Thunder booms and rumbles across the mountains. Another flash and another drumroll echoes away. Huddled in my tent in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, I cover my eyes, for it seems less scary without the brilliant flashes of lightning. I think of the animals curled up underneath the trees as the rain pours down. I feel as minute as a grain of sand but as fragile as a snowflake under the stormy sky.
The Wind River Range in Wyoming. All photos: Hannah Green
The next day, I peer down a gully and tell my friend, “It’s gonna’ be tedious.” We make our way down the loose scree and talus, finally popping out on the apron above a big lake. I can tell the day is wearing on my friend, but we continue down to a nice lunch spot on a sandy beach. I remain optimistic about our route but can tell she is struggling to join the optimism. Toward the end of the day, I push ahead, hoping an invisible rope appears and I can pull her over the last pass. We make it, but she is not happy.
As we set up camp, I recount my similar anxiety and fear when I first started doing big mountain adventures to hopefully make her feel less alone. The more I recount these sinister feelings, the more I realize just how much I have learned from the mountains. Sometimes they teach you just how strong you are, and sometimes they teach you how strong you aren’t. There is a certain synchronicity that I believe has to exist between a person and a place for an adventure to be successful. And sometimes nothing seems in sync.
When my friend and I eventually bail from our intended mostly off-trail route onto some well-marked trails, I feel the synchronicity appear between the terrain and my friends’ ability. Rather than being scared and anxious, she is able to relax and enjoy where we were at and also still be out backpacking, which she hasn’t done in a while. We also get to see some places that we might not otherwise visit.
Learning From the Mountains
The mountains always give, and give to us the lessons we don’t even know we need. Just a couple of weeks prior, I was working my way up a peak, thinking a magical route through the rocks would lead me right to the summit. But rainfall the night before made the tundra wet and slippery, which, when mixed with some kitty-litter gravel and some scrambling that made me nervous, had me bailing. At first, I felt frustrated that I couldn’t figure it out, but nerves had taken hold of my logical brain. Once I got down, I knew I had made the right call for the day, and I was able to enjoy an easier summit next door.
Respecting nature and understanding our abilities within it are where we toy with our limits. Sometimes we push hard and are rewarded, and other times we push too hard and are set back to where we began. We can raise some of our ceilings, but not all of them. Some are there to protect us — such as in literal life-or-death situations — and others remind us of our own preconceived limits that someday we might be able to expand.
Pushing Our Boundaries
Pushing physical boundaries need not be the only way we test our limits, and I think sometimes we forget that as athletes. Recently, I was reading a book called “One Man’s Wilderness” where a 50-year-old man decides to build himself a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness. The book was an extremely pleasant recount of the man’s day-to-day activities that he journaled. He was living out his dream, and it showed in his contentment. His story felt in stark contrast to a lot of the expedition and mountaineering books I’ve read lately that talk about pushing physical boundaries often at the cost of near-death or deathly experiences. But in building his cabin, the author, Dick Proenneke, was also pushing his limits: building the cabin entirely with hand tools, living in the Alaska bush year-round, and contending not just with megafauna but also extreme solitude.
This is all just to say, and perhaps to justify my own lack of ultra racing, that trying new things or chasing our own dreams outside of the ones we see in the media still counts as pushing ourselves. And perhaps even taking a book down to the river and whittling our first spoon out of wood counts just as much as going for a long run in the mountains. The former being a much more rare activity than the latter. Trust yourself and the natural world, however you choose to immerse yourself in it. Just remember all that it’s taught you and always say thank you to it.
Call for Comments
- Have you turned back from an objective but known it was the right choice? How did it feel?
- What ways do you push your personal limits in the mountains?
