Once Everest was determined to be the highest summit on earth, it was only a matter of time before people decided that Everest needed to be climbed.
Nadie debería negar [...] que el nomadismo siempre nos ha estimulado y llenado de júbilo. En nuestro pensamiento, la condición de nómada está asociada a escapar de la historia, la opresión, la ley y l...
Mountaineering, she understood, was an essential expression of some odd, immutable aspect of my personality that I could no sooner alter than change the color of my eyes. Then, in the midst of this de...
McCandless viewed running as an intensely spiritual exercise, verging on religion. Chris would use the spiritual aspect to try to motivate us, recalls Eric Hathaway, another friend on the team. He’d t...
Lisak and Miller examined a random sample of 1,882 men, all of whom were students at the University of Massachusetts Boston between 1991 and 1998. Their average age was twenty-four. Of these 1,882 stu...
Kittredge wrote, I was looking for what I took to be a genuine world to inhabit. I wanted to be someone that I could understand and stand—a romantic idea that seems commonplace in the West these days…...
It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on t...
In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails,...
If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you bec...
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,—that is your success. All...
I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were p...
Huguet, on the other hand, insisted that prosecutors settle for nothing less than a lengthy sentence at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge.
How can a society actively promote religious faith on one hand and condemn a man for zealously adhering to his faith on the other?
He was alone, as James Joyce wrote of Stephen Dedalus, his artist as a young man. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone a...
He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn't a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.
He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of...
Everett was strange, Sleight concedes. Kind of different. But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.
Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you're hyperaware of the abyss pulling at your back. You constantly feel its call, its immense hunger. To resist takes a tremendous consc...
Desert Between the Mountains: Mormons, Miners, Padres, Mountain Men, and the Opening of the Great Basin, 1772–1869 by Michael S. Durham.
Climbing along the blade of the summit ridge, sucking gas into my ragged lungs, I enjoyed a strange, unwarranted sense of calm. The world beyond the rubber mask was stupendously vivid but seemed not q...