Sometimes, when the Autumn leaves fall, when the mountainsides are changed from green to yellow to red to brown, when a soft breeze whispers through the aspen groves, and the sun shines in majesty above, men go to the mountains. They look around and see all the glories of creation- the granite monoliths towering overhead in a seemingly endless mass of jumbled gray, the vast forests of tall pines and short pines, the quietly gurgling stream flowing peacefully over a smooth riverbed, the crisp fallen leaves crackling underfoot- and they feel a sense of freedom: the freedom of relaxation, not of the body, but a slowing down of mind and emotion. As minute progress is made up an immense mountain slope, they might ask themselves why they are climbing up this immense mountain slope, but they don't ask because they know the truth lies not in the answer but in the question (just as a summit is the end of a beginning and the beginning of an end) because it is simply something they do and must do because that is how it is and how it must be.

The day was cold. A slowly moving stream proclaimed its peaceful serenity with a light trickling sound as it splashed over well-worn stones. The sound of the water echoed across the alpine meadow to give a restful feeling to the climbers, which was further imparted by the remoteness of their camp (a three-day backpack from the nearest roadhead), the idyllic clouds journeying across the morning sky, and the sublime setting- a high cirque, surrounded by the highest and most rugged peaks of the Wind Rivers. It was clear- with the exception of three lazy cumulous clouds encircling the rising sun on the horizon- as it so often is high in the Rocky Mountains on weekends late in August and early in September. It was cold, though, and the two climbers, just awakening, in the black and white tent in this basin had trouble thinking of anything beside the cold.

John's beeping watch roused the two from their fitful slumbers and initiated the events of a day destined to be long and hard. John always had trouble sleeping the night before a climb, as the excitement was overwhelming. Alex, on the other hand, had a busy mind that wouldn't stop for sleeping. His thoughts had been occupied with fears of having forgotten a critical piece of equipment, concern about a pack strap which had been giving him problems the day before during the approach, and worry about his young friend, sharing his tent now, who had never before been on a climb of this magnitude. John was only 13, but every bit as determined and enthusiastic as climbers with twice his years and many times his experience. Some, like John's mother, thought that he was not yet ready for a big climb, but Alex knew better. Alex knew that it is quiet ambition, a thirst for adventure, and the ability to thrive where most cannot which made a person a climber.

Beside the black and white tent was an all-black tent. In it, another two climbers were looking at their watches and starting the process of getting up. They had met Alex and John on the trail the day before and camped with them since the objectives of the two groups were both reached from the same saddle. Josh and Dan would climb Hayden Point today while John and Alex would climb Fremont Peak. Dan was a rugged outdoorsman, seasoned by many nights in sub-zero cold, close-calls while scrambling on rocky crags, and numerous realized summits, each represented by a scratch of his pocket knife upon the shaft of his black ice axe. Josh was 22, a senior in a Wyoming college, and three years older than Dan, his admiring brother, who had followed him to school in the West from their birthplace in New Hampshire. Dan liked to see his name alongside his brother's in the summit registers and in some ways, he climbed in order to justify himself to Josh. Dan lacked Josh's experience, and the route they had selected on Hayden Point for today would push him to his limits.

Meanwhile, Alex had dressed and pulled on his boots, and was now emerging from the black and white tent. John came out a few minutes later with the butane stove, matches, and breakfast. Alex got some water from the stream and put it on the stove. Before long, Josh and Dan were out cooking breakfast alongside the man and the boy. Alex struggled to choke down his third cup of oatmeal, knowing that he wouldn't be able to eat any more warm food until late in the afternoon, after they had returned from Fremont Peak. After the hurried breakfast, the four filled their water bottles, jammed candy bars, crackers, and assorted bags of food into their summit packs, and took the first of many steps up the mountain on what was destined to be a long and hard day.

The procession up from the basin to the saddle was a quiet, introverted one. Josh was in front, thinking about a dream he had just had that night. He had heard a man whisper into the ear of another man, "Look. I see someone who will die climbing that mountain. He was enticed by a summit, his weakness, his vice. He succumbed to my temptation and broke the climbers' most sacred Law to get it and now he is doomed. He may even think he will live since he won't die immediately, but it is only a matter of time since a man cannot escape the consequences of breaking that most sacred Law." Josh was scared by these words, because they did not promise good things for his enterprise, and forced him to accept an experience from his past which he had long wanted for forget. Perhaps he should ignore them. Ah, that is a good idea. It was only a dream anyway.

A few yards behind, Dan walked slowly and methodically, thinking about the crux of the route, the Staircase. Dan had read the description in his climbing guide nine times the night before and once more this morning. The staircase, an amazing series of 17 small ledges leading up a 40 foot wall, was the part of the route about which he had the most severe qualms, and in his mind it seemed terrifying.

John came next, working his way up the very faint trail with what a careful observer might classify as a skipping walk. His excitement and exuberance would have been contagious in virtually any other group, but each of the others was lost in their own thoughts.

Alex brought up the rear, thinking about sundry ideas and feelings and hopes, as he always did. In particular, he was thinking back to the conversation in which the four had engaged around the campfire the night before.

Josh had been telling them some of his background, how he got started climbing, and a few of his favorite climbing stories: stories full of fighting mountain goats, attacks by a mother ptarmigan after Josh had almost stepped in her nest, and the summit he had shared with his girlfriend, before she was killed in a tragic accident on the descent. The conversation had slowly transformed itself into a discussion about the risks of the sport which each of them, in his own way, loved in an ineffable manner. Josh had argued that to the careful mountaineer, the risks were quite minimal, perhaps even non-existent. He had talked about the great Law which governed climbing and which separated those who lived by the mountain and those who died by it. He had spoken with impressive wisdom, which even his reckless and repulsive egotism failed to discount.

"Climbing is dangerous in the way life is dangerous. You can get hurt. What's more, you can die, though maybe you would die anyway," he had remarked. "But within the Law, climbing is very safe. This Law is an extremely fine line which it is not permissible to cross, not unless you are willing to risk dying. The line is different for everyone; it may be a particularly exposed 3rd class scramble for a beginner or a difficult technical climb with a long runout for an experienced expert. The climber is safe who knows the Law and obeys it. Once this line in the mind, this theoretical distinction between 'I know I can' and 'I think I can', is crossed, not only is that climber courting disaster, but disaster is a very real immediate possibility."

Alex had absorbed these words and contrasted them with his own experience. He had been trying to teach the boy judgment (what Josh would call "Respect for the Law") as the preeminent foundation of climbing, even more than the skills necessary to do it---. But is judgment something that can be taught? And what good was the Law if a man's ego placed the line so high that he only thought he rested secure in climbing which was sufficiently difficult as to be bound to destroy him in the end?

Josh had continuede preemminent , "The Law must be learned and obeyed. Learning it is not so simple a matter as conscience, and while it is written on every man's heart, each man must experience situations which help him grasp it, since it is engraved more deeply than most ever look. The law is learned slowly, and speaks differently to every rock and to every climber. But, just as important as knowing the Law is obeying it. With so much at stake, I can't help wondering why would anyone risk it all for the experience of touching a rock not so unlike any other he has ever touched and grasped before?"

At this point, John had commented, in answer to what must have been intended as a rhetorical question, "I think that the reason is just because it is the Law, and any Law makes men think to, want to, and need to break it. What they must do is indeed written on their hearts, but they rebel and turn their backs because that is what men do, and then they do what they know they should not. They realize that death may well be the consequence for breaking the Law," said John, quietly, almost mournfully, and Alex couldn't help but feel a sense of sorrow, too, and a sense of envy, that despite his many years, the others understood or had known some profound realization which he might die not knowing, and suddenly, that thought seemed the most horrifying and frightening consideration he had ever pondered.

Josh continued his discourse from where he had left off. "Anyway, the point is, climbing within the Law is what every man who wants to live must do, for living outside the Law is to die and dying is to not know how to live. See, I know because I have broken the Law before. It was about four years ago on an insignificant rocky face of a low peak in the Colorado Front Range. The climbing was not so hard, but the rock was covered in snow and below the snow it was relatively unstable. The whole face was in the late afternoon shade and my hands started to get very cold from brushing the snow from my handholds. I climbed a little higher, and suddenly the exposure between my legs made me more than a little uncomfortable. I had knowingly and intentionally broken the Law because I dismissed these facts with the notion that I could easily do it- after all, the smooth, sloping rock was really not that steep. Then I thought, 'If you loose it now, Josh, and slide down this snow, you're a definite goner. But why did it have to happen on this mountain, and not a big one, where I could die with some honor.' I really thought that; it's amazing what futile thoughts a man will think when he knows he is doomed. The hard part in obeying the Law is not letting ego get involved in your assessment of the conditions, difficulty, experience, and gut feeling. When I realized what I had done with the sudden unmistakablity of a snakebite, I immediately started trying to escape from my vulnerable position. Then it happened, with lightning swiftness. My feet slipped on the ice covering the ledge on which I had attempted to land them, and my life was hanging from my fragile fingers, numb with cold and milliseconds from letting go. It was then that I saw a sort of vision, during the arrested timing of that unmistakable stopwatch which was, and I now realize had and has always been, counting down the remaining length of my life. But amazingly, my left foot caught hold of a projecting knob and I held myself for a second, then, controlled by a force I did not understand and tightly grasping a mighty invisible hand of deliverance, I managed to reach safety."

"Wow," John murmured. Unable to restrain his curiosity, John asked Josh what he had seen during that prolonged moment when he knew everything was over. "Did all the events of your life flash before your eyes?"

"No," Josh said. "It was a strange experience. I knew that I had risked the unmentionable, and I felt badly- not regretful, not scared, not angry or bitter, not even lonely- but sorry for myself and for everyone I loved and who loved me, that I could have been so foolish. Then it was as if one of those people who loved me that I knew but didn't rember ever meeting, had delivered me from an ineluctable death on the pointed rocks below. I was gone, but I got a second chance, and I don't know why. I didn't deserve a second chance, but I got one anyway and I shall not question it, since it was beyond my control and humanly feeble capacity of comprehension. When you break the Law once, you know you can't ever break it again because you have climbed on the wrong side of yourself and you know it is not the joyous, wonderful, freeing experience you climb for, which in fact, defines climbing. Yet, you will break the Law again because you are a man and that is what you must do and that is what you are doomed for unless you see that hand reaching out to you and grasp it tightly, not because you think it wise in the ways of men, but because something inside you, which you have always known and tragically never knew, convinced you that you must. No, no, I didn't see my life or my loved ones flashing before me. I saw a crazy man, up on a snowy cliff, above the abyss, and doomed to the abyss, starting to slide on the snow, and I pointed at him, saying to the man beside me, 'Look at that foolish person. I hope he gets down safely, so we can talk some sense into him.' And the man beside me said, 'He needs help and I must help him because I love him, even though he doesn't know me, though he really does know me and just doesn't know it because he has blinded himself to it.' The man on the cliff was me, Josh."

"Who was the man that said he would help you?" the boy asked, extremely curious and confused.

"I don't know, but I wish I knew, for he is the only way someone who breaks our climbing Law can be rescued and I know I have broken the Law and I know I will break the Law again for that is the end of all men, and I am a man. That man in my vision must be found, because he is the only way for all of us climbers who inevitably break the Law we must live and die by. Only I can't find him, although I know he is always near when I climb, and he is calling my name. But I don't listen or hear his voice, even though I know I must, probably because I don't want to, though I don't know why I don't want to, since I know I must."

Alex had pondered his mysterious words for a long time when Josh began to conclude his discourse. "There was another man standing beside the first man, and he whispered something into the ear of the first man. I hear the whispering voice in my dreams, but can't quite make the words out, though they grow more mumbled as I progress from the womb and more clear as I progress to the grave."

Alex was still pondering Josh's strange words now as he walked slowly toward the saddle, where he and the boy would leave the two brothers to climb Fremont Peak.

Now when the foursome reached the Fremont-Hayden Saddle, they exchanged "Good luck's," "See you back at camp's," and "Be careful's" before parting company. Alex and John, the man and the boy, as it was said earlier, were going to climb Fremont Peak while Josh and Dan scaled Hayden Point. It was nine o'clock in the morning when the two groups set off for their respective objectives. The horizon was clear and only three cumulous clouds, a little closer than they had been at sunrise, marred the perfectly blue sky. Or was it blue? Looking carefully, it might have seemed purple, or magenta. You could look up into it and its purity was so deep you thought that if you suddenly averted your eyes, they would go blind, as if you had been looking at the sun, because you were gazing on something too pure and beautiful for human eyes.

The boy and the man slowly worked their way across the east face of Fremont along a series of ledges called the Bookshelves, which extended from Fremont's south ridge just above the saddle halfway across the east face to a forked gully called the Pitchfork Couloir. The couloir was snow-filled year-round, but dry areas of loose rock could usually be found along the outsides of the couloir this late in the season. The couloir was shaped like an inverted pitchfork, with the top of the handle reaching the small saddle just between the twin summits of Fremont, and the three prongs of the pitchfork extending down to the base of the face. The Bookshelves would lead the man and the boy into the leftmost branch of the couloir about three-quarters of the way up it. Approximately 350 feet below the place where the Bookshelves accessed the Left Fork, each of the couloir's three branches grew extremely steep and dangerous. Consequently, routefinding on the descent would be of critical importance. A few people had been killed on the route before, but many thousands had made it up and down safely over the years and had given the route its classic and famous reputation. Both John and Alex were very excited about climbing the route which they had heard about and seen pictures of for so long. Josh had climbed the route before and said it was no big deal under good weather conditions, and the only difficult part was the scramble from the saddle between the twin summits to the higher, North Summit of Fremont.

When they reached the couloir, the man and the boy donned their helmets, as the couloir was notorious for rockfall. They started climbing the snow in the middle of the couloir, but the rockfall was substantially greater in the center of the couloir than on its outsides. Climbing on the outsides was more frustrating and slow, though, because the loose scree and talus would bring them back down a foot for every three or four upward feet they gained. Most of the morning was spent in the 3000 foot couloir. The two climbers had reached the Apex, the point at which the three prongs of the pitchfork come together, by noon and stopped for lunch there. According to a newspaper Alex remembered reading, the Apex was the place where a man named Timothy Underhill had fallen to his death only two months earlier. But Alex didn't tell that to John.

The Apex was about 1000 feet above the Bookshelves and another 2000 feet below the summit. It covered a large area, and the thought that one could easily get off route here if he were to encounter poor visibility was sobering, yet terrifyingly thrilling and exciting to the young boy yet unfamiliar with the passions of risk and the consuming fire of desire for something, be it summit or otherwise. For the good or the bad, this ignorance and innocence would soon be alleviated.

The lunch stop wasn't long, since they could continue to munch on their candy bars while they worked their way up the upper part of the couloir. As they climbed, they talked and the man shared many of his fondest memories, which had all occurred in the mountains. As he talked, the man's face would fill with great joy and happiness as he described every detail of the ascents he had made during his younger years of peaks which, to the boy, seemed to stretch out infinitely in all directions on the horizon of the man's mountain-filled life. The boy listened and learned and finally asked the man what it was that made him climb the mountains which he knew could snuff out his tiny life.

The man paused, as he always did before he began speaking very precisely and succinctly, as he always did when he spoke. "I suppose that understanding what I do in the mountains is as important as understanding why I do it. I climb, of course, but more than that, I see, I feel, I look, I think, I grow, I make a new friend. I am filled with a peace and restfulness as I climb to exhaustion, which is not to be found even in the most restful activities in the flatlands. I know that seems to be a contradiction, but I've awakened too many times in this bituminous life of mine and wanted with everything inside me not to have to get up and not to have to face the world and the problems that permeate the world. My experience has been one of frustration, frustrated by a vacuous search for some legitimate justification for living, and frustration is the most painful emotion because it is characterized by feelings of failure and hopelessness and powerlessness. I once had a thought: life is not what you make it, but rather what it makes you; this thought has stuck with me and I shall live and die under its banner of freedom. But in the mountains, I have found a happiness, a closeness to something I cannot explain or understand. When my son was born about 20 years ago, I looked at him in my wife's arms and thought to myself, 'What have we done? What have I done? Why was I so selfish as to bring another poor being into this world and make it suffer by living?' But, then I remembered the mountains I had climbed and the joy they had given me and in a small way, by them I was somehow able to justify my life and the life I had created. I thought, 'Life is short, so they say, (though it seems horribly interminable to those of us trapped in the clutches of time) and it's all we've got, so to deny my son the chance to see our world, as bad as it is, would have been a terrible crime. I needed to let him have the opportunity to suffer and be defeated, and also the opportunity to climb mountains, for no good in our lives can come without the bad, and we must accept both as they are allotted unto us. To deny my son his legitimate right to live and to suffer would also be to deny him his legitimate right to live and be happy."

The boy responded, "Where is you're son now?"

The man answered, "He died on a mountain...as I now realize all of us will someday."

The boy asked, "I don't understand. On what mountain will my friends who don't climb die?"

"They will die on Mt. Efil, that fierce mountain we all climb, though we don't know why, and though we can't justify it, we climb it anyway, despite our awful knowledge of what the end result will be. You see, the earth is the treadmill of life. It is an uphill treadmill, a mountain treadmill."

"Is death the end result you are talking about?" asked the puzzled boy.

"Yes, death is the summit of Mt. Efil, which is life."

"But, if life is simply a means to death, how can you justify it?"

"I justify it the way everyone else does- by the sustaining hope that I will find that omniscent justification, and by the good things that happen along the way, which for me are mountains."

"But climbing mountains is as illegitimate a justification as love, family, fame, or fortune," The boy said.

"You are right, I think," said the man. "Those good things will fail to justify, and in the course of every man's life, he will realize that all the things he fought for on the slopes of Mt. Efil and used to justify his struggle will come to absolutely nothing. No, they will come to something- they will arrive at the summit of Mt. Efil, the inescapable termination of the struggle to which every man has been doomed. I climb because I can lie to myself and believe that climbing a mountain will justify my pains and toils."

"But what if death is not the summit, but something merely that happens along the way to those who never reach the summit? And what if, on that elusive summit lies something that will justify Mt. Efil? Then, wouldn't it be worth it? For if nothing along the way can justify, it has to be something at the summit. No climber would deny that a summitless climb is a failure, for the summit is the prize, though without the climb it is not so priceless."

Now the man was asking, "What of that necessary magnitude could lie on a summit besides emptiness and loneliness and the register containing the names of those who were there once and now are there no longer?"

The boy answered, "That we cannot see until we reach the summit, for the true summit is hiding behind many subsidiary peaks and false summits. Not many will reach that elusive summit, though many will try and fail since they go not on the narrow trail thay must. If Josh was right last night about there being a way to get rescued by grasping the invisible hand extended to you which has been there all along, then maybe all is not so hopeless and futile. Maybe our journey up Mt. Efil is the only way for us to realize that we need that hand to grasp and that we need to grasp it, if not only to justify our struggle, then also to justify ourselves."

The man stopped climbing for a moment and thought about what had just been said. "If that were true, then not only would the summit serve to justify, but the entire climb preceding the summit would also be justification, since that is the only way to see the void and reveal its emptiness to others."

The two continued to talk as they progressed up the handle of the pitchfork. Within a hour, they were at the small saddle which separated the North and South Summits of Fremont Peak. The scramble to the North Summit was a hairy coxcomb of crumbling rock with a 100 foot drop on either side of the sharp arete leading to the summit. The summit was small, but not so pinpoint that they needed to secure themselves to it as they celebrated what they thought was a successful climb.

"Boy," said Alex, "standing here, looking down on everything is what makes it all worthwhile. Seven hours of difficult, exhausting climbing seems but a small price to pay for such a spectacular, indescrible feeling!" The man looked down over the ridges, the cirques, the valleys, and the vast embankment of clouds which had amassed along the spine of the Wind Rivers.

They shook hands and took the climbing register out of its protective plastic case. The message written under the last entry said, "A summit can justify a successful climb only if that success is comprised of discovering the way not to die on the mountain." It was signed "June 29, 1986, Timothy Underhill."

Josh and Dan had made slower progress on Hayden Point than Alex and John had made to the top of Fremont Peak, and were still an hour distant from their objective when the boy and the man had reached their summit. From the saddle, they had crossed to the west side of the range, descended to a wide snowfield and proceeded across it. The snowfield divided the rotten North Ridge from the Northwest Shoulder, the primary route on the peak. The climbing on the Northwest Shoulder was slow, but good. The rock was hard and solid, and the shoulder relatively sharp and well-defined. The difficulty varied from second to third class, and back to second again for many hours, after which Josh decided to stop for lunch at the base of the Staircase. When Dan, who was several minutes behind, caught up to Josh here, he stopped in horrified amazement as he silently beheld the formidable impediment before him. The Staircase looked every bit as difficult as the books had described it, and Dan was torn between feelings of anticipation and dread.

After a few minutes, Josh asked Dan if he were ready to go and Dan nodded. Josh pulled the straps of his packs tight and made sure that the weight in his pack was exenly distibuted and would not shift during the next few minutes of spectacularly exposed free climbing. Josh walked up to the fourth class wall, placed his palms against it and looked up towards the top. It was forty vertical feet from base to top, and the rock leaned back at about 50 degrees, making the wall itself about 50 feet in length. Josh confidently placed his left foot on the first of the seventeen "stairs," actually ledges which protruded about 5 inches from the rock and were each about 4 feet wide. Each stair gave way to a successive five inch indentation about two feet higher. Josh grasped the second stair, shifted his weight, and simultaneously moved his left hand to the third stair and his right foot to the first stair. He was off the ground. Josh sat quietly watching his brother continue up the rock in graceful, well-disciplined, fluid motions.

About two-thirds of the way up the wall, Josh turned his head to Dan and said, "This really isn't too bad. It's mainly a matter of leaning into the rock and letting the stair below support you as you move up to the stair above. You won't have any problems."

"Well, I'll give it my very best shot," Dan responded.

Josh turned back to the rock and climbed the remaining stairs. At the top, he took off his backpack. He called out to Dan, "Okay, it's your turn now. Let's see what you're made out of."

"Here goes."

Dan moved his hands and feet as precisely as he could, trying to replicate the movements he had watched his brother make. A grunt. Step three. A determined smile. Step five. A pound of the right foot. Step eight. Slowly and with meticulous care, Dan brought his right hand to the ninth step and pulled himself higher. Half-way. He looked down. It was a long way down. It was a very long way down. It was too far down. Dan started to huff and shake.

"I don't like this," he called to his brother in the calmest voice he could command.

"Come on. You're almost there. Just don't look down."

Dan made it up to the next stair, took a deep breath, and proceeded to the next stair. "Almost there," he kept whispering to himself. Three more steps. Two more.

"Hey, check out that cloud coming over the ridge," said Josh suddenly. "I don't like it. It's a mean one. We better get up this thing fast!"

Dan couldn't see the cloud or hear his brother's voice. He concentrated only on the next four moves that would get him to the top of the wall.

"Hey, Dan, hurry up." Josh paused. "Listen, I'm gonna start on up the last 500 feet here. That cloud's makin' me nervous. I'll wait for you at the summit."

Within two minutes, Dan was reaching up to the sixteenth stair with his right hand and he swung his body upwards. He started to lift his left foot when suddenly his right foot slipped off the ledge and he was hanging by ten fingers. He screamed. The wind answered in a chilling chorus as Dan's feet flailed about in the air.

In a moment, Dan had recovered his footing. His pulse started to return to normal and his heavy breathing slowed. He was quite shaken. He called out to Josh for help, but there was no answer. Josh was already 200 yards away, though Dan did not know it. Dan stood on the thin ledge only three moves from safety for nearly half an hour. He wanted to be sure he was relaxed when he moved again, for the next three moves would be the most critical of his life.

After several tries, he gave up trying to get Josh's attention and figured he was already out of voice range, which was now particularly reduced because of the violent winds, constantly increasing in intensity. Despite efforts to stay calm, he became scared and his thoughts turned morbid.

"I'm not ready to die," he thought. "I will just stay here and wait until Josh gets back and he'll get me down safely. But I should get the nerve and just pull myself up the rest of the way, and not keep standing here like a frightened, lost sheep caught between air and rock, sky and mountain, life and death.

Dan's mind then became critical and accusing. "Why am I doing this? he thought to himself. "What possible reason could I give myself for climbing up this heartless stone, when I should have known all along that it would be my downfall? I suppose I could have given myself any reason and it would have been sufficient, for the reasoning doesn't have to be reasonable; it just has to be a reason one can tell himself."

Dan's weather-beaten cheeks were wet with tears when he finally grew determined enough to make a move toward the top. Dan moved.

By this time, the puffy cloud Josh had seen over the ridge had become a dark system of misty blanketing which had reduced visibility to about fifty feet. The wind blew (as it must blow), the snow fell (as it must fall), and the climbers climbed (as they must climb).

Josh approached the summit and dropped his pack. He was very tired, but the hardest part was yet to come. He signed his name in the register, stretched a little, and scratched a tally mark onto the shaft of his black ice axe with his black pocket knife. The clouds had thickened now and snow beat down heavily on Josh's parka. Visibility was around 30 feet. Josh looked down the ridge he had ascended, and seeing nobody, began the descent. The most difficult section of the route between the Staircase and the summit was the Knife-Edge, a section of ridge about sixty feet long which had to be straddled for almost its entire length, due to its minuscule and at times, non-existent, width. Josh doubted Dan would have had the nerve to cross it and must therefore be below.

Josh decided not to traverse the Knife-Edge under the current weather conditions. He called Dan for several minutes to make sure he wasn't anywhere nearby. To avoid the Knife-Edge, Josh decided to descend the snowfield for about 200 feet, then regain the Northwest Shoulder just above the Staircase, where Dan might possibly be waiting.

The mountain was very cold. The glissade down the Pitchfork Couloir was smooth and fast. After traversing the airy ridge from the summit to the Fremont saddle, the boy and the man began the rapid descent into the black cloudbank below. The boy went first and went faster than the man. A thousand feet, which had taken over an hour to ascend, was descended in three minutes. The boy stopped for a few minutes to let the man catch up. The two decided to take it more cautiously from there to the Apex, since the visibility was now as low as 30 feet. They roped up, tying in about 100 feet apart, beleiving thst the greatest danger was separation. Then they both bent the rope into clove hitches, which they slid up the shaft of their axes to allow for a possible belay. The wind was so noisy that the boy and the man needed to yell at each other when only a few feet away to hear each other during their brief conversation as they tied into the rope.

The wind in the couloir moaned in an eerie cry which seemed to portend a impending gothic nightmare. The boy departed first. When most of the rope between them had run out, the man followed. For another three to four minutes, they sped down the couloir, two weights on a string, being pulled ever downward with increasing force and velocity. The boy, momentarily struck by the awful realization that he had passed the Apex and was now in the Pitchfork's dangerous Central Prong, slowed his glissade to a stop, then moved out of the way and waited for the man, who should have been about fifteen seconds behind him.

But after only eight seconds, the man flew past the boy in a furious flash of equipment, altogether failing to see the boy, who was waving frantically at him.

The man had reached too great a velocity to stop with the spike of his axe and was plummeting at extreme velocity down a narrow gully toward certain disaster. The man tried to self arrest, but he was moving so rapidly that the axe was nearly wrenched out of his hands as he made futile attempts to get the pick into the snow, off which it bounced repeatedly with mocking and sinister hopelessness. The boy immediately dropped to his knees and jammed his white axe deep into the snow to establish a belay. Then he waited. In a few moments the slack would be pulled taut, at the exact moment when the man was 100 feet further down the slope. At that point, the boy would be jerked by an incomprehensible force which he would have to control, though he knew there was almost no way he could. If he did not stop the man's fall, he would be plucked from his position on a tall, rocky appendage of the earth and be pulled down the central prong of the pitchfork, over the cliffs and down to the earth below.

Those few moments seemed long enough to the boy for him to have done just about anything, but he remained lying on the snow with all his weight applied over the head of his axe and waited, waited. In those few seconds, the man slid 70 feet down the couloir and 15 feet over the lip of a small ice cliff. He then landed on a shelf of snow which started to crumble as soon as his weight impacted the fragile shelf.
For a moment, the man thought he was saved. It seemed that within seconds of coming to the end of the rope and pulling himself and the boy into the abyss, he had miraculously landed on a small ledge and stopped. But the man looked and he saw many things. He saw that the shelf he was on was crumbling and would break off sometime within the next five seconds. He saw that below his ledge, the cliff dropped for 120 feet of uninterrupted verticality and empty air. He saw that he was doomed. He saw that the boy was doomed, too, as things stood. He saw that if he imbedded his axe pick into the face of the ice cliff, he might hang from it for awhile and possibly somehow surivive for a time and he could hope for some incredibly unlikely rescue. But that would only be a delay of the inevitable; he was going to that place in the depths below soon, and that fact could not be denied or altered. The man knew that his time had come and he had failed to reach that elusive summit of Mt. Efil, but there might still be hope for the boy. Perhaps the boy would be more wise and would die justified and live, not die justifying and die, as Alex knew he would.

Alex saw that time had stopped for a moment, while John lay waiting for the inevitable pull to come and take his life. And the man saw that in this interval, he was the only one who could act and he must act. He had been granted about fifteen seconds to change the course of events or to let them run their course. He knew what he would do.

It was getting very cold. Josh walked carefully down the snowfield around the Knife-Edge. He had seen a steep ramp on his topographic map that morning and decided to use it to access the shoulder at some point between the Staircase and the Knife-Edge. The ramp was an unobtrusive fold in the rock that now lay shrouded in a veil of thick snowfall. Without knowing it, Josh had passed the ramp and was walking down the snowfield which he knew became quite steep within a half-mile below the Knife-Edge. Josh walked slowly down the slope which gradually steepened with a mischievous subtlety that had surprised many a climber who would suddenly find himself, without explanation, on a snowfield which necessitated crampons for what might be termed a dubiously safe descent.

But Josh had been on many a mountain; the scratches on his axe could attest to that, and he had been on many a snowfield; his insight could attest to that. He came to a halt, understanding the snowfield's heinous trick and thought to himself, "Ha. I shall not be defeated so easily. No mountain shall ever claim my life. Or at any rate, certainly not this one and certainly not anytime soon."

Then to the mountain he cried out, "You cannot deceive me or destroy me so easily. You have underestimated your adversary. I have conquered you and shall go back to the world of men to boast of my exploit and you shall remain here, wallowing in the misery of your glum defeat at my hands!"

Josh turned around and saw what looked like an ramp leading up to the crest of the shoulder. He walked over and began climbing it. The rock was poor, reminiscent of the wet, crumbly shale common in Colorado's Elk Range. It was wet, too, and wet rock is slippery, and wet, crumbly rock is, in a word, dangerous. But Josh was not worried. He had to ascend here to find his brother, who was undoubtedly freezing and cold after an hour without much movement. He would ascend the rock here, and nothing, he thought, could stop him. Then, without warning, a golf-ball-sized rock came loose and tumbled down the ramp from above. Josh was quick, but the rock was quicker, and it struck him on the edge of his right shoulder. Josh cried in pain and frustration. His shoulder was bleeding a little bit and was quite sore. It hurt for him to move his arm above the shoulder and he felt unjustly targeted by some invisible dwarf, carelessly hopping around on the rocks above him.

Josh wrapped a bandage around his shoulder and secured it with adhesive tape, which he angrily ripped from the roll with his shiny, straight, white teeth. Josh put on his climbing helmet to shield his head from falling rocks and proceeded to ascend the ramp. He must hurry, for sunset was not more than two hours away and he still had yet to find his brother. Josh had not climbed more than twenty feet higher when another rock rolled down the ramp, nearly missing him. Josh was getting mad now. He yelled, and in answer, a whole cascade of rocks leapt from the ramp and fell toward him. He looked upward with concern, realizing that he could not dodge them all. Instinctively, he jerked to the right and avoided most of the rocks; however, a fist-sized rock impacted his helmet, just above the forehead. The helmet kept Josh from receiving an unwanted hole in his skull, but it did not keep him from losing his balance. He teetered for a moment, then took a six-foot fall. It was not a bad fall, as climbing falls go, but it was enough to rip his parka and make numerous cuts and bruises on his arms, legs, and back. His head lurched violently backwards when he hit the ground, although the helmet took the force of the blow which would otherwise have knocked him unconscious. Dazed, Josh stood up and examined himself. His helmet was totally crushed on the top and the side and he just about tossed it down the mountain when another volley of falling rocks made him change his mind. Josh had just started up the ramp a third time when the sound of heavy rockfall above caught his attention. He jumped out of the way in time, successfully avoiding, though not by an overly comfortable margin, a shower of larger stones which would have easily broken through even the strongest of helmets. Josh stopped, bewildered and astonished at the dangerous predicament in which he had been caught. He decided to return to the Knife-Edge and try to cross it rather than continue to charge blindly and vainly up this horrid ramp.

When Josh reached the beginning of Knife-Edge, he stopped and fell over, suddenly overwhelmed by mixed feelings of exhaustion, hopelessness, and pain. He voiced a loud moan unto the mountain as if to say, "Enough, let me go. You have won. I am the conquered one and am begging for mercy."

But Josh would never beg for mercy or accept defeat. He straddled the Knife-Edge and slowly pushed himself across it. The arete was extremely slippery, as he had feared it would be, and utmost caution was necessary to maintain the control mandatory for a safe crossing. But Josh wondered if safe passage over it was possible at all under these circumstances, because he knew he was doing wrong and deliberately breaking the climbers' Law by climbing a feature despite grave misgivings. But he had no other choice if he wanted to live. Did that then make it okay to break the Law under certain circumstances? He would find out. Josh crossed the Knife-Edge slowly and fluidly, with exact, calculated movements, just as he knew he should. After about five minutes of grindingly intense climbing, Josh neared the far end of the Knife-Edge and began to relax with relief. But he relaxed a moment too soon, making a jerky movement which threw him off balance and over the east side of the Knife-Edge. Josh screamed. Adrenaline rushed immediately through him and he caught himself on a small projection about ten feet below the Knife-Edge.

Josh caught his breath for a moment and realized how incredibly close he had come. He was not yet safe, though. Josh climbed up the cliff on small fingerholds and footholds. Then he stopped, about two and a half feet below the arete. The handholds at this point seemed to have vanished and Josh pondered his next move long and hard. Less than a minute more had passed and the tired muscles of his arms could barely hold his weight against the cliff.

Then, he heard a voice, calling "Josh, Josh, is that you?"

Josh responded half-joyously, "Yeah...I'm on the Knife-Edge, Dan."

A shadowy figure emerged from the clouds at the end of the Knife-Edge. "Whew! Boy am I glad to see you," said Dan. "I thought you were lost or something, then I heard a scream and came running up the ridge. You know, you look like you could use some help."

Dan had seen Josh scale taller and more inclined cliffs before and was not immediately scared for Josh as he approached. But Josh's next tentative move clearly revealed the severity of the situation and the absence of the needed handholds, and Dan rushed to Josh's aid.

Dan flattened himself against the sharp arete and lowered a hand to Josh, a hand which provided the only solution to Josh's unmistakable doom. The hand was there, fully extended and waiting to be grasped. All Josh had to do was grasp it and be saved and pulled to the safety, joy, freedom, and life above. But if he didn't grasp the hand, he would fall down the cliffs to the grave below, which had been waiting there for an awfully long time to receive him if he made the wrong choice, and annoint him with pain, suffering, and death. Josh also realized that not making a decision was tantamount to making the wrong decision since he could not hold on much longer; the consequences (i.e. death) and the crime (i.e. not grasping the hand) were identical in both scenarios.

Now a minor event occurred at this point, which I shall endeavor to tell, for all must be told exactly as it was, and is. Josh's hat fell off, and, for a moment, he could not see the hand extended to him. Then he could see it again. Was the hand suddenly not there just because he could not see it? Of course it was there, but he still couldn't see it. "Does something have to be seen to be real?" Josh wondered. We can pretend that many things in life do not exist, and then chose not look at them. Then we can say we did not see them, and that since we didn't see them, they never existed at all. It is only the very young and the very old, those on the birthing chair and on the deathbed, who can see the truth: before it is obscured and then totally blocked out before their eyes by the psychological wall built by their conscious selves, and then after the wall has been torn down by too many realizations to leave it standing. That is why is wisdom of the old is wiser than the wisdom of the young and why we must become like children to see the truth.

"Thanks, Dan. But I think I can make it myself." Josh took a deep breath, and felt his arm muscles waver in weakness. "I want to do it myself. I think I can conquer this mountain, and I want to do it by my own blood and sweat."

"Some men cannot be saved," Dan said to himself. With Josh's great words of great garbage, he mustered all the strength remaining in his body, and propelled his body in a precise, often-practiced lunge, upwards toward the knife-edge, which he would attempt to grab in both hands and save himself. He thought he could, of his own strength and power, reach the safety above, which must be reached by grabbing the extended hand, which was the only way.

But, like all of those who lunge for safety from Mt. Efil's cliffs, thinking their own ability will get them there, Josh fell down, down, down the cliffs into the place prepared for him and for all of those others who chose to make the same vain choice he made.

You may ask why Josh chose to lunge rather to grasp his brother's hand. The answer is very simple; it comes from a hard heart. Josh wanted to conquer the mountain on his own. He wanted to do it himself, if merely to spite the rescuer, all the time knowing that his doom from breaking the Law had caught up with him and even though he still could be saved, he chose not to be. He didn't understand that the purpose of the mountain was to test him and determine his choice between life or death. Josh chose death as so many others regrettably do, not ascertaining the beautiful but saddening truth that the mountain itself was the lesson intended to reveal to him that he could not save himself.

You may argue also that Dan knew that his brother would reject his hand (for they were the sons of a common man, as are we), and it is indeed true: he did know. But Dan would have extended his hand to any man about to fall from the cliff (after all, some would have taken it), even to Josh, who he knew would reject it. But the choice was still Josh's to make and Josh would ultimately bear the responsibility for that choice.

Alex grabbed the shaft of his black ice axe and brought the adze of it down with a murderous stroke upon the rope which unified him with the boy in life and in death. As the adze struck the rope, the snowy shelf on the cliff released the hold with which it had been clinging to the cliff since time began for this solitary moment. The shelf and the man on it dropped 120 feet onto the slopes below, where they exploded in a mass of wrenched destiny and instigated a massive avalanche. As he fell, the man whispered a prayer thanking God for making the mountains for him and for making him for the mountains.

About 200 feet above, a small boy huddled over a white ice axe, waiting for the pull on the rope to come and snatch his life from him. But the pull did not come. The boy waited and it still did not come. Then he heard an enormous explosion, like a bomb, which interrupted even the wind's sacred screaming. The boy was very frightened. He carefully began pulling the rope. It came up easily and in a few minutes, he was tentatively and reverently handling the frayed end of the rope where his partner and friend had once been connected to him in life and in death. He was connected no longer in life and he was connected no longer in death.

For quite some time, John sat there in tears looking at the rope which had served such a terrible, seemingly vain purpose. John examined the end of the rope and pondered the mystery it spoke. The man would not have had time to cut the rope while trying frantically to arrest himself as he fell hopelessly from the cliff. The rope must therefore have broken. But if the rope had broken, he should have felt a great momentary tug, then the relaxation of his end of the rope as it snapped. John lived, though he didn't recognize it at the time, because the man had been willing to die so he might not have to die, though maybe John would never know it anyway, if he looked at the rope and didn't understand or didn't want to understand its witness to the course of events which had not only shaped, by undeniably altered his destiny. Perhaps they hadn't changed his destiny, for he would still die. No, they would change his destiny, but only if he saw and ascertained and believed.

John walked down the gully as far as he dared to convince himself that Alex was dead. The shockingly bitter reality of what climbing is and what it unalterably leads to was overwhelmingly horrifying to John as he slowly made his way back up to the Apex, down the Left Prong, and across the Bookshelves to the Hayden-Fremont saddle. The realization was like the bitter metamorphisis of a man who has subconsciously deceived himself all his life about what a jolly and happy procession men make up mountains, then finally understands the stakes and how he can die and how he will die if he does not climb wisely and how the consequences are inescapable and everlasting. But that wisdom is not the wisdom of the world and he understood, accordingly, what a lie his whole life had been, though most lives are lies anyway. Did that make the tragedy lessor or greater?

John watched the sun go down from the saddle and disappear with such a resoundingly convincing finality that he was convinced it would never rise again. The boy, in a blind stupor of emotion, wove a wild and crooked path down into the cirque where Alex's black and white tent stood, a mute testimony to a sorry end which could not and had this very day failed to justify its means.

John only half-noticed that the all-black tent was also empty as he wormed his way into his white sleeping bag. He cried.

John tried to think, but thinking was futile. Alex had been doomed just as surely as he was doomed and as Josh and Dan were doomed and as everyone he knew was doomed. He felt a chilling sensation work its way up his spine from his back to his head, as one feels when he is experiencing some overpowering emotion, witnessing the beginning of an event with far-reaching consequenses, or when he is on the verge of comprehending something incredible, something which could overpower doom and deliver him and everyone he knew from their alterable destiny. But his weariness overcame his futile thoughts and he fell into a futile sleep which ended a futile day and he dreamt an unfutile dream.

He saw Josh and Dan on Hayden Point and he saw Josh trapped on a cliff and Dan's hand extended to save him. He saw Josh lunge for safety and fall short of it, and die. And he saw Dan lunge towards Josh and topple over the cliff after him. And John saw that Josh's wrong choice had led to the destruction of another life, as wrong choices of that nature so often do. He saw that Josh had brought Dan down with him, because he had, through an unspoken argument, convinced Dan that lunging was the right choice, and Dan, always the blind shepardless sheep, had followed.

When the boy woke up, it was light. The sun was shining again and the sky was clear. The world seemed new and beautiful and the experiences of the previous day were almost forgotten in the beauty of the morning's new birth and new hope. But John was no longer the boy. He was the man now, for he understood as a man does that the world and himself are not innocent and beautiful, but alterably destructive and alterably doomed.

The man thought about the mountain and about the reasons men scale its morbid heights. Is it an inner sadistic drive which makes climbers charge suicidally toward a summit? Is there some addictive quality about danger, risk, thin air, cold rock, and steep snow which causes climbers to return over and over because they can't get enough of it? Or is climbing simply something someone does, because something is there, and it is only something which happens to be more risky than the other things which someone else does? John wondered if climbing wasn't a pursuit, which, like life, was its own reward and doom.

He thought about his friends, who were now but casualties of the mountain that Alex said would kill them all in the end. Did his friends simply climb because the mountain was beautiful and men want beautiful things for their own? Did they like the power and egotism climbing gave them, at least while the mountain restrained itself from displaying its power? No, they all climbed for different reasons; all of them, of course, meaningless futility. For Josh, the mountain was something to be conquered and to be used to prove his own very great worth. Yet it was the mountain that did the conquering and proving of its worth. For Dan, climbing was a means to be great, like his great brother, but in following a great man, he was led only to death, for that is the place where those who follow men that claim their own greatness will go. For Alex, the contradiction was perhaps greatest. He wanted to be happy, but now he never could, for he was dead, and death is forever. All Alex had wanted from the mountain was a small amount of happiness and friendship and joy, and all he got in the end was death, for that is the end- or is it? In Alex, the man saw that the mountain could not justify itself or its climber- no mountain except Mt. Efil could truly be climbed only because it was there. True justification needed to come from an outside source, not of the mountain or on the mountain, because everything on the mountain is death, and that is no justification, except for some.

John thought about the Lonliest Climber and what justification He would have given as He neared the summit of the mountain of the skull. And John suddenly knew the answer and he knew that it was the answer for which all men search all their lives, although tragically few ever find it. The man knew that the summit of Mt. Efil was not death, just as the Lonliest Climber knew that his summit was not death, either, although both summits were ends: ends that are inexplicably defined by their beginnings. And just as John had earlier surmised and now knew, on Efil's small summit sits the true justification, that is the Justifier, comforting the justified after their exacting but successful climbs.

The mountain had been brutal, but it had been merciful. It had taken the lives of three, but given life to the fourth. It had played no favorites, but taught each player exactly where he stood, for that was its purpose, and its purpose was thereby fulfilled.

And yet, the man realized that there was hope for those climbers who had doomed themselves, for even as they were about to fall to their deaths from the cliffs of Efil, they could grasp the hand of the Lonliest Climber (who had gone before them and reached the summit), which now extended to them a free gift. They could grasp that gift and it would never be taken away from them. The gift was life, and the knowledge of how to live- how to live in the doomed world without falling down to the place reserved for those who reject the gift. And they will not fall and their feet will not strike a stone and they will soar like eagles at the summit and they will not grow weary, for they know how to live, and knowing how to live is knowing how not to die.