was dreadfully cold and dry. Scrambling awkwardly over piles of tottering boulders, I felt uneasy and at risk. Once on firm bedrock, however, the act of climbing relaxed me. Several hours later, a roof pendant in the cliff wall – an overhanging sill of rust-iron basalt – stopped me cold. Traversing carefully to my right along a narrow ledge jutting out into air, I soon encountered smooth ice filling a slash in the basalt sill.

This was the crux. With my shoulders tensed, I started up relying on my ice axe and crampons for purchase and "pied a plat" for balance, flat-footing my way up the slope. The ice was cold and brittle. Thousands of ice shards fell away, clinking like broken glass with each placement of my crampons. Panting hard from the exertion, I cut steps into two slabs of high-angled ice. Eventually, I reached a long vertical chimney of fractured rock running straight up to the top of the ridgeline. Relieved, I opened my parka and placed my frozen fingers on the hot, sweaty skin beneath my woolen shirt. Shivering slightly, I remember thinking how peculiar to inhabit a body simultaneously freezing and roasting. I laughed quietly, releasing my tension.

Once safely on the ridge crest, I looked south to the pole. No human had ever been here before. In front of me, an endless apron of frozen water, wider than ocean-wide was drowned in muted light. Honey-colored clouds front lit by the low sun were weakening. I stared into vastness, not memorizing, but clumsily folding the gripping view into my head. Not a breath of air anywhere, the measured hush absolutely still, containing nothing whatsoever to overhear.

Unnerved by the deadness of the moment, I turned away. Over my shoulder, I saw the crooked ridgeline and an endless spread of messy rocks and...