Making Miseries

wet, tired, smelly, and spent in Lake City, Colorado

"We're epic-ing so hard right now," I gleefully yelled while crouched over a stove tucked under a truck's tailgate in a desperate attempt to cook in the midst of a massive freezing downpour at the base of Wetterhorn's long approach trail. At the same time, Robin and Logan were pitching a tent and Vance was taking a poop in the cold, late night, driving rain. All equally miserable. All equally stoked.

Epic-ing is a climberism for when everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. And without going into too much detail, it had. To "epic" is to suffer and endure and while we may not end up in Alpinist, we were definitely epic-ing for the everyman. Or, as Logan said while huddled under a boulder in the middle of another rain storm on another mountain, we were "making miseries."

Difficult moments shape us.

As a climber, I live for those moments. Snot in my mustache. Wind in my backpack straps. Kick stepping through snow patches. Scree sliding off exposed ridges. Running it out over your last piece of pro.

As guides, getting to tree line or rapping to flat ground when a storm is or is about to pummel your valley is a lot harder with twenty inexperienced people than it is with just your party.

We often ask clients after super hard days, "how do you find joy in pain?" Week after week, the most common response is in the people around us.

Shared experiences bring people together. Shared struggles bring people together forever in deep and meaningful ways.

Very few people can climb a mountain by themselves. And those people usually eventually die in the mountains. Similarly very few people can make it through life alone.

Real community exists in the journey.

What does it look like to have joy in pain? To be content in every situation? It's not a perfect analogy by any means but I think it looks a lot like an exposed final pitch and turning to your partner behind you and admitting, "man, this sucks."

Real community creates the space for lament.

And maybe you summit. Maybe you don't.

Real community turns lament into laughter.

Because when you get back to your car or to the bar or the local pizza joint, you laugh about the loose block that fell right past your face and embellish how miserable you felt on the descent and rejoice about how ungodly tired you still are.

It isn't the summit or the view from the anchors I talk about most when I get back down. It's the struggle and pain and the absolute joy of the journey that makes for great stories and laughs and memories.

Making miseries.

That day, after climbing three peaks on two mountains and hiking for hours back in the rain and the hail, I sat in a gravel parking lot in Lake City, Colorado, watching Barrett struggle to learn how to change his first tire, my shins aching, my eyes struggling to stay awake, and foul stenches erupting from every pore of my body and I thought, man, I'm having the time of my life. 

**addendum updated 8.18.13:
"the essence of the sport lies, not in ascending a peak, but in struggling with and overcoming difficulties. The happy climber, like the aged Ulysses, is one who has 'Drunk delight of battle with his peers,' and this delight is only attainable by assaulting cliffs which tax to their utmost limits the powers of the mountaineers engaged." -- Alfred Mummery, 1895 quoted in Pilgrims of the Vertical by Joseph E. Taylor III